Hi there, I have a problem after being forced to reinstall kde (due to many broken dependencies after installing one pdf-related program) on my Debian 12-derivative Kali system (KDE plasma version 5.27.11, QT 5.15.15, KDE frameworks 5.115.0) - the desktop icons are no longer selectable. They are still clickable however - I can open them or call the context menu or drag them around - but I can no longer select multiple of them by clicking on a “plus” sign that appears when you hover your cursor on a file. Clicking on them also no longer has any visual representation of a file being selected, they just open all of a sudden. Some tray icons like the battery charge also became invisible, the default web browser now looks like a blank white paper in the application list and so on . Bizarrely, the problem is on the desktop icons and those in the tray, but if I open Dolphin, then everything is fine and all functionality is like normal. I tried poking around some logs and reinstalling some parts like kinit, dolphin, plasma-desktop, plasma-workspace but to no avail. Where should I look for the source of the problem? Any ideas how to fix? Thanks.
My graphics processor is Mesa Intel UHD Graphics 620 though I don’t think it’s really important here since everything was fine just recently.
Oh, also the login screen now looks kinda different (different overall style plus I can choose X11 or Wayland, don’t think I could do it before…never really paid much attention to graphical stuff, really, just assumed it works).
Also it seems the forum restricts links for new users so I can’t paste the syslog here (it’s too big for inline insertion into the post so I wanted to upload it to a pasting service)
Huh, now it’s fixed. It was 403 error whether I used the link directly or tried to make it look like plaintext like I just did above. Well, the link above is some potentially relevant logs from /var/log.syslog "grep"ed by “kde”.
And you didn’t need it all, line 4 of your output tells you the error;
Dec 1 00:00:15 localhost plasmashell[2215]: error activating kdeconnectd: QDBusError(“org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown”, “The name org.kde.kdeconnect was not provided by any .service files”)
dbus is needed for any desktop using systemd to ‘talk’ to the underlying hardware and draw the desktop.
That is a configuration error, probably caused by the pdf program you tried to install that has broken everything else.
personally I’d probably just reinstall Kali from scratch, you don’t / won’t know what other files have been messed with by that installer, you say you can now choose X11 or wayland, have you tried both options? (Wayland is now used by most Linux distros and is now the default for KDE anyway)
X11 is the older way of doing things, and I would say your pdf installer probably added that, and may have altered other things to be X11 from wayland too.
Yeah I tried both options but the desktop problem is all the same. Wouldn’t really want to reinstall the entire system though…
There’re various errors and warnings besides the dbus one in the logs tbh, maybe you’re right that it’s the primary problem, I’m not sure. The only problem is to figure out how to fix it Or maybe I should try just purging everything KDE-related and try some other DE like Gnome? Wouldn’t want to mess up my preconfigured fonts and terminal icons though…eh. What a bother.
Or maybe I should try just purging everything KDE-related and try some other DE like Gnome? Wouldn’t want to mess up my preconfigured fonts and terminal icons though…eh. What a bother.