Hello forum, and thank you for being awesome!
I don’t like have any icons (shortcuts) on my desktop. Every time I delete them, they return after restarting my computer. They never return while using the computer, only after restart. I imagine this has something to do with a config file or a cache, but I have no experience troubleshooting on that level.
Any help or reading suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Hello,
First check if you start or not with an empty session
If not, set it like that.
Also, right click on Desktop and go to Configure Desktop. You can set it to Desktop View instead of Folder view. That removes the presence of icons on desktop. If you prefer to keep it as Folder view for other reasons, then set the path to none, or make sure you don’t actually have icons/folders/files in the Desktop folder
Hi Fabby and Bogdan,
Thanks again for your help! Unfortunately this didn’t fix the problem. I apologize for not giving an in depth description the first time. But here it is with some screenshots:
In this screenshot you’ll see the two icons in the top left corner. One is for Konsole and the other just says Icon (more on this in the next screenshot). Just for good measure I included the menu options so you can see that I tried the original solution.
This screenshot explains the blank icon. I get an error for a malformed url when I click on it. This was originally a link for LBRY. I uninstalled the program, yet the icon remained, but obviously referenced nothing. So I dug into the properties and found the file path. I deleted the LBRY file from /home/nick/.local/share/plasma_icons. That’s when it became this blank, “malformed url.” I delete them both each time I boot, but without fail, they reappear, like a ghost or something 
.
Does this also happen when you create a new user and log in there?
Hey,
No, I created a test user and the settings were the default, like right after a fresh install. I also looked through the forum and found a few that seemed similar. One in particular about sticky widgets that never got solved. The user eventually reinstalled from usb. KDE Plasma does not save my settings.
Thank you!
Well, no need to reinstall if it doesn’t happen in the newly created user. It means something in your profile is messed up, not the system itself
Therefore, we’re going to do the following:
Verify that the new user has access to the same groups as your old one by executing groups and comparing the output of both users.
groups forever_noob_mind
groups forever_noob_mind2
(Where obviously, fullmetal is your old user and fullmetal2 is your new one.)
E.G. if forever_noob_mind is a member of operator and forever_noob_mind isn’t, execute:
usermod --append --groups operator fullmetal2
Copy all data files from your old profile into your new one
cp --verbose --recursive --preserve=time-stamps /home/forever_noob_mind/Documents/* /home/forever_noob_mind2/Documents/
If that worked and you had no errors, remove the documents from your old user:
rm --recursive /home/fullmetal/Documents/*
repeat for:
After everything has been copied over, disable the old user so you cannot accidentally log on:
usermod --lock forever_noob_mind
If you would have theming going on, don’t do everything in one day but do this at the rate of 1 application / theme / whatever per day and if the problem crops up again, roll back your last change
in 1 month delete the entire home directory of your old user, but don’t delete the user itself so that in 6 months time files still owned by that user will still show up under its username.
If you ever migrate to a new machine, just don’t migrate the old user: only the new one.
From now on, start making backups so you can roll back and never have to do this again:
Thanks so much for all your effort to help me. I’ll start moving through this process. Beside solving the issue, it’s going to make me a much smarter user.
Best,
Nick