Arch Linux

queenbiscuit311

Member

Registered: 2023-05-17

Posts: 64

[SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

I encountered this issue for the first time today. I've never seen anything like this happen before, and I really don't know what could be causing it. Earlier today I tried to use my laptop in discrete GPU mode since it has both a dGPU and an iGPU. GNOME, which I booted into first, worked fine. Plasma Wayland would not start, so I assumed it was a driver issue since I have an NVIDIA dGPU. Then I realized that Plasma X11 didn't work either. So I went back into dual GPU mode and KDE still didn't work. Then while in GNOME I tried opening Dolphin since I'm using it as my default file manager, and it wouldn't open. Neither did the Kate text editor, or any other KDE apps. Other QT apps work, so I know it's not a QT issue. I tried opening various different programs and getting KDE to start in various different ways, only for it to not work and for me to be completely unable to get a single useful error message from any of the programs, not even in the systemd journal which doesn't say much other than that the apps keep getting terminated by the abort signal.

At first I assumed the package update that I had done earlier today messed up somehow, so I reinstalled some of the packages I remembered got updated, with no success. I then reinstalled a bunch of other packages, no dice. I finally proceeded to reinstall every single package on my system, still with no success. I then decided to see if it was just my user account, so I started Dolphin as root and it worked fine. Then, to avoid having to keep running a bunch of stuff as root to test, I made another user account on my system and everything works fine. I'm actually using that user account to type this right now by using pkexec to open my web browser from my main user account. I'm logged into a KDE Plasma session and everything is working just as expected. I still haven't been able to get a single KDE app to open as my default user. The only apps that even open at all are Konsole and Yakuake, and they crash when I try to open a context menu or any other menu.

I've tried moving .config, .cache. and .local to different folders and letting them get regenerated. When I try opening a KDE app, they don't even attempt to recreate their directories under these folders. I've also ensured that file permissions for my home folder are as they should be. I've run out of ideas at this point. Does anyone know what could possibly be causing this behavior? I'm unsure of what to do short of moving my entire home folder to somewhere else and letting it get recreated and, assuming that works, slowly adding back files until it breaks again.

The most life I can get out of KDE is the KDE Crash Handler which appears and complains about every KDE app crashing.

Last edited by queenbiscuit311 (2023-11-14 08:51:36)

queenbiscuit311

Member

Registered: 2023-05-17

Posts: 64

Re: [SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

The situation appears to be getting even more bizarre. I've taken everything out of my home folder and am slowly putting it back in. Everything's still working so far except for the fact that every application immediately crashes when trying to handle or even show a directory that contains a json file, again only for that user account. it seems like I'm going to need to start removing things again and see at what point that stops happening. It's not even the files themselves, if I rename them to not be jsons they work fine. And I can make a json in any directory to make every KDE app crash when trying to display it.

Last edited by queenbiscuit311 (2023-11-14 07:04:17)

queenbiscuit311

Member

Registered: 2023-05-17

Posts: 64

Re: [SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

I've managed to trace the problem down to my .local folder, so now I have to move every folder in there I have out, and then move them back in 1 by 1 until something stops working.

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 58,676

Re: [SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

This isn't your blog and please don't bump the thread, edit your previous post if nobody has yet replied.

The most life I can get out of KDE is the KDE Crash Handler which appears and complains about every KDE app crashing.

The backtrace out of such crash would likely be more informative than the novel I had to read to get to that point…

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queenbiscuit311

Member

Registered: 2023-05-17

Posts: 64

Re: [SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

I've tracked down the json problem to ~/.local/share/mime/packages and ~/.local/share/mime/mime.cache. For some reason putting either of these back into my home folder instantly breaks everything. I'm not, however, sure if this is the cause of all of my problems. It is a good start, though. I'm not seeing anything broken by that file and directory not being there so I'm just going to ignore that for now. I also managed to rebuild my mime.cache with "mkdir ~/.local/share/mime/packages && update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime"

Why this is happening or how these files got messed up I have no idea.

