Plasma, start menu is missing.

zmaint

I have an 81 year old friend that has been using Solus for the last five years with no issues. His Parkinsons is unfortunately been worse of late, and my guess is that he's hit some key combination that has disabled/removed/hidden the start menu.
Two questions.
1) cannot get Rustdesk to work anymore. It gives some connection error about botnet shit. I googled and it and it says I need to log in with an account, tried that, error is gone, but it still doesn't connect. Does the person on the other end need an account too? Is there a functioning alternate to rustdesk that will actually work? It was not super great previously, but now it is completely unusable.
2) what's the best way to simply restore the KDE default desktop? Something that I can walk him through over the phone since I cannot log in remotely?

SethStorm666

2) You can get him to delete .config directory, that would reset the KDE completly to default. But it will also remove eventually shortcuts he may have in the panel and/or other stuff.

⚠ Moderator Warning
Do not delete that directory. The KDE maintainers warn against doing this. See https://help.getsol.us/docs/user/troubleshooting/plasma

zmaint

SethStorm666 Do you have a specific path? KDE has folders and files everywhere. I don't think he'd probably be competent enough to do this over the phone but I'm still interested in this as a plan B. My parents live fairly close to him and they could pick his laptop and meet me half way with it when they come visit next. I live in a different state or I'd just drop in and fix it for him on site.

Harvey

zmaint

Harvey Thank you Harvey, I'll try to walk him through this tomorrow. Much appreciated.

Harvey

zmaint

I would not advise deleting the ~/.config/ directory. That would do more than simply reset the panel/DE after a restart (Which I have not tested, I just assume it would). It would also delete many browsers bookmarks, saved passwords, history, settings, browser sync, login sessions as well as settings/configuration data for most other applications on the system in the hopes of getting the system menu back.

I fear that would really be bad for someone who has parkinsons and seems like they might have set a lot of this up 5~ years ago.

You could add a new default panel, delete the existing panel and move the new panel to the correct location but it works in a similar way to the way I showed in my video without respecting any other changes they may have made to the panel which is why I did not recommend that.

zmaint

Harvey Thanks that's very much what I'd thought would happen. I visited with him this morning, his task bar (the bar with the clock) is also missing, so can't click and add the application launcher that way. alt+spacebar works, is there some way to add widgets back from there? Even though I've been on Solus Plasma since it officially released from beta, and I do love to tinker, I've just always loved the default out of the box look and have never even messed with anything beyond wallpaper. Figured I'd just leave ricing for the kiddies🙂

TraceyC

Harvey I would not advise deleting the ~/.config/ directory.

I wanted to reiterate this because of the problems it would cause. It's even documented in the Plasma troubleshooting page of the Help Center to not delete that directory.

https://help.getsol.us/docs/user/troubleshooting/plasma

I strongly advise people to look through the Help Center and Known Issues thread as a first step in solving problems. We vet that information for accuracy.

It's understandable that people want to help other people. That's one of the strengths of the open source community! When handing out advice, it should be verified, especially when it can cause significant problems or disruption to someone's system.

Harvey

Ohh. If he needs to use the PC in the mean time. alt+f2 will open an application launcher where you have to type the name of the app you want to launch.

This is what it looks like:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Fdaily-tip-you-can-press-alt-space-and-bring-up-a-quick-v0-wRbI8DQByy-rh0pWvH-0GgTeAvM7ow46dEydYoxDJZM.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dced29ccba184e20ce3804345e4d0cc0e29296cc0

Harvey

zmaint

Right click the desktop and select "Enter Edit Mode" then select Add Panel -> Default panel.

You can see this section in my video, the add panel section is next to the Add or Manage Widgets section I had used.

zmaint

Harvey Thank you sir. I texted it to him. He's going to try it out when he gets home from church today.

zmaint

Harvey He says that he doesn't have that menu either. Now I'm not sure if he's turned something off or maybe gotten something actually broken. The plan currently is to drop the lap top off with my parents, and then they'll hand it off to me later in the week. I'll let you know what I find once I have it in front of me.

I was able to walk him through getting a Rustdesk account set up, but we still were not able to connect. I have to say my Rustdesk experience so far has been right up there with getting a prostate exam. Is there anything else that actually works with Wayland?

zmaint

Harvey Ok so I now physically have the laptop. Plasma is pretty broken, but it looks like he had an update go sideways, most likely the last big plasma one. I'm in chroot, trying to repair and eopkg check says "unable to read file (var/lib/eopkg/package/pam-32bit-1.7.0-38/files.xml) Errno 2 No such file or directory." I'm one of those old school terminal update guys, pretty sure pam was in a recent update. Anyway how do I fix that if eopkg isn't working? I have confirmed that the folder is legitimately missing. He has a pam-1.70-38 folder but not a 32bit one.

Also, internet works fine in live environment but not in chroot and the instructions on our help page didn't work. I have tried both wired and wifi with the same result.

TraceyC

zmaint

Try running

sudo eopkg dc

and then running the repair again. You will get faster help on Matrix. Since you only have the laptop physically for a limited time, I'd recommend reaching out there.

zmaint

TraceyC Thank you that helped greatly. Currently running sudo eopkg check | grep Broken | awk '{print $4}' | xargs -r sudo eopkg it --reinstall it says "The following packages are broken:" It doesn't list anything and it's been sitting about an hour. It's not locked up. Guessing there are a lot of broken files. I'm headed out to mow the grass, plan on just leaving it and seeing if it finishes on it's own. I've got all of his personal stuff backed up so I can reinstall if needed. I'm honestly just super curious now if I can get it fix it.

alfisya

zmaint sudo eopkg check | grep Broken | awk '{print $4}' | xargs -r sudo eopkg it --reinstall

FYI, this snippet is not needed anymore.You just have to run sudo eopkg checkand it will ask you to reinstall stuff that it found broken. Using that snippet just make the prompt invisible. We already removed that snippet a few months ago from help center.

Hope you get the laptop working again. Cheers!

zmaint

@TraceyC @Harvey Just wanted to say that Solus is special. It's not just because it's linux. Credit needs to go where credit is due, Solus is built like a brick shit house. I can't keep Arch with no AUR alive in a VM. I've had every other regular release on Pop break something catastrophically, I've had Kubuntu die a horrible death, ditto x2 for Fedora. Solus… just keeps on ticking somehow regardless of the abuse. When I came back in from mowing eopkg check was still running so I CTRL+C'd and found that the sudo permission had expired at some point. I went ahead and just ran updates from there and it's all magically good. There is no way this laptop should have been booting with all the broken packages it had, but he was able to use Brave to pay his bills and still run Quicken. Pretty amazing.

TraceyC

That's amazing. I'm so glad you were able to get it sorted out!

zmaint

alfisya Awesome, I did not know that. Eopkg check rocks, as far as I know Solus is the only distro that actually makes it easy to find and repair bad packages.. in addition to a rollback feature. I sincerely hope that never changes, awesome stuff.