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Debian

Plasma 5 doesn’t start in Debian (testing)

Well, I just lost a few hours of my time trying to solve an issue cause by an upgrade to my debian workstation. My desktop environment, which is KDE Plasma 5, was not starting so I had to switch to Gnome for a while to correctly use my computer and do my work. Also almost all of KDE applications were failing to start, with some “Dbus” related errors.

After some research I found a few references that lead me to the solution:

Specially this reply was very useful:

So after trying lots of things the solution was simple, just to downgrade the library that was causing the problem, until it is fixed. So I looked at my local archives and with the following command I fixed the issue:

$ sudo dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/libqt5x11extras5_5.4.2-2+b1_amd64.deb

So I hope this is useful to you and can save you some time if you are having similar issues.

P.S.: I didn’t used gnome for a long time and after this ~6 hour experience, I hope I don’t need to go back. I tried to play around a bit and it has some soul crushing limitations (at least the base installation), for example, If you want to choose another wallpaper, it must he in a certain folder. Another one, for people that use 2 displays, only the main one changes when switching between several virtual desktops.

By Gonçalo Valério

Software developer and owner of this blog. More in the "about" page.