Arch Linux

graybeard

Member

From: Northern New Jersey

Registered: 2016-01-17

Posts: 5

[SOLVED] Cinnamon broken after Using KDE desktop

I have been using the Cinnamon desktop since I installed Arch Linux a year ago. Over the weekend I made a devastating mistake. I decided to try KDE.

I added "exec startkde" to my .xinitrc file.  KDE did not start properly. It came up with a black screen and a single terminal. I exited back to the command line and tried again, with the same result.  Exiting out again I started Cinnamon with no issues.

Here now is my devastating mistake.  I ran startkde from a terminal within Cinnamon. After exiting out of KDE and Cinnamon I rebooted and started Cinnamon. Now random applications do not follow the Cinnamon theming.  Many GTK applications look as expected (eg nemo, galculator, virt-manager). However, there are both GTK and KDE applications let are not.  I use dark themes. Depending on the application it can be either completely light (eg keepassx, convertall), or are a hybrid (eg geany, terminator) where certain areas are light (pulldown menus, sidebar, etc.).

I removed all the ~/.config files, I tried to start the misbehaving applications by defining the theme on the command line. As far as I can tell nothing is left from before the mistake.

At this point I am sure I have read most other posts that are similar to my issue, none of the ideas there aprears to have helped. I have tried different themes, borders, icons, controls, and even mouse pointers. Nothing seems to make a difference. I hope someone has an idea I have not yet tried.

Thank you in advance.

Last edited by graybeard (2016-09-23 18:30:25)

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,286

Re: [SOLVED] Cinnamon broken after Using KDE desktop

Either start killing other dotfiles outside .config or create a new user and try to get a working Cinnamon and then compare the files between users.

graybeard

Member

From: Northern New Jersey

Registered: 2016-01-17

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Cinnamon broken after Using KDE desktop

After a lot of experimentation and diffing I am still unable to find the root cause of the problem.  The new user's set up works exactly as expected.

Now in the interest of just getting this fixed and getting back to business, my solution is to create a new user and migrate my old broken /home directory to the new user. 

Is it possible to:
usermod -o -u <OLDUID> <NEWLOGIN>
cp and ln files and directories as necessary from /home/OLDLOGIN to /home/NEWLOGIN
mv /home/OLDLOGIN /home/broken
mv /home/NEWLOGIN /home/OLDLOGIN

Again thank you in advance.

graybeard

Member

From: Northern New Jersey

Registered: 2016-01-17

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Cinnamon broken after Using KDE desktop

In the end I did as described above with a few additional usermod commands to clean up the system.