Goal: Get Plasma or GNOME Working
I’m currently facing issues with my desktop environments on Linux. My primary goal is to get either Plasma or GNOME functioning properly. While MATE is working without any issues, both Plasma and GNOME are not starting as expected.
Things I’ve Tried
- updated from 24.04 to 24.10. Successfully booted the system but Plasma won’t start on Wayland.
(Openbox starts) - Plasma on X11 has no title bars for Qt applications.
- Installed kubuntu-desktop and task-plasma-desktop which I noticed weren’t installed.
- Removed all Plasma-related files and configurations starting with “k” from .config and purged Plasma via apt. And then reinstalled. Still fine minus qt applications. I changed my theme and updated window decorations and back to no avail.
- Probably unrelated: Thunderbird is in my autostart and its window decorations seem to change three times as it loads in parallel with plasma: Thunderbird’s built-in close-maximise-minimise appear and then change into qt? Then into GTK.
- Attempted to start MATE with startx /usr/bin/mate-session (I was informed on the matrix UbuSuppt channel I shouldn’t do this) which resulted in the Plasma panel appearing within MATE.
- I am used to the xserver days and don’t quite understand systemctl isolate graphical as the way of starting a graphical session from getty.
- I tried loading GNOME on a different user, but since gdm is broken this seems unlikely to be the least of my problems… same Oh No! Screen as GDM resulted.
Request for Support
I’m looking for guidance on how to “reset” GNOME and Plasma, including any shared files and configurations that can be purged to start fresh (and remove the other).
system info - semi-old CPU - 4th gen i7 — 32 GiB with zram-cache as swap — originally 20.04. 24.04 was working flawlessly. Mesa with amd GPU. Did have rocm setup but removed it to prepare for updating to 24.10. Ext4 with / encrypted via luks
Disclaimer - the above was smoothed out with an LLM, but written by me.