I have KDE plasma and sometimes upon startup the panel wouldn’t show up, but it would reappear after relogging. This time that didn’t work, neither did reboot, so I removed the “plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc” and “plasmashellrc” files, and that brings it back but with all desktop configuration reset. Is it possible to recover it with old settings?
Not if you deleted those files. Plasma will then just generate new ones with the default configuration.
However, perhaps you should be more concerned about what it is that you did in order to trigger this abnormal behavior, and my guess is that you’ve installed some incompatible and no longer maintained Plasma theme.
The development of Plasma has come a long way and has known many changes under the hood, some of which were quite incisive. At the same time, many people upload themes to store.kde.org and then never adapt them to the new underlying infrastructure, or just abandon the maintenance of their theme again shortly after it’s uploaded.
Both scenarios can and often do lead to broken themes and/or broken Plasma configurations. The golden rule therefore is to always check when the theme was uploaded and when it was last updated. Themes that date back to — just to give you an example — Plasma 5.12 won’t work anymore and/or will break your desktop.
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I haven’t installed themes, but did install a color scheme a week or more ago (it has a date of 2020-11-29), and there was no problem for a while. And I have those two files saved elsewhere.
When messing with Plasma, it pays to open up a dual pane Dolphin - so you mirror your localhost~/home directory.
Then you can compare, you can delete and replace, and spend time narrowing down exactly which file is causing the issue.
You can recover settings, but you must be sure which exact setting is causing it…
So
This is my way of troubleshooting now, I like Meld. Now I can see any changes from 11th May to the current one. Snapshots rock 
Oh, did I forget to say?
Backups rock too.
If you had a snapshot from before you deleted that file, you could compare it to a default one.
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I have a timeshift snapshot, also have both files with old configuration, got Meld and opened two versions of a file in it, but I suspect redoing the configuration from scratch might be faster for me than troubleshooting as I lack the understanding for it. I suppose plasma widgets also get deleted with these cofing files?
Sure, instead of troubleshooting just bite the bullet and restore.
If you think it’s a Widget thing, you could just compare the widget folder first… I can hardly remember where they even are - but if you install one via OCS you can open the directory, delete it and see what else lurks there…
~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/
U could just try renaming plasmoids.bak first
Make sure you have eventcalendar (the BEST ever)
and I think volumewin7mixer is good - despite the horrible name - compared to the normal volume control.