I've recently started using Debian 12 with KDE on my laptop and after ironing out most of the teething issues I have a couple left.
The one I have made no progress on is random freezes on the taskbar. I only really notice this when the clock is wrong (as it's frozen) or I go to click an app on the taskbar and nothing happens. If I press the Meta / Windows key the Start menu appears but nothing else seems to work.
There doesn't seem to be a pattern to it. For example it doesn't always happen resuming from sleep. I can be working away and find it's frozen. I have three widgets running (CPU, Memory and Network) but it froze before I added them. Other than that there is nothing fancy on there.
The workaround is to edit the Taskbar and then drag the resize sliders and it strings back to life with the correct time.
I've done the usual Google Search but haven't found anything that's not been fixed, or recent.
Any help appreciated.
Can you confirm that it's only the taskbar that freezes? Do any other DE components (e.g. app launcher (shortcut meta + f2 by default)) work or do they freeze/not respond as well?
You could check various logs for errors:
/var/log/syslog
ordmesg
)journalctl -xeu $UNITNAME
; e.g.journalctl -xeu sddm.service
)