On Fri, 2025-03-21 at 08:33 +1100, Stephen Morris wrote:

[Lots of stuff deleted. It's neither necessary not desireable to quote
the wntire previous history of a message in order to reply to it. See
the Guidelines.]

[...]

Plasma is not the whole DE. You can restart it at any time without
logging out if you have a working terminal emulator.

poc

Thanks Patrick, I thought that when, in my current case, SDDM starts up 
Plasma it was starting up a Plasmashell which Plasma was running inside 
of, hence how do you restart Plasmashell without that shutting down the gui.
I'll also need to look up the instructions again for switching between 
DM's again as I'm thinking of switching away from SDDM as it's start up 
performance is atrocious, but then the start up performance of 
KDE/Plasma is not much better.

The processes run from plasmashell don't die when it crashes or is
restarted. The processes it starts run asynchronously. If you look at
'pstree' for example, you'll see lots of GUI-related processes running
under systemd, including plasmasehll itself.

poc