| name | plasma-restart |
| description | Restart Plasma components (plasmashell, krunner, kglobalaccel, polkit-kde-authentication-agent, kded) without logging out. Use when a config change isn't taking effect or a Plasma process is misbehaving. |
Plasma Component Restart
Restarting individual Plasma components is almost always preferable to logging out.
plasmashell (taskbar, panels, desktop)
kquitapp6 plasmashell 2>/dev/null || killall plasmashell
sleep 1
kstart plasmashell
If plasmashell is wedged and kquitapp6 hangs, killall -9 plasmashell then kstart plasmashell.
krunner
kquitapp6 krunner 2>/dev/null || killall krunner
kglobalaccel (global shortcuts)
kquitapp6 kglobalaccel 2>/dev/null || killall kglobalaccel
kstart kglobalaccel
kded (background services)
kquitapp6 kded6 2>/dev/null || killall kded6
kstart kded6
KWin (window manager) — Wayland caveats
On X11, kwin_x11 --replace & works. On Wayland, KWin is the compositor — restarting it ends the session. Don't restart kwin_wayland from inside a Plasma session. Workarounds:
- Trigger
qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin reconfigure to re-read config (most changes don't need a full restart).
- For a hard restart, log out and back in.
Polkit agent
kquitapp6 polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1 2>/dev/null || killall polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1 &
Notes
kquitapp6 is graceful (asks via D-Bus). killall is a fallback. -9 is a last resort.- After a
plasmashell restart, ephemeral state (open Klipper history, plasmoid scroll positions) is preserved because they're persisted on quit.
