Kill/Quit and Restart Plasma on KDE

Every so often, Plasma freezes on me or the graphics get cluttered. It is a hassle to restart KDE (logout/login) when you have 101 tabs open in Firefox and several xterm windows.

I had been a Gnome user since shifting to Ubuntu a couple years back, and recently shifted to Kubuntu/KDE when KDE 4.2 was released. Its been mostly stable, except for the occasional Plasma issues. Individual components in Gnome can be easily killed/restarted. For eg Gnome Panel can be killed/restarted using the following command.

killall gnome-panel; gnome-panel &

Now the same can be achived in KDE too. This is how you kill/restart Plasma.

kbuildsycoca4 && kquitapp plasma-desktop && kstart plasma-desktop

The above command can be run either through the terminal or krunner (kde run command).

No more restarting of KDE to clean up plasma mess. 🙂

I upgraded to KDE 4.4 last week and its has been largely stable and amazing to work with. KDE is a much more powerful desktop shell than Gnome and I would recommend KDE 4.4 for everybody who use Gnome just because of a lack of better choice.

4 comments

  1. I used Cinnamon for a while which has a button for this in the taskbar – used it multiple times a day :-D. I switched to KDE because it’s much more stable and more powerful.
    Since a few months I had not the slightest problem with KDE but today it started leaving parts of moved or closed windows on the screen so I wonderered how to solve this without closing all my applications. There are many posts out there but their suggestion didn’t work.
    Glad I found your post – works like a charm!

  2. Excellent! That’s what I am looking for, because somehow my plasma-desktop crashes every time I load a Youtube flash video ever since upgraded to KDE 4.9.1…

  3. Thanks, that’s really helpful. I’ve found kde to be fairly unstable on my work desktop, but rock solid at home. In particular the plasma desktop occasionally crashes, but this will help me out with a simple restart. Cheers!

    Tim

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