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I'm not sure what I pressed or clicked but I can no longer see the taskbar in KDE. I'm not finding any desktop switching keys though ALT+Tab still switches to already opened windows. Right-clicking on the blank empty black background does nothing. On Windows 7 I'd just CTRL+ALT+Delete, kill explorer.exe and start explorer again.
How do I show the missing taskbar in KDE?
John
Posted 2016-10-05T13:50:03.187
Reputation: 1 490
21
Killing the plasmashell process and restarting it from a terminal helped me in this situation.
To terminate the plasmashell process you will need access to a terminal. On most distributions you can get a terminal with CTRL+ALT+F1 or CTRL+ALT+F2. Don't worry, your screen will turn black and you will be prompted to log in with your username and password.
To get back to your regular KDE session you will need to press CTRL+ALT+F7 or CTRL+ALT+F1!
Once you have opened a terminal session you can stop the plasmashell process with
killall plasmashell
and start it again with
plasmashell &
The & is only required if you want to be able to close the terminal or want to be able to keep using it for other commands. It will start the plasmashell process in the background so it does not close with the terminal and does not keep blocking the terminal from receiving further input.
Alternatively you can kill the plasmashell process in your terminal and then immediately return to KDE and hit your hotkey for krunner, which is afaik ALT+F2 by default, and enter plasmashell there.
FlyingFoX
Posted 2016-10-05T13:50:03.187
Reputation: 329
...I probably did not accept this answer because it lacked/lacks instructions. If someone is asking a question an answer should provide instructions. – John – 2018-09-07T09:55:10.197
1That can be fixed :) – FlyingFoX – 2018-09-11T16:17:04.290
Thank you, I up-voted this, looks legitimate though since I'm no longer running that environment I can't technically accept it...right now. It might be a year down the line though with Microsoft busy destroying the parts of Windows that actually still works I'll eventually find some time to explore a hopefully even more matured Linux OS. KDE has been my preferred desktop environment. – John – 2018-09-12T12:57:06.093
I've stumbled upon a very similar phenomenon, but restarting plasmashell in a shell alone was enough, so this process crashed somehow before. Maybe there is a bug related to or in VSCode, because its small preview windows become very small before the task bar crashes. This happens when you click on the VSCode entry nonetheless. – BairDev – 2018-11-30T10:13:57.507
@John Accept it. It still works! (The answer I mean) – Carlos Rafael Ramirez – 2019-10-17T07:28:50.263
@CarlosRafaelRamirez I am not in a position to verify that it works though I will very likely be sometime in the 1H of 2020. I'll literally be paying someone to fix a LOT of the GUI/UX issues in Linux at some point next year and thus far prefer KDE. I still update blog articles and pages on my sites that are over a decade old. Not forgotten, it will happen. ︀ – John – 2019-10-17T13:12:06.633
For me, it was a temporary solution. When I restarted the problem came again. Ultimately I had to delete the cache: rm -rf ~/.cache – Carlos Rafael Ramirez – 2019-10-18T15:20:24.673
13
In my case the ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc file got in a bad state (from switching from laptop to external monitor).
Rather than trying to fix the file, I just deleted it (ALT-F2 "konsole"):
rm ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc
Then logout from the session (ALT-F2 "logout") Log back in, and the taskbar is now visible, some settings were lost (background color, ...)
xx1xx
Posted 2016-10-05T13:50:03.187
Reputation: 231
First one didn't actually solve the problem, but this one did! – Rainb – 2020-01-20T16:25:17.890
Brilliant, thank you! Any tips on how to avoid it happening again? – bdeniker – 2020-01-24T09:07:32.927
I think maybe your KDE silently died and left you with bare X server and your open windows. Did you try to restart the whole system? – Kamil Maciorowski – 2016-10-05T14:08:54.477
@KamilMaciorowski Yeah but it happened again. :-\ – John – 2016-10-05T14:15:06.763
Was there graphical login prompt? After login, did KDE interface appear (if only for a moment) or not? – Kamil Maciorowski – 2016-10-05T14:21:58.177
@KamilMaciorowski Either it crashed without a crash message or I either pressed a button or clicked my mouse and inadvertently screwed it up. – John – 2016-10-05T14:38:54.977