All desktop became gear icons

yzg · Guru Joined: 18 Jun 2005 Posts: 493

I started to have this problem:

After login, all the desktop icons show as gear symbol. When you move the mouse pointer over an icon, the proper icon picture comes up.

I cannot point to a specific update which triggered this issue.

Any ideas?

HerrSchafer · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 May 2011 Posts: 139

What DE do you use?
Have you tried to change or reinstall the icon set?
_________________
“Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.”
― John Milton

yzg · Guru Joined: 18 Jun 2005 Posts: 493

It is KDE desktop.

I did emerge -e and deleted /var/tmp/kdecache-<user> but this did not fix it.

yzg · Guru Joined: 18 Jun 2005 Posts: 493

I emptied the Trash bin and the problem is gone.

I do not understand how the Trash bin can cause the icons to go blank. Anyway, I will mark as solved.

i92guboj · Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2014 7:20 am Post subject:

Ugh, it's quite odd indeed.

It might just be a bug in whatever is managing your desktop (that'd be plasma in kde these days I guess?) but there's also the chance that's disk corruption. To be on the safe side I would boot a livecd and run fsck on whatever partition your $HOME lives.

yzg · Guru Joined: 18 Jun 2005 Posts: 493

I found a solution to this problem: in Desktop Settings > Icons, select either Sorted or Preview.

If unsorted is selected and preview is not selected, the problem shows again and it is 100% repeatable.

I think in the absence of any of the above selections, KDE does not refresh the icons after login.

yzg