I am using my Kaos box in part as an HTPC. I run a DisplayPort to HDMI cable to a TV. When connected Kaos detects and uses the second screen correctly. The problem I have is that Plasma moves the panel to the TV despite the VGA monitor being set as primary. Then when I disconnect the TV I end up with no panel. Logout-login and reboot do not bring it back unless the TV is active. I can't find a setting or configuration to change so the panel stays on the VGA monitor. If that is not possible, is it possible to set it so that the panel always goes to an active monitor at least? Thanks in advance.

Unfortunately there are many known issues with Plasma 5 and dual monitor setup, pretty much going back to Qt 5.

Qt 5.6 should fix almost all of these issues. It was supposed to be released last December, now it looks 5.6RC should be out within a few days. It will go in the repo for KaOS since it will require a rebuild of almost all Plasma 5 related packages. You probably will be best served to enable and once Qt 5.6RC is up.

KDE links:

See the "Multi screen woes" section:

Thanks. I had found a lot of KDE bug reports of similar issues but no solutions. Since it seems to be a QT bug, according to that blog, I guess I just have to wait for the upstream fix. I was also wondering, however, where the panel configuration goes. If I can even manually edit the panel configuration to make it show up that would be helpful. Or at least see how many panels are floating around. I want to avoid the situation of creating a new panel every time and having my system bog down because it loads them all even though they disappear.

Those settings are in ~/.config

Mainly in the file plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc there

For anyone else that has this problem, the fix for me turned out to be changing the plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc entries for the panel from lastscreen=1 to lastscreen=0.