How to restart Plasma without restarting the operating system

Next February 28 reach Plasma 6.0, a very important update for the desktop KDE. Although I have not experienced serious failures since they went up to Plasma 5, it is possible that something goes wrong and plasmashell closes completely. At that moment we will see the applications, but the bottom panel with Kickoff, for example, will no longer be accessible. In a case like the one described or something similar, how can we solve it without restarting the operating system?

The best way is to do it from the terminal. The command may vary depending on the version of Plasma we are in, and it was not the same in KDE 4 as in Plasma 5. In the previous version of the graphical environment the command was used killall plasma-desktop && kstart plasma-desktop – there it is in case there is someone who is still on that version -, but starting with version 5 the name of the package was changed to plasmashell. The commands would look like this:

Restart Plasma from the terminal

There are at least two ways to restart Plasma from the terminal: with killall and with kquitapps5. The second one won't work in Plasma 6, but the first one is valid for both v5.x and v6.x:

killall plasmashell && kstart plasmashell

The second would look like this:

kquitapp5 plasmashell && kstart5 plasmashell

At the time of writing this article, at least the order kstart6 It doesn't exist, but that doesn't necessarily mean it never will. Considering that the first one works in both versions, it may be worth remembering just that one.

What these commands do

• killal terminates all processes associated with what follows, in this case plasmashell.
• kquitapps5, or ending in 6 if they implement it, close the application that we indicated later, the same as in the previous example. They practically do the same thing, but the first is a Linux command and the second is a KDE command.
• kstart it is used to launch applications, and what it will do is start Plasma.

All together and to summarize, what these commands do is close Plasma, or finish closing it completely, and reopen it, which is restarting the graphical environment. Fast and easy.