Kubuntu 26.04 KDE Plasma crash after update traced to fontconfig race condition

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A developer discovered that KDE Plasma's plasmashell was crashing in a loop after a routine system update on Kubuntu 26.04 LTS, leaving the desktop inaccessible. Investigation of crash logs revealed a race condition in fontconfig, where plasmashell attempts to read the font cache at the same moment a system update triggers its regeneration, causing a segfault inside FcCharSetHasChar. A temporary fix involves clearing the fontconfig cache and restarting plasmashell via systemd commands, which restores the desktop without a reboot. The permanent solution is a systemd user drop-in file that forces fc-cache to complete before plasmashell starts on every boot, eliminating the race condition entirely. The fix has been verified stable across multiple reboots and subsequent updates on KDE Plasma 6.6.6 running on kernel 7.0.0-34.

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