René J.V. Bertin posted on Sat, 20 Aug 2022 01:05:04 +0200 as excerpted:
> On Friday August 19 2022 21:43:20 Duncan wrote:
>
>>From krunner "killall plasmashell" (without the quotes) should do it.
>>To get it back, just "plasmashell".
>
> You will probably find that this logs you off (or drops you back to the
> console) ;)
?? It never[1] has here, not on X, and not on wayland.
In fact, I deliberately use the quit plasmashell and restart it
(immediately or later) tactic somewhat frequently, including when I have
made some changes to the plasmashell config and wish to ensure they stick.
[2]
Just to be sure that hadn't changed recently I actually quit plasmashell
while writing this up and am now running without it. I'll restart it in a
bit, probably after I send this...
OTOH, while on X the same thing can be done with kwin (kwin_x11), on
wayland that doesn't work because kwin (kwin_wayland) actually provides
the wayland server implementation as well, and quitting that quits the
entire session (which should restart, but it means losing any unsaved work
in your wayland and xwayland apps).
And killing the session (startplasma* or plasma_session) will land you
back at the login or CLI terminal prompt, depending on how you start
plasma (from a *DM graphical login manager, or from the terminal prompt).
But plasmashell, no. That can be safely killed without killing the
session (other running apps should remain), at least here, and I must
wonder what your distro is doing if you can't safely kill it there.
So maybe you were thinking about kwin_wayland or the session, not
plasmashell?
That said, it's always possible (and recommended) to try it yourself in a
fresh session or at least without any unsaved data the first time, just to
be sure. But I'd sure like to see the details of any behavior contrary to
what I've described above, because as I said, it has worked that way for
me since the kde3 era so for more than 20 years now, and continues to do
so.
---
[1] Well, not since sometime early in the kde3 era anyway (when IIRC it
was kicker, and in the kde4 era simply plasma, not plasmashell), not sure
before that.
[2] At least one bug was "recently" (as in perhaps six months ago) fixed
where plasmashell wouldn't save changes to its config until it was
properly shutdown -- if it or the entire system crashed before that, the
changes wouldn't be written.
Meanwhile, because I run live-git-master it isn't always as stable as
releases are supposed to be, so ensuring any config changes one intends to
last longer than the currently running application instance are written to
disk ASAP is wise.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
