In Mint KDE i was a heavy user of multiple Desktop Effects [why bother using KDE at all, otherwise?], so i'm pretty familiar with them. KWin was certainly not 100% reliable in Mint KDE4, but it was still pretty good overall. Sadly in Maui, since i installed it "for real" on my SSD [instead of just in VB VMs, which cannot test those Effects given no 3D Acceleration], Plasmashell very frequently crashes [sometimes a dozen+ times an hour]. It's terribly disappointing & actually annoying. I really hope it gets fixed in an imminent update.
The triggers so far can be LOTS of things [including "nothing", ie, sometimes i've watched it crash with my hands off the keyboard & mouse, simply passively reading a webpage]. Initially [earlier this week, soon after i installed Maui] the action most likely to cause the crash was to display the Desktop Grid, then drag a window from one VD to another. Depressingly i've more recently also found that incredibly banal actions like clicking on the Menu Button, browsing the Menu, clicking any icons in the System Tray, etc, can also often crash it.
The one ray of sunshine is that i used to have to keep logging out & in again to recover, but luckily i eventually discovered how to make a bash script to kill then restart plasmashell, without damaging any of my open windows. Unfortunately it's not perfectly effective, as eg, nothing i've found, after the first crash of the day, will recover the audio volume control, which thereafter remains entirely blank [hence i cannot easily control music volume etc].
Is this unreliability commonplace? Does anyone have any suggestions for a solution please?
PS -- When i installed Maui "for real", ie, to my SSD not merely in VMs, i formatted Mint KDE's / partition, but reused my existing /opt & encrypted /home partitions. In hindsight i almost wish i'd also formatted /home, to blow away the Mint KDE ~/.kde folder [& maybe others too?]... i'm slightly anxious that maybe some of the legacy KDE4 config files might somehow be conflicting now with Maui's Plasma5, & maybe causing / contributing to this unhappy Plasmashell instability...? I really do hope not, because i've now spent the week installing all my pgms & tweaking Maui just to my liking, so the prospect of having to start all over again now would be very unappealing.
The triggers so far can be LOTS of things [including "nothing", ie, sometimes i've watched it crash with my hands off the keyboard & mouse, simply passively reading a webpage]. Initially [earlier this week, soon after i installed Maui] the action most likely to cause the crash was to display the Desktop Grid, then drag a window from one VD to another. Depressingly i've more recently also found that incredibly banal actions like clicking on the Menu Button, browsing the Menu, clicking any icons in the System Tray, etc, can also often crash it.
The one ray of sunshine is that i used to have to keep logging out & in again to recover, but luckily i eventually discovered how to make a bash script to kill then restart plasmashell, without damaging any of my open windows. Unfortunately it's not perfectly effective, as eg, nothing i've found, after the first crash of the day, will recover the audio volume control, which thereafter remains entirely blank [hence i cannot easily control music volume etc].
Is this unreliability commonplace? Does anyone have any suggestions for a solution please?
PS -- When i installed Maui "for real", ie, to my SSD not merely in VMs, i formatted Mint KDE's / partition, but reused my existing /opt & encrypted /home partitions. In hindsight i almost wish i'd also formatted /home, to blow away the Mint KDE ~/.kde folder [& maybe others too?]... i'm slightly anxious that maybe some of the legacy KDE4 config files might somehow be conflicting now with Maui's Plasma5, & maybe causing / contributing to this unhappy Plasmashell instability...? I really do hope not, because i've now spent the week installing all my pgms & tweaking Maui just to my liking, so the prospect of having to start all over again now would be very unappealing.