Last edited by queenbiscuit311 (2023-11-14 08:41:03)

queenbiscuit311

Member

Registered: 2023-05-17

Posts: 64

Re: [SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

The backtrace out of such crash would likely be more informative than the novel I had to read to get to that point…

I did attempt to go through it but couldn't find anything useful. If it shows up again I'll try to send it here. Sorry about the novel, I just wanted to be as descriptive as possible since I can find zero mention of any problem even resembling this online.

queenbiscuit311

Member

Registered: 2023-05-17

Posts: 64

Re: [SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

I put everything back into my home folder except the aforementioned files, and KDE apps and Plasma are now functioning as expected. That is a very strange bug I hope I never encounter again because diagnosing that had to be one of the single largest PITAs I've had with my arch install in a while. I will probably keep the broken mime directory files to look through later to see if I can get anything useful from it. I guess I'll mark this as solved now.

Last edited by queenbiscuit311 (2023-11-14 08:51:48)

aksdb

Member

Registered: 2007-10-07

Posts: 38

Re: [SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

Thanks for keeping this updated!

After I upgraded my system, I had similar problems. My KDE sessions wouldn't launch (it just stays black) and running KDE applications (like Dolphin) in a different DE shows nothing as well.
Wiping the mime config at least made Dolphin work again and the KDE session also started to load again, but plasmashell now freezes and I can't get it back either.

For now I had to rollback the system completely to older package versions to be able to use KDE. :-/

queenbiscuit311

Member

Registered: 2023-05-17

Posts: 64

Re: [SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

Thanks for keeping this updated!

After I upgraded my system, I had similar problems. My KDE sessions wouldn't launch (it just stays black) and running KDE applications (like Dolphin) in a different DE shows nothing as well.
Wiping the mime config at least made Dolphin work again and the KDE session also started to load again, but plasmashell now freezes and I can't get it back either.

For now I had to rollback the system completely to older package versions to be able to use KDE. :-/

That's strange. That would mean that in addition to local mime files there's something else that must've also gotten broken. I wonder if it would be possible to track which package update causes this?

Another thing I noticed that I neglected to mention is that this doesn't seem to be only specific to KDE. Until I fixed my mime stuff nautilus was very unstable and nemo kept complaining about broken icon caches or something (can't give any more details because I only installed nemo while trying to fix this and immediately uninstalled it again when I didn't need it). Both of these issues were remedied entirely at the same time as my KDE apps.

However while it's not only KDE apps that are affected clearly KDE apps are affected the most.

Last edited by queenbiscuit311 (2023-11-15 21:42:41)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,187

Re: [SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

probably a bug in shared-mime-info 2.4/it keeling over for technically broken/corrupted mime-app configs that might have been carried around for a few years.

Last edited by V1del (2023-11-15 21:49:32)

aksdb

Member

Registered: 2007-10-07

Posts: 38

Re: [SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

For me the problem just returned. I had to wipe the mime directory multiple times. The current session was freezing up again, but I thankfully had a terminal open, so I killed plasmashell, wiped the mime directory and restarted plasmashell to get it running. Very strange. I also didn't see anything susipicous using `strace`. The process just hangs.

queenbiscuit311

Member

Registered: 2023-05-17

Posts: 64

Re: [SOLVED] KDE Plasma and KDE apps not working, but only for one user

For me the problem just returned. I had to wipe the mime directory multiple times. The current session was freezing up again, but I thankfully had a terminal open, so I killed plasmashell, wiped the mime directory and restarted plasmashell to get it running. Very strange. I also didn't see anything susipicous using `strace`. The process just hangs.

I saw a bug report about this (or at least the json crash part of the problem) on
the KDE bug tracker, I haven't checked on it but hopefully the devs are aware it of and are able to figure out how to fix it. I hope it doesn't return for me

Last edited by queenbiscuit311 (2023-11-23 09:45:19)