Minor KDE (?) bugs

[Gagarin Gambit]

I have a couple of minor bugs since the upgrade to kde 4.8. I thought that they were peculiar to this kde version, but they persist after the upgrade to kde 4.9.2. In particular:

- When I logout/reboot/shutdown, I often get a kde bug report:
We are sorry, Plasma Desktop Shell closed unexpectedly.
Details: kdeinit4 PID: 5592 Signal: Segmentation fault (11)
This error is quite unpredictable, some times it comes up and some times it does not, without any noticeable pattern. Selecting close carries on the shutdown, so that's only a minor inconvenience. But if anyone knows a possible cause or, at least, a way to get rid of kde error pop ups, I could use your feedback.
- The launcher recently used applications don't persist. Even though the list will be updated during the session, recently used applications are lost after a logout and I'm back to a "recently" used list of a few months ago. Again, that's no real issue, I can simply ignore or disable this feature.

These issues are observed in both a desktop and a laptop, similar list of installed packages, completely different hardware, so that's no hardware specific.

[T6]

the plasma crash is more related to the video card and driver, also if you are using xrender or opengl to have effects in kde

you can change from opengl to xrender in the configure your desktop

also the right driver for your video card can help, what video card and driver is being used?

about recently used, can't help much, first thing i disable is that

[Gagarin Gambit]

This was a good point... same symptom, different reasons.

Desktop, NVDIA. The video driver was set to use xrender, but the effects were using opengl... I changed the video card settings, and now it seems to be fine.

Laptop, Intel HD 3000. That's another story. This video card has been given me headaches for some time (a livecd or a remaster will not start the GUI, unless I use video safe mode; then I need to configure the video card, log back out and only then it works properly, and my latest remaster didn't seem to work even then). I tried to switch from the Intel 810 and later driver to the generic xorg intel driver; I also tried completely disabling the desktop effects; but the error persists. Buggy drivers? Linux unfriendly video card or monitor? But then, trying the root account (no desktop effects) I don't get this error. Quite puzzling.

[T6]

monitor? no, it is the driver

i think others reported problems with hd4000 too

intel fault

try setting opengl, there is other hacks for it but i don't remember any, maybe something on the forum

[Gagarin Gambit]

I see... it's clearly the video card, this forum is full of issues with intel 3000 & 4000. I seem to remember a few more things now...

OpenGL never worked properly with this machine. OpenGL screensavers, for instance, work via xscreensaver, but they are often followed by a crash and it's back to the log in screen. It also gave me much trouble during installation. My desktop remasters would never work, no matter what I did, so I had to install from a livecd (via video safe mode, of course). I could not change the screen brightness until I upgraded to kernel 3.2; and so on.

But probably one of the upgrades broke it a bit more. After the kernel upgrade some of the issues were gone, and I could even get the remasters to work (always via safe mode). But now it's not only this error, but the remasters don't work again. Video safe mode drops me to 1024x768, 256 colours, and it appears stretched in the left half of the screen; setting the proper video driver and logging out, which used to work, does not give a GUI.

Perhaps I should feel lucky that I got this laptop going in the first place.