Hello people, I’m in need of help. I’ve encountered this same issue when I was on EndeavourOS and for the life of me I can’t find anybody else who ran into this.
Basically, my desktop doesn’t show what’s in my home/Desktop folder. It used to, but now it’s “frozen”, aka if I create a new file in the desktop folder, it will not show up on my desktop.
I have checked that my desktop setting is on “Folder View”. In fact when I change for “Desktop” then re-enable “Folder view”, THEN it “updates”, aka it shows what’s in the desktop folder. But the problem persists: if I create a new file in the desktop folder, it won’t appear on the desktop.
I can’t figure out what caused this. I noticed the problem today, but it might have occurred anywhere in the last week since I don’t often add files in the desktop folder.
I tried emptying /tmp and /var/tmp, no change.
I created a new user, and on that new user, it works perfectly fine. I guess it’s something I configured? But I can’t figure out what. I have installed two Kwin scripts (Krohnkite and Geometry Change), but even when I remove them, the problem persists.
Most likely, it’ll be the content of your ~/.cache/ directory. However, in order to effectively clean that out, you should completely log out of Plasma — you have to be looking at the login screen, not the screen locker — and switch to a tty.
You get there by way of CtrlAltF3. There, log in with your own user name and password, and then issue the command…
rm -rf .cache/*
Then, exit the tty with CtrlD and return to your GUI login screen with AltF1, AltF2 or AltF4 — sometimes it’s AltF7, even, because the tty where the GUI runs is randomly chosen by systemd.
After logging into Plasma again, see if the behavior has changed. Also note that…
You can always refresh the desktop with F5; and…
Hidden files — i.e. files whose names start with a period (“.”) — are by default not shown.
F5 doesn’t do anything either. There still is a test.txt (with gibberish inside, so not an empty file) in the desktop folder that doesn’t show up on the desktop.
Hmm… And, is the folder for your “Folder View” setting effectively set to ~/Desktop? Sometimes it accidentally gets set to a different folder, and then of course, it won’t work.
Yup, up to date. And there is no option to chose the folder to set Folder View BUT as I said, if I change to “Desktop” then back to “Folder view”, THEN the desktop shows correctly what’s in the folder, but then freezes again and the same problem arise.
Is it possible that I killed a systemd service or something like that? There’s no problem with the other users. When the problem first arose with my previous installation of Endeavour I spent days trying to find the source of the problem, and didn’t find anything. I don’t know what I’m doing to have TWICE a problem nobody else seems to have encountered
Mod edit:- Please avoid made up abbreviations or so-called netspeak – Corrected. No charge.
Just did. The terminal doesn’t return anything, but it opens a GUI window with a bunch of services and I’m not sure it’s relevant I list them all (there’s a lot of them). Is there one in particular I should look for?
The only one that are shutdown are timezone, and automatic mounting of external devices.
Okay so I nuked all my dotfiles related to plasma or kde and the problem is gone (even tho I have to reconfigure a thing or two). I just wish I could have found what, in my config, caused this so that I know what not to do. I’ll mark this as solved but if anybody has an idea please let me know
Sometimes the KDE scripts for migrating an existing Plasma configuration to a later version lead to corruption of the configuration files. It doesn’t happen very often anymore, but it used to occur more often in the past.
The cause is then most likely to be found in some leftover configuration options from an earlier Plasma version that were deprecated but never got removed from the user’s own configuration files.
