Today I ran into a small, yet crippling problem with KDE4 after using it for a whole two days. I found a quick and easy solution to get back on my feet.

Quick answer jump to the bottom of the article.

This morning when I booted up and tried to login to KDE4 via GDM on my (k)ubuntu hybrid install, KDE loaded up to the desktop but was unresponsive. It wasn’t completely locked up as I could SSH in from my laptop and see what processes were sucking up all the resources. Sure enough it was all tied up between Kwin, Plasma, and Xorg. Now, that didn’t tell me much more than I already knew. So I dabbled around looking through the ~/.kde folder hoping to find a simple permission issue, or maybe stumble across a corrupted file. I quickly realized that would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

Now I’ll admit, I am no specialist with Linux. I’d likely be labeled as a novice power user. You might think I blame KDE for this, but I do not. KDE has grown in stride since I last used it years ago. Chances are it was something I did as I was playing with different themes and had my hands in a whole bunch of stuff that can cause something like this to happen. So don’t let my logo for this guide fool you, its more of a misdirected venting on my part. But I acknowledge that and still love KDE’s efforts.

So first thing I did was login to see if Gnome had similar behavior which it did not.  So I jumped on Google to see what I could find.

First things first, you must get to a console to perform these steps.  You can do this by logging in via SSH from another computer if you have that setup.  There is also the option before you login to select your session.  Which ever floats your boat, as long as you can get to a console.

  1. Get into your console and move to the home folder of the the account you use to login to KDE. (If you are logged into that account already you “should” already be in your home directory)
    $ cd /home/YOURUSERNAME
  2. Rename (DO NOT DELETE) the hidden .kde folder via the mv command
    $ mv .kde/ .kdeBACKUP/
  3. Go back to your GDM or KDM session and log back into KDE like you would normally.

If you did it correctly you’ll notice all of your settings have been set back to the way KDE was when you first installed it.  Your files will for the most part all be intact. The reason I suggested in step 2 to not delete your ~/.kde folder is that I read there may be some files you might need to restore.  Something to do with email data files, contacts, maybe the calendar.  However I did not have to restore any of that as I had not configured any of that. So I cannot confirm, however some of you out there may be using that so it is best to rename it instead of deleting it in case you do need to restore something.

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