Bug 455439

SUMMARY
I am not sure how useless this bug ticket would be but creating it so there is at least a log. Maybe someone can play around with trying to reproduce if they have time or want to have fun.

Basically what happened was I was using my laptop as usual, played some games. Did an Arch update (sudo pacman -Syu) then turned off my laptop and went outside. When I came home and powered on my laptop almost all of my KDE settings were gone/reset to default. My Dolphin was like I had never touched it before, as was Plasma. All of my icon only desktop pins were gone except the 4 default. And my widgets were gone. Wallpaper was back to the default one.

I had made a post on Reddit and another user mentioned they had a similar encounter with xwayland crashing.

https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/vd6g6h/arch_did_an_update_and_all_only_my_kde_related/

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Make changes to settings like wallpaper, Dolphin, icon only task manager placement, add icons, widgets
2. Force kwin or xwayland to crash
3. upon getting logged back in or rebooting your settings may be reset to default/deleted.

OBSERVED RESULT
Almost all KDE related settings were deleted/reset to default. Some remained like my saved wi-fi and having widgets downloaded. But the actual settings for those were all reset/deleted. Dolphin was like if it was new, Plasma was like if it was new. Wallpaper was default.

EXPECTED RESULT
This bug ticket is more so to investigate why crashing of kwin, xwayland or anything else can nuke KDE settings. How are they related? Could something have been writing to the settings during the crash? But then why would almost all KDE settings reset even if they are completely unrelated? Perhaps further safety could be put into place where a duplicate of the setting is made and only deleted if the original setting saved? I imagine this would work upon a reboot or something it would check if the current setting is not corrupt and delete the back up. Or replace the corrupt on with the back up.

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Linux/KDE Plasma: Arch
(available in About System)
KDE Plasma Version: 5.24.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.95.0
Qt Version: 5.14.5

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Please move this to another category if it would suite better, however for me it was kwin that crashed when everything reset. Another user had reported it happened to them in xwayland.