Have a TW KDE 64bit from last winter, working fine so far.
For some weeks now, the desktop icons get re-arranged some nights when the machine is running but the monitor is turned off. Sometimes the icons get arranged alphabetically in colums to the left of the Desktop, sometimes the icons all jump some positions across the Desktop.
If I download a new file to the Desktop, it doesn’t appear on the Desktop (even after “Refresh” in context menu repeatedly). But the file is visible in the Desktop folder with Dolphin.
When copying fileswith Dolphin from some other location to the Desktop folder, the file becomes visible on the Desktop immediately.
Any ideas what is borked here? And: No, I can’t create a new user, I need this special user for accessing shares and other machines…
Okay, you “can not create a new user” and I understand you do not want to switch but can still create that new user an have it active overnight, that way you know if it is user specific or not and that helps debugging.
Many thanks for replying! The Desktop icon re-shuffle by far does not happen every night! Sometimes it happens after reboot, but mostly after a night the monitor has been turned off (every 5-10th night). I turned on screen saver instead of turning off the monitor, that worked 3-4 nights, then th icons were alphabetically arranged in columns to the left again.
It is really, really annoying. I now gave up on re-arranging the icons back into a functional position. No idea how to tackle something brainless like this…
Okay, thinking about how to debug this, I think the action to re-arrange the icons is send through D-Bus.
So I would install a D-Bus sniffer, find the KDE way of rearranging these icons using a short-cut-key, execute that so you can find in the sniffer log what happens on the bus. If you do not see it you might need to enable monitoring the system bus.
I expect that using this way you can find the culprit.
So, I tried both “Dbus-system” and “Dbus-session”, started wireshark and right-clicked the Desktop, chose “Icons” and “Sorting: Name”, clicked “Apply” and the Icons got arranged to the left (chosen “Top to Bottom” and “Align left”), but wireshark recorded nothing.
The spam above was with wireshark for root, but same result (no dbus commands recorded on re-arranging desktop icons) when using wireshark as my user on both “Dbus-system” and “Dbus-session”…
Because wireshark does actually capture some dbus event?
Is this really true that I have to track dbus to find some random application (nothing really running over night…) that is resetting at absolutly random intervals but always when monitor is turned off or screen saver running the position of desktop icons?
