Bug 787884 – [kde overlay] kde-frameworks/kwindowsystem-9999 overlay commit 73682b315 breaks plasma-wayland (plasma-X OK)

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED INVALID

[Description Duncan 2021-05-03 11:27:28 UTC]

After my update yesterday I rebooted, logged in at the CLI, and ran my usual script to start plasma on wayland.  The splash appeared... and stayed for much longer than normal, finally to fade to a black desktop -- no plasmashell.  I could launch krunner (invoked via hotkey), but it would crash as soon as I started typing into it.

Luckily the rest of my hotkey-launched stuff seemed to work, including konsole and pdmenu (in a custom konsole profile with custom kwin window rules), which I have setup as a hotkey menu tree for all my usual apps, so I could run otherwise pretty normally except without a working plasmashell or krunner.

A bit more experimentation demonstrated that I could run an X session plasma, and plasmashell and krunner worked there, just not on wayland.  So I began trying to figure out what broke.

After trying a few other things (updating again to see if it was already fixed, etc) I remembered the KWINDOWSYSTEM_NO_WIDGETS commit I had seen in the git logs and that I had had a bad feeling when I read about it.  Then I just had to remember what package it was, find the commit again, and look a bit closer at it to see what I needed to do to undo it, and if undoing it fixed the plasma-wayland session.

That was gentoo/kde's 73682b315 on kwindowsystem, and sure enough, just commenting the -DKWINDOWSYSTEM_NO_WIDGETS=ON line that it had added (other things still pulled in qt-widgets so I still had it merged) and rebuilding kwindowsystem got plasmashell and krunner working on wayland once again! In fact, immediately after kwindowsystem remerged I tried starting plasmashell again, and my backgrounds appeared!  Breathing a sigh of relief I tried krunner again and I could use it now too.  I didn't even have to quit and restart the full plasma-wayland session, plasmashell and krunner started right up! =:^)

Conclusion:  The plasma-X session ran fine with that commit, only the plasma-wayland session was broken, so while X can do without the widgets they're evidently still needed on wayland, at least as of kwindowsystem upstream c7d2f84ee.

[Comment 1 Duncan 2021-05-03 13:14:27 UTC]

Tho (in wayland) with plasmashell running it's still *highly* unstable, crashing/respawning kwin on any attempt to scroll-switch desktops, drag a window (by titlebar or win-drag aka alt-drag but with win as that's the key I have configured for it), trigger effects like the cube, etc.

Zoom still works, grid gives me the grid but can crash plasmashell in the process and crashes kwin on clicking one of the grid-desktops to switch to it, transparency still works, window-invert-color still works, etc.

All stable on X, tho.  Guess I'll have to be back to it until this settles down a bit.

[Comment 2 Andreas Sturmlechner 2021-05-03 14:16:31 UTC]

You should have tried to rebuild all kwindowsystem consumers instead.

[Comment 3 Duncan 2021-05-04 05:52:45 UTC]

(In reply to Andreas Sturmlechner from comment #2)
> You should have tried to rebuild all kwindowsystem consumers instead.

I blame being too close to see it along with lack of sleep. =:^P

Meanwhile, most of the packages have had further upstream changes, many being l10n so not actually code changes that would have affected the bug, and have been rebuilt now, and the problems are gone, so seems you're correct.

Regardless of why it's a relief to have a working system again! =:^)

Resolving invalid.  Thanks for your patience.