ngraham added a comment.
Perhaps this is a clue. With or without your patch, every single time I change the icon in user-manager, plasmashell immediately prints the following to the console: file:///usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/ui/Header.qml:55:5: QML Image: Error decoding: file:///var/lib/AccountsService/icons/dev: Unsupported image format The file exists and is a valid image: file /var/lib/AccountsService/icons/dev /var/lib/AccountsService/icons/dev: PNG image data, 64 x 64, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced xdg-open /var/lib/AccountsService/icons/dev [opens in Gwenview] So I think we can confirm that the icon is being changed on disk and that plasmashell sees the changed image and tries to load it. However without your patch the avatar changes anyway (most of the time), while with your patch, it does almost never does until plasmashell is restarted. It seems like there is some latent bug with QML Image loading/parsing/MIMEtype detecting/something else that is only being triggered when the `OpacityMask` is applied to the `Image`... REPOSITORY R119 Plasma Desktop REVISION DETAIL https://phabricator.kde.org/D13415 To: sharvey, ngraham, davidedmundson, mart, apol, abetts Cc: sefaeyeoglu, hein, plasma-devel, ragreen, Pitel, ZrenBot, lesliezhai, ali-mohamed, jensreuterberg, abetts, sebas, apol, mart