Plasma Desktop fails after updating to KDE 4.11? SOLUTION
Yesterday, KDE 4.11 arrived to Arch Linux’s stable repositories, and as always, I updated and restarted the system. However, when logging in again I encountered something unexpected: Plasma Desktop died after a few seconds and left me in a black screen with only the pointer on it.
The worst thing was that, since I had been literally months without having any issue when updating Arch (I seem to recall that the last one had been in April 2021), i lost the habit of keeping the old packages in cache and I had deleted them before restarting, so I couldn’t downgrade. Luckily, I also had LXDE installed just in case and I was able to log in to look for solutions on the Internet. I found Plasma 4.10 in an outdated repo, but despite installing it, it served for nothing. Other ideas didn’t bring any better results. No matter what I did, Plasma kept dying seconds after loading.
I had already resigned myself to spend some time on LXDE, until in the Arch Linux forum, some user who had the same problem gave me the solution. Everything is as simple as editing the /usr/share/autostart/plasma-desktop.desktop file and replacing this line:
Exec=plasma-desktop
With this:
Exec=sleep 10 && plasma-desktop
And that’s all. Plasma Desktop will continue working as usual.
Source: Arch Linux Forum
Image: gomezhyuuga at deviantART