It seems my leftmost monitor has it out for me again. My wallpaper refuses to load. This time it is not caused by a rogue plugin, but instead was brought on by a crash. I will note though, prior to the crash I was using a plugin called Smart Video Wallpaper Reborn so I could use a video as my wallpaper. I have not had any issues with it, and changing it out now doesn’t seem to help the issue. It could still have an underlying effect as to why I no longer have a wallpaper, but I don’t believe it was the cause.
Prior to crashing, I had a window full screen on my leftmost monitor. I suspect that this program is also the one that caused the crash, but I can’t say if this is definitively the case. The program consumes a bit of RAM, so it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for there to be a memory leak that I didn’t realize. Either way, both screens went back and I was sent back to the login screen. It seems that my PC did a soft reboot for one reason or another.
Upon logging back in I noticed my leftmost monitor’s wallpaper wasn’t loading. I tried changing it to a normal image with no success.
I can provide the output of xprop and xwininfo, but I believe from what I’m seeing and reading I’m getting just the straight root window on the left. The right side is unaffected, I can still see and display different things as my wallpaper on the right.
a bit more info would be needed, just post your inxi so we know you hardware specs and what you are on like DE, wayland or x11 etc..
as for smart video wallpaper reborn, which i assume you use kde plasma (not shure if x11 or wayland though…) sometimes it can happen that the video wallpaper doesnt load (often happens after update, or it just fails) there all i usually have to do is reapply the video. but then, i dont know how you installed it… it can also be that depending on how you istalled it that you need to rebuild it, often after plasma has an update.
but as it is, there are some known issues with smart video wallpaper reborn on their github:
If you need extra codecs see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GStreamer**PRs to expand this list are welcome :)**
3. Switch the Qt Media backend to gstreamer (default is ffmpeg):Create the file ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/qt-media-backend.sh
#!/bin/bash export QT_MEDIA_BACKEND=gstreamer
Reboot to apply the changes, and verify it was correctly set by running echo $QT_MEDIA_BACKEND
Video still doesn’t play/keeps crashing? Follow these steps
Run journalctl -f > journal.txt and sudo dmesg -wHT > dmesg.txt in separate terminals
While both commands are running switch from the Image wallpaper plugin to video wallpaper and reproduce the issue
Then stop both commands
If needed, remove the plugin configuration (sed command above)
Get your system information from kinfo > sysinfo.txt command or from System settings > About this System
Save the file from here as test.qml. Run the test qml with from terminal QT_FFMPEG_DEBUG=1 QSG_INFO=1 QT_LOGGING_RULES="*.debug=true" qml6 test.qml 2> qml_video_test_log.txt, (qml6 may be qml-qt6 or /usr/lib/qt6/bin/qml please confirm is qt6 one with --version) this file will play some public test videos from internet in fullscreen. If it doesn’t crash immediately, try clicking the pause/next buttons a bunch of times.
Run lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display' > lspci.txt
Create a new new issue describing the problem and how to reproduce, and attach those files including wether running the test.qml also crashes or not.
As for why you still have the issue even if you deleted it: I dont know, as i dont know how you installed it, could be remaining packages, could be that its still there somehow, could be that if you didnt reboot, that a reboot helps (or relog, or restarting plasma session)
To recover from a crash loop remove the videos from the configuration using this command below in terminal/tty sed -i ‘s/^VideoUrls=.*$/VideoUrls=/g’ $HOME/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc $HOME/.config/kscreenlockerrc
then reboot or restart plasmashell systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell.service or plasmashell --replace if the former doesn’t work.
This partially worked for me. The sed command failed, but going in and removing the configurations related to the Smart Wallpaper plugin (via vim or some other text editor) in $HOME/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc and then restarting with systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell.service did the trick.
Thank you for your assistance! And apologies for the lack of info. I was in fact running KDE Plasma (X11).
All good, next time you know to give more info else you get many questions
Also note that plasma x11 will probably not be supported anymore towards end of this year, should you not be aware. So you may want to try out Wayland or go with an x11 DE when the support gets removed completely
Small update after I finally got to perform a reboot: the issue persists. I still get a black background on the left monitor when logging in. It seems like removing the Smart Wallpaper config wasn’t the thing that fixed it, but instead it was restarting plasmashell. That being said, I don’t think the plugin is the issue but it very well still could be since I still have it installed. But since it’s not a part of the plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc config I feel like it should have no influence.
Below is my inxi and my fetch so you can see my DE and WM.
I don’t have much experience with x11. So I am not shure if the issue is specific to it. But from my experience it has always been this way, whenever I changed a setting in plasma x11 I had to restart or reload the session. Which I don’t need to do on the Wayland session. I am not shure if this is related to it, it could also very well be that smart video wallpaper is more buggy on x11 as most plugins are specifically developed for Wayland (not shure if it also is for this one).
But it would be interesting if you can try out to login with Wayland and see if it gets fixed there, to rule it out
Don’t know if you did a downgrade or are running behind on updates , because the kernel is now at 6.19.14 (even the zen one I checked that) and plasma at 6.6.4. Not saying a update will solve the problem , but you never know.
After doing some uninstalling due to a few package conflicts, a full system update did not, unfortunately, solve the problem. Thanks for the reminder to update though.
Switching to Wayland it doesn’t seem to be an issue. I know support is ending towards the end of the year here. I think there was something that was preventing me from doing the switch just yet, but for the life of me I can’t quite figure out what that thing was. Either way, I’ll attempt switching back to X11 in a little bit here and see if it resolves itself when I switch back from Wayland to X11. If not, I still would like to figure out what the issue is here in case someone else runs into the same issue, but after this I’ll probably just jump over to Wayland.
Alright, I switched from Wayland to X11 and the wallpaper was still there. I did a full restart and loaded directly into X11 to see if the wallpaper stuck… and it did not. Just to double check, I did another full restart and loaded directly into Wayland and both wallpapers loaded in. So the issue may have something to do with X11 specifically. I’m just not sure what may be causing this.
I don’t know, as I said above it could be that the addon may be a bit buggy on x11 if it’s developed with focus on Wayland.
Otherwise maybe you just have a few missing dependencies that it needs to work on x11?
You won’t need those in the ( ) but make shure you have the qt6-multimedia things
Otherwise I can try if I have the same issue once I get to my laptop. I know it worked a few months ago but don’t know how it is now.
Ok I tested it myslef on my laptop, it works for me without issues. So again the question, how did you install it?
I just installed from the KDE Store and it directly worked, also relogged, rebooted and it always loaded after like 2-3 seconds.
(for my own sanity, this video clip is taken from x11, on a laptop with a 4k screen. due to the 6Mib size limit on this forum i had to heavily compress and cut this video i hope the fastfetch is visible enough for you to see its on x11, if you zoom in it should work. also the DE is not yet completly customized, im working on it )
I’m pretty sure I installed it from the plugin manager (the ‘Get New Plugins’ button next to the wallpaper type) because I’m not seeing it in my list of pacman packages when I grep for ‘smart’. I see there’s an update for it, but as of right now it’s not letting me update the plugin. I’m unsure if this is plugin is still the thing causing issues since I changed the wallpaper type to a static image which eventually loads after enough time has elapsed (we’re talking hours until it loads in).
That would be the same way how I installed it.
How are you trying to update it? Normally when you go to that menu “get new” there is a filter option to show you the Plugins with an update available. So if a update is available you should be able to update. Else deinstall and reinstall it with this same menu.
No idea why the static wallpaper loads that late, have you removed or disabled (untagged) the animated wallpaper in the settings from smart video wallpaper?
