Comment # 3 on bug 1174566 from Fabian Vogt

(In reply to Nick Dordea from comment #2)
> Hello Fabian, 
> 
> 1) I had this configuration for years and I did not have issues, because 
> very seldom I used another desktop manager. 
> When I had issues at login time, one of GNOME, LXDE, Enlightment was
> selected and I had an operational desktop from which I did some research and
> changes .
> Please note that I do not use kactivities.
> 
> 2) Yes ... krunner is available and can be used .
> 
> 3) As far as kactivitymanagerd ... the journalctl log shows that it was
> successfully started ....

It appears like it, but it probably isn't running anymore when plasmashell
starts.
In a broken session, use krunner to start a terminal and run the two mentioned
commands, they should tell what's wrong.

> ...
> The above directory exists and contains 3 objects 
> database
> database-shm
> database-wal  

It's possible that the database got corrupted and deleting those files would
recreate them.

> and it proves that kactivitymanagerd was active before the message was
> displayed 
> Jul 27 14:05:50 suse4Rocco.dom plasmashell[4905]: Aborting shell load: The
> activity manager daemon (kactivitymanagerd) is not running.
> 
> Something happened between Jul 27 14:05:45 when the daemon was active and 
> Jul 27 14:05:50 when it was detected that the daemon is not running .
> My feeling is that during the intended R update something in KDE was also
> updated/changed.   I do not know any of KDE internals/intricacies to
> understand what's going on in the journalctl log as well as what KDE
> component  is the culprit .  Over the years I understand that KDE is a
> collection of packages distributed over many repositories at different
> versions etc.  
> 
> I just noticed that opensuse leap 15.,2 was released.  
> I will have a look at 15.2 release notes and see if an upgrade does not
> require fundamental changes on my PC. If not, I rather perform an upgrade to
> 15.2 that will solve/synchronize/fix all relationships between KDE
> components with workable plasma than fixing the actual/broken KDE then 
> upgrading to 15.2 .
> I did DVD/NW upgrade several times so I hope that the upgrade is not taking
> more than 2-3 hours .

It contains an upgrade to Plasma 5.18, but there weren't any relevant changes
in kactivitymanagerd. So I expect that if this is an issue with
kactivitymanagerd
it won't make a difference.

> I will keep you posted with my decision .
> 
> Thank you for your help.
> 
> Regards,
> Nick