KDE plasma no desktop after crash

Ask Fedora
,
1

After a Firefox induced crash the desktop no longer loads, I get a blank screen. I can switch to Ctrl+Alt+2 (is desktop on Ctrl+Alt+1, this is documented nowhere) and logon but than what? How do I manually restart the desktop?

Nothing was changed on the hardware side, updates might have been pending.

NVIDIA Quatro RTX4000

2

Find your processes id with eg top

Then kill the process for the Desktop with
kill <pid>

then start your desktop again with the appropriate command which I think is startplasma-wayland

3

Thanks. It indeed looks like the last update fedora push worked my system. Journalctl -u sddm reveals: Detected locale “C” with character encoding “ANSI_X3.4-1986”, which is not UTF-8." .

I wonder if test where done.

What on earth is blocking SDDM to load the logon? (And why wasn’t this not tested?)

startplasma-wayland stops and starts something and claims “Done” but still no desktop.

Why are there no man pages for start plasma away land?

4

I don’t think this message is related to your problem. It’s been there as long as I’ve used Fedora and is nothing new with recent updates.

5

You might be right there.

IMG20260520152332
IMG202605201523321920Ă—2560 786 KB

That sddm opens and closes immediately is a bitvweird

6

or firefox crashed because something else broke. There might be useful details in the journal for the boot where firefox crashed. You should provide enough detail to allow others with access to similar hardware to reproduce the issue.

  1. basic data describing your system from running inxi -Fzxx in a terminal (you may need to install inxi), posted as web-discoverable text using the </> button.
  2. applying all Fedora and vendor firmware updates avoids lengthy exchanges comparing configurations and avoids wasting time on a solved problem.
7

New KDE has gone to Plasma Login Manager or something like that, maybe you can change to that?

8

Firefox crashed my system before consistently so I would be a bit carefully there. I can execute those but how will they get here?

inxi not found…

9

I like that vector. It when did that happen?

10

inxi was removed due to space limitations. It does pull in a bunch of packages.

11

Tried a lot of things now, search these days is useless.

But indeed doing this undocumented magic of inix -Fzxx installing (it also downloaded everything there is on Perl) and run I get my login back.

And no of course Firefox caused the crash and reboot which did an OS install.

Does Fedora document this startup procedure anywhere?

BTW. having this repaired about 1 hour after I asked the question is a hell of a compliment to the forum. Thanks for all the support!

12

Inxi did not fix your system, the reboot did that. Inxi just gives system info.

The new Plasma Login Manager was with fresh installs of 44.

13

Than I’m unsure what did. As on the hardware side I tried everything to the point of cutting power completely. You make me uncertain.

14

Third item down:

You should bookmark the main page so you can check release notes in the future.

15

I don’t bookmark release notes and read them. Do you? Where is the rss feed wth urgent changes

16

I have a file with a million links, everything from release notes, package searches, command line tips & tricks you name it.

Keeping references means you have a resource that you can return to again and again.

How you keep it is up to you. I prefer a file, others prefer bookmarks in the browser.

This means I can always go back and cross-reference if needs be.

And yes I read release notes. Has saved me numerous headaches in the past because I knew what to expect.

But each to their own…