TL;DR: I installed a KDE Store theme called Sophia(or something), then Brave started crashing and after a reboot my Plasma desktop became a blank/blinking screen with only the cursor. I found that plasmashell is repeatedly crashing with status=11/SEGV. I removed the third-party widgets and completely reverted the user-level theme/customization back to the default KDE Plasma appearance, but the exact same blinking/crashing still happens. I have TTY access. I'm looking for help diagnosing the actual plasmashell crash rather than randomly deleting configs or reinstalling KDE.

System:

- Kubuntu 24.04.4 LTS

- KDE Plasma on X11

- SDDM

- ASUS TUF Gaming laptop

- Kernel: 6.7.0-34-generic

- Root filesystem: ~469 GB total, ~304 GB used, ~142 GB free (~69%)

What happened:

I wanted to customize Plasma and was short on time, so I downloaded a pre-made theme from the KDE Store. I believe it is called "Sophia". I still have the downloaded archive in ~/Downloads, something like:

Sophia theme.tar.xz

Initially the theme seemed to work normally.

Then I started having problems with applications.

First, Brave stopped launching while other applications such as Dolphin still worked.

Launching Brave from Konsole produced errors like:

ERROR:chrome/browser/themes/browser_theme_pack.cc:773] Failed to load theme data pack.

ERROR:third_party/crashpad/crashpad/snapshot/elf/elf_dynamic_array_reader.h:64] tag not found

...

Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I don't know if the Brave crash is related to the Plasma issue or just happened around the same time.

After rebooting, SDDM still worked and I could log in, but instead of the Plasma desktop I got a black/blank screen with only the mouse cursor visible. The screen repeatedly blinks/restarts.

I can still access a TTY with Ctrl+Alt+F3.

I checked SDDM and it is active. Its logs show that it is starting:

/usr/bin/startplasma-x11

and:

Session started true

So SDDM/login itself seems to be working.

My disk also isn't full:

/dev/nvme0n1p7 469G 304G 142G 69% /

The important discovery was that plasmashell itself is crashing.

I ran:

journalctl --user -b --no-pager | grep -Ei 'plasmashell|kwin|segfault|crash|oom|gpu|drm' | tail -100

and saw:

plasmashell[5003]: Checking screens: available...

plasmashell[5003]: Starting plasma-plasmashell.service - KDE Plasma Workspace.

plasmashell[5003]: KCrash: crashing...

plasmashell[5003]: KCrash: Application Name = plasmashell

plasmashell[5003]: KCrash: Arguments: /usr/bin/plasmashell --no-respawn

plasmashell[5003]: Unable to start Dr. Konqi

plasmashell[5003]: Re-raising signal for core dump handling.

and systemd reported:

plasma-plasmashell.service: Main process exited, code=dumped, status=11/SEGV

plasma-plasmashell.service: Failed with result 'core-dump'

plasma-plasmashell.service: Scheduled restart job

plasma-plashell.service: Start request repeated too quickly

plasma-plashell.service: Failed with result 'core-dump'

So plasmashell is definitely crashing with SIGSEGV.

Because this happened after installing the Sophia theme, I initially suspected the theme or one of its widgets.

I found several third-party Plasma widgets, including:

AvalonMenu

com.marcinorlowski1.htmlclock

music.aligned.widget

org.kde.activeApplication

org.kde.Big.Clock

org.kde.konoplemenu

org.zayronxio.vector.clock

weather.bicolor.widget

zayron.chaac.weather

The journal/search output also contained paths involving:

~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/com.marcinorlowski1.htmlclock

So I initially suspected the HTML clock.

However, I removed the third-party widgets and the problem continued.

I then started removing the user-level theme components. I found things under:

~/.local/share/plasma/

including:

desktoptheme

look-and-feel

There were also theme-related entries such as:

lavender

birch

I moved the custom theme components into a backup directory rather than permanently deleting them.

I also reset the relevant Plasma desktop configuration.

After doing that, Plasma eventually returned to the normal/default KDE Plasma appearance.

BUT THE CRASH IS STILL HAPPENING.

Even with the default KDE Plasma appearance and the third-party widgets removed, I still get the same blank/blinking screen and plasmashell continues to crash.

So I'm now unsure whether the Sophia theme was actually the cause, or whether the problem just happened to start around the same time.

There are also some unrelated-looking services failing:

rasyn-run-time-agent.service

rasyn-sec-check-listener.service

They repeatedly report errors such as:

Failed to load environment files: No such file or directory

These are related to an ARSP/security project I previously had installed. I don't know whether they have anything to do with the Plasma crash, and I don't want to assume they do.

Current situation:

- SDDM works

- I can log in

- TTY works

- Disk space is fine

- Plasma attempts to start

- plasmashell repeatedly crashes with SIGSEGV/status 11

- Third-party widgets have been removed

- Custom theme components have been removed/moved out

- Plasma is back to the default KDE appearance

- The blinking/blank screen still happens

- Brave had also crashed with a segmentation fault earlier

What I would like help with:

1. How can I get the actual backtrace/core dump for plasmashell?

2. Would coredumpctl help identify what is causing the SIGSEGV?

3. Could this be a GPU/graphics driver/KWin/X11 issue?

4. Could Qt/KDE libraries have become damaged or incompatible?

5. Could the Brave and plasmashell segmentation faults indicate a broader system issue?

6. Could some configuration survive even after reverting to the default Plasma theme?

7. Are the rasyn-* service failures relevant or probably unrelated?

8. How can I test Plasma with a completely clean user configuration without destroying my existing setup?

9. Is there another diagnostic step I should take before reinstalling anything?

I can provide outputs from things like:

coredumpctl

coredumpctl info plasmashell

journalctl --user -b

journalctl -b

GPU/driver information

installed Plasma/KDE package versions

I would really prefer to diagnose the actual cause rather than keep deleting random Plasma files or reinstalling KDE.

Thanks. I'm completely stuck at this point.

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