"The most annoying being that ksmserver-logout-greeter sometimes crashes when trying to shut down."

That's quite an esoteric issue that I have never seen on a lot of disparate hardware, all with KDE, since early v2. I'd log an issue, you never know it might get fixed and you can get on with life.

That may be true, but the only thing I know is that I'm having it :) What I didn't mention is that it's an LTS version of Kubuntu, so logging an issue would probably just lead to the question "does it still happen with the current version?", and I'm not motivated enough to invest the effort into finding that out right now, so I guess I'll just have to live with it until I upgrade my installation...

Fair enough.

However you might like to note the time it happens next and then on your next reboot take a quick look in your journal and perhaps point something like lnav at /var/log and see if anything jumps out.

  journalctl --since "2023-04-13 09:00:00" --until "2023-04-13 09:05:00"
  https://docs.lnav.org/en/v0.11.1/usage.html#time

EDIT: formatting

This is a good example of why you should design software to be as robust as possible up front. E.g. using statically typed languages, not using shell scripts, using typestate patterns, bundling dependencies, etc.

A lot of Linux software isn't very intrinsically robust and the result is lots of janky stuff that isn't caught by tests, and only affects a small number of people in difficult to reproduce ways.

"A lot of Linux software isn't very intrinsically robust"

Yet you will almost certainly have something Linux running in your home somewhere. Obviously, I am making quite an assumption here with regards what OSs run in your home, but Linux powers way more stuff than any other OS on the planet by a massive margin.

Your casual dismissal of Linux misses several points. Linux is just a kernel - 'tis what boots and stuff. Statically typed bollockary doesn't even feature at this level, yet we have some wondrous stuff on display. We get eBPF to play with for fiddling quite unceremoniously with network packets and much, much, more. We have way more file systems than you can count ... OK put your socks back on. We have multiple schedulers and way more firewalling systems than is reasonable. nft looks like it might be quite useful. It's the fourth one I've dealt with (ipfw, ipchains, iptables) so it should work out.

That's the kernel alone - 1000s of devs working on it - way more than any other OS kernel.

There are multiple stable WMs, GUIs and whatever. I've stuck with KDE since a shaky self compile of 2.0 a fair few years ago.

Linux runs quite a bit of your life somewhere even if it's only your telly.

this usually happens when you install a new nvidia driver as it replaces the opengl libraries and for some reason the logout/shutdown and lock screen can't deal with it.

The thing is that it only happens sporadically, and locking works just fine (I do that routinely whenever I go away from my desk, even at home, and there was never any issue), just shutdown doesn't...

I used Kubuntu for a very long time, KDE Plasma has a lot of really neat things in it and I have no issue with recommending it to many people. But eventually I end up gravitation back towards Cinnamon and Mate based Desktops because of the simplicity they provide. Not so ambitious but execute what they do well.

Cinnamon is great! My goto forever has been Xfce because I like the simplicity, but after my last bout of DE window shopping I tried Cinnamon and really liked it. It feels like a similar vibe to Xfce (unbloated), but it's not quite as spartan.

That's a Kbuntu problem. Isn't it abandoned for the most part? Tried mint, was better, but not good enough.

I left it for the same reason. Moved to Manjaro KDE and... Way, way better.

I have the same issue with the logout-greeter crashing and stopping me shutting down or suspending. I often have to resort to "sudo shutdown now".