Ubuntu – KDE Plasma copy & paste stopped working, which service, how to restart

kde

Sometimes after a long usage (several days) of KDE Plasma, copy & paste suddenly stops working. (Concretely, paste command always pastes whatever I had last in the buffer, but I'm not able to copy anything new into the buffer.)

(At the same time, moving windows around also stopped working. Maybe related: here. Using kwin --replace fixes that, i.e. now I can again move windows around. However, copy & paste is still broken in the same way.)

Which service is responsible for the copy & paste handling? Is it possible to restart just that service, so that I don't need to restart the whole system and log out/in again?

(This is Ubuntu 16.04 with KDE 5.)

I found klipper now, and tried kstart klipper, but that does not help (after some iterations of kwin --replace, killall plasmashell, plasmashell, even the paste clipboard stopped working, and klipper brought back the paste, which still had the old frozen buffer content, but it still does not let me copy anything new to the clipboard buffer).

I also found ksmserver but not sure yet what it does. Also not sure yet how to properly restart that.

I also found dbus-daemon, which might be related. Not sure yet. Also not sure yet how to properly restart that. killall dbus-daemon did a full logout of the session.

Best Answer

I found that going into system tray settings then disabling clipboard in 'Extra items', applying the change and then enabling it again results in a 'Restart' of the clipboard service.

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