KDE/Kwin on Kubuntu 22.04 periodically locks up

[Aaron Kelley]

Apologies for the package selection of "kwin". This is a MESA bug that impacts KWin, but I do not know which MESA package to select.

The issue is: KDE locks up after being up for a two days or so.

I am not sure if this only occurs for certain hardware configurations, but it appears to be a common enough problem. Here are some examples of other users running into this.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1462228/kubuntu-gui-freeze-issue
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/currently-supported-releases/kubuntu-22-04-jammy-jellyfish/desktop-environment-support/668814-kde-plasma-freezes-unexpectedly
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/11gwc6s/kde_plasma_freezes_unexpectedly/
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1457526/kde-plasma-freezes-unexpectedly
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1458083/desktop-freezing-on-kubuntu-22-04-lts

The issue apparently began after an update to MESA was dropped in the Ubuntu 22.04 repositories (in December?). There is an issue in MESA 22.2.x which causes this. The issue is already understood, and fixed.

See: KDE bug #457847
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457847
and MESA bug #7674
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/7674

This is still occurring on Kubuntu 22.04 because the current version of MESA is 22.2.5. The solution is to upgrade to MESA 22.3.0, or to backport the fix to MESA 22.2.x. (I fixed this for myself by pulling in the newer MESA packages from Ubuntu 23.04.)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 22.04
Package: kwin-common 4:5.24.7-0ubuntu0.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 6.2.0-20.20-generic 6.2.6
Uname: Linux 6.2.0-20-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu82.4
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Sat May 6 20:38:26 2023
InstallationDate: Installed on 2023-04-14 (22 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" - Release amd64 (20230223)
SourcePackage: kwin
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.