How do I restart the plasma shell in KDE5?

Question

I want to restart my plasma desktop/shell without rebooting my machine and was looking for a way to do so. Is there some konsole command or something that would do just that?

Answer 1

So I think I found an answer. Modifing the KDE 4 command from humbug.in like so:

kbuildsycoca5 && kquitapp5 plasmashell && kstart5 plasmashell

Answer 2

Kill plasmashell and start it in the background.

killall plasmashell
plasmashell > /dev/null 2>&1 & disown

Answer 3

For Plasma 5.27+

plasmashell --replace & disown

Now you can close konsole.

Another solution:
Best way is according to KDE devs, if you have systemd is

systemctl restart --user plasma-plasmashell.service

Works in Fedora 40 KDE.

Answer 4

I'm having trouble with KDE right now. Sometimes it boots in a black screen, no nothing.

But if you type ALT+F2 and open up a konsole, you can see KDE is just running fine without plasmashell. No plasmashell in the process table, no need to kill it. In my case, just typing:

kstart5 plasmashell

will solve the case.

Also, no need to tell it to go on background (or disown it), because it will do just that anyway. You can close the konsole and it will keep running just fine.

Answer 5

I am running plasmashell 5.26.4 and the easiest way to restart it is

plasmashell --replace &

Answer 6

In Debian 8 it's:

killall plasma-desktop && plasma-desktop

to restart