With some kde specific settings, kwin crashes. (kubuntu 18.04LTS)

Question

With some KDE specific settings, kwin crashes.

So I was playing around with some settings regarding virtual desktops. I wanted to have the on-screen switch setting on, however, using this causes kwin to randomly and inconsistenly crash after switching desktops frequently and fast.

I can of course remedy this by restarting kwin in the terminal, but this is only temporary as it will crash again.

Trying out different compositors has no effect.

specs; (NEOFETCH)

ccpeters@ccpeters-Lenovo-ideapad-510-15ISK 

OS: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS x86_64 
Host: 80SR Lenovo ideapad 510-15ISK 
Kernel: 4.15.0-20-generic 
Uptime: 17 mins 
Packages: 2465 
Shell: bash 4.4.19 
Resolution: 1920x1080 
DE: KDE 
WM: KWin 
Theme: Breeze [KDE], Breeze [GTK3] 
Icons: Breeze [KDE], Breeze [GTK3] 
Terminal: konsole 
CPU: Intel i7-6500U (4) @ 3.100GHz 
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 940MX 
GPU: Intel Integrated Graphics 
Memory: 857MiB / 7882MiB 

I'm using KDE plasma 5.12 on Kubuntu 18.04 LTS, with the nvidia-390 drivers.

Anybody have any idea why this is happening? Here is some pictures on the problem;

Setting

Kwin crash

Crash report

Answer 1

I experience a similar problem and found a preliminary fix for it, as decribed in the bug report: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=396000

I hope this helps you, too. Maybe you want to confirm this on my bugreport to give it more momentum?

Joe

Answer 2

This is an issue for me on 20.10, though I am not switching desktops, it just seems to happen at random.

As far as I can tell this is a bug either in KWin or the Nvidia drivers, probably the drivers.

The fix I found for this is to open the file ~/.config/kwinrc and change

[Compositing]
OpenGLIsUnsafe=true

to

[Compositing]
OpenGLIsUnsafe=false

Now you can restart kwin with

kwin --replace &

Everything should be back to normal.

I don't know if this is a permanent fix or if another crash will set it back to true but for me it seems to be OK for now.