KDE taskbar missing

kde

I'm not sure what I pressed or clicked but I can no longer see the taskbar in KDE. I'm not finding any desktop switching keys though ALT+Tab still switches to already opened windows. Right-clicking on the blank empty black background does nothing. On Windows 7 I'd just CTRL+ALT+Delete, kill explorer.exe and start explorer again.

How do I show the missing taskbar in KDE?

Best Answer

Killing the plasmashell process and restarting it from a terminal helped me in this situation.

To terminate the plasmashell process you will need access to a terminal. On most distributions you can get a terminal with CTRL+ALT+F1 or CTRL+ALT+F2. Don't worry, your screen will turn black and you will be prompted to log in with your username and password.

To get back to your regular KDE session you will need to press CTRL+ALT+F7 or CTRL+ALT+F1!

Once you have opened a terminal session you can stop the plasmashell process with 

killall plasmashell

and start it again with 

plasmashell &

The & is only required if you want to be able to close the terminal or want to be able to keep using it for other commands. It will start the plasmashell process in the background so it does not close with the terminal and does not keep blocking the terminal from receiving further input.

Alternatively you can kill the plasmashell process in your terminal and then immediately return to KDE and hit your hotkey for krunner, which is afaik ALT+F2 by default, and enter plasmashell there.

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