[Desktop] KDE Plasma started crashing

[troymcclure]

Hello,

I am using Kubuntu 26.04 LTS and I am experiencing repeated KDE Plasma crashes.

The issue occurs even on a freshly formatted and newly installed Kubuntu 26.04 system, with no previous configuration or older installation carried over.

• Session: Wayland
• Plasma crashes unexpectedly, even when the system is idle.
• Multiple notifications appear stating that plasmashell has crashed unexpectedly.
• The system generates DrKonqi/systemd-coredump crash reports.
• There are also messages related to fontconfig.
• I ran fc-cache, which completed successfully with fc-cache: succeeded.
• After rebooting, the problem may temporarily disappear, but plasmashell eventually crashes again spontaneously.
• An X11 session is also available (/usr/share/xsessions/plasmax11.desktop), although I am currently using Wayland.

Since the same problem occurs immediately after a clean installation, it does not appear to be caused by an old user configuration or a previously installed system.

The issue seems to have appeared after a recent update and may be related to Plasma, Wayland, or fontconfig.

I can provide journalctl logs, system information, and DrKonqi crash reports if needed.

Thank you.

[claydoh]

There are also messages related to fontconfig.

Are you using Google Chrome? Not anything Chromium-based, just Chrome. *Maybe* Edge.

If so look here for some links and repair methods.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kubuntu/com...rome_corrupts/

There is a bug in Chrome and/or fontconfig that seems to affect some of us, maybe specific to Plasma 6.6?

I have had no issue myself, but a number of people have been reporting similar problems since the last Chrome update.

[troymcclure]

Until yesterday morning, everything was working normally. After the recent updates, the problem started occurring, with Plasma repeatedly crashing.

I have already formatted and reinstalled Kubuntu three times, and the same problem occurs even on a clean installation.

At this point, the problem is preventing me from working normally. Since it started immediately after the recent updates and persists after multiple clean installations, I suspect that something introduced by one of the recent updates may be causing the issue.

Any help identifying the specific package or recent change responsible would be greatly appreciated.

[claydoh]

Still, as font cache corruption seems to be the cause for the crashes in the past couple of days, it is still worth trying the repair, if nothing other than to eliminate this.


You can see what was updated last by looking at /var/log/apt/history.log. Look at the bottom of the file for the moist current updates.

Also some basic system specs, particularly graphics, will be helpful.