Plasma desktop thoroughly messed up

[Jason]

Well, this is awkward (see attachment). I logged into my Kubuntu 19.10 system and it looks like that. Though I can move the cursor everywhere, you can't right-click to do anything in the back areas. It treats only the squished versions as the functional desktop for clicking on although I can move Windows around the blackened quasi-desktop. I can still run programs via the Plasma application menu (what most people call the start or program menu). Alas, my task manager is gone. Luckily I have often used Alt-tab to switch programs so I could use that.

I messed around with display settings earlier when this happened by turning off and then turning on dual monitors, moving them around in relation to each other, changing the primary and so on and somehow got back to two functional desktops, 1 on each monitor. I also made frequent use of a trick learned years ago to force the computer to recognize settings that have gone wonky. You go the setting which is exactly what you have wanted to set it to, but it's clearing not doing it. Then you change it, click Apply, change it back, click Apply again. You'd be surprised how often this works - in Windows, too, in fact, that's where I learned it. I still had to fix my widgets since they ended up being squished after the changes I made. Rebooted and I'm back to it again. Sigh.

Tried resetting Plasma settings by changing the name of .kde to .kde.old. In the olden days, doing this with KDE 4, would reset your settings so you were back at the default when you logged out and then back in again. It didn't work, nothing changed. I'm probably going to do a Timeshift rollback next to fix it.

Update: Just finished restoring using Timeshift to 2 days ago when I know, for sure, that things were fine. It didn't work. Logged in and back at the same weird desktop. Since I only backup root files and not /home directories using Timeshift I think it has to do with a messed up configuration in my home directory. Or, my graphic card is showing its age. Going to try hunting down the messed up file or files or just figure how to reset all Plasma settings so I can get back to a functional desktop.

Update 2: Just went and created a new user and logged in as it. Everything is fine now. So obviously a messed-up dot file somewhere but not worth the time tracking down. At least I saved having to reinstall which meant I'd have to add the programs after and do the updates.

I tried copying over the user files from the old directory to the new (using Konsole) and part way through ran out of space. Oops. Since moving no longer functions correctly as it sees all these folders but not necessarily all the files, I elected to just delete them from the old and new directories and going to just restore the files using SpiderOak (my cloud backup program). It's about 25 GB of files so it'll take a bit of time.

[fox]

That is thoroughly awful! Did you try starting up in single user mode? Also, I wonder if this could have been specific to x or Wayland. Did you try starting up in the other. Last thing - do you have any other desktop installed besides Plasma? If so, did you try that desktop?

[ssfc72]

Thanks for sharing your tips, Jason.  Good to know  the information.

[Jason]

That is thoroughly awful! Did you try starting up in single user mode? Also, I wonder if this could have been specific to x or Wayland. Did you try starting up in the other. Last thing - do you have any other desktop installed besides Plasma? If so, did you try that desktop?

Unless I'm mistaken, single user mode doesn't boot into a graphical desktop. Ah, I see now what you're getting at. I should have been more clear. The program menu still worked. I could start programs although they wouldn't show up on the bar so I had to Alt-tab to switch between them. I'll update my original post to reflect that. So the box was still functional but not the desktop - icons couldn't be created and the ones that were there, well, most couldn't even be seen (as you can see in the screenshot) and the widgets were squished into that space on the right rendering them useless.

I don't think it was specific the rendering engine (X or Wayland) as I never saw any updates that changed that unless I missed something. And after resetting everything is fine again. I didn't try switching. Looking under Compositor, it looks like I'm using OpenGL 2.0 for the rendering backend. There's an OpenGL 3.1 and Xrender option as well. I think these are the defaults but I don't remember. I certainly didn't change anything in here that would have caused the upset.

I didn't and still don't have any other DE other than Plasma installed.