Cam Murphy

Senior Cloud Engineer. I live in Chicago with my girlfriend and our cats. For work I do a little bit of networking, security, and programming.

This post is following up on my previous post about a KDE Plasmashell crash issue I was experiencing. It has since been resolved, but not by any action I took. I am going to see if I can track down the change, commit, or release that fixed it.

Looking at Releases

When I first started noticing the issue, I was on version Plasma 6.5.4. When I realized for sure I was no longer seeing the issue, I was on Plasma 6.6.2. So there was one minor version, a major version, and two more minor version released. Also, a side quest minor version on 6.5.

There are a lot of changes in these releases. Particularly with the release of the major version 6.6. I will have to my search down to a few topics:

  1. plasmashell
    a. This is the product that was crashing. Anything in the release notes that specified the term ‘plasmashell’ would be a good start.
  2. Terms like crash, fix, or bug
    a. The changelog specifies bug fixes and new features. I want to filter out new features and focus on the bugs.
  3. KIconTheme KIconLoader
    a. When I asked ChatGPT about the crash log this is what it singled out as causing the issue.

Searching through I realized this was going to be a long and maybe impossible task. There were many entries in the changelog and nothing I could find matched exactly what I was looking for.

A Better Way (KDE Bug Finder)

However! Combing through the changelog I found links to the kde bug page with a query parameter specifying the bugs unique id. This is a better way to find a resolved bug, because I could run a filtered search on the reported and resolved bugs. So, the search page was where I went.

I used the advanced search page to narrow down my results.

Key Word Search: ‘Crash’ (I initial had this set to ‘Icon’ but no results were found. I am not sure if this is because my exact crash log was not logged, or it was filed away as an attachment thus not found in keyword search.)
Classification: ‘Plasma’
Product: ‘plasmashell’
Component: ‘Generic Crash’ (I guess… I could not find a specific component that matched my crash log)
Status: ‘Resolved / Closed’ (I no longer experience the bug, so I figured it was fixed)
Resolution: ‘Fixed / Duplicate’ ( I chose duplicate in case one was closer to my issue, but it was closed because it was also similar to another issue less similar to mine. )

A list of bugs that seem very relevant to the ones I had were listed. I kept my search between January and March of 2026, because that is roughly when I started noticing it got better.

Image

As you can see there is a lot of bugs similar to what I was experiencing during that time period. I could not find an exact match, but maybe different symptoms of the same disease. I narrowed the duplicates down to a few root bugs:

[https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=511757]
[https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=514098]
[https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=506642]
[https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=500044]

Each had more than a few duplicate bugs tied to it. I think [https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=511757] seems like the closest to the one I experienced. It also had the most duplicates tied to it. It says it was resolved in a special 6.5.6 release, which was released in March. However, I wonder if it was also fixed in 6.6 which was released in February. I am not sure how the release schedule works, maybe there is a release schedule for those who do not want to go to 6.6.

Takeaways

Did I find the commit that fixed my issue? No nor did I find a release note about it. Do I want to spend any more time looking? No, I feel satisfied with finding the bug logged and resolved. Did I learn something about KDE Plasma’s bug system and release schedule? Yes! Next time I run into a bug I will be able to log and check the status of it and maybe find people logging similar bugs. This is a better approach than trying to figure it out on my own or hoping for a release to fix it soon. As always thanks to all the KDE Plasma contributors and maintainers.

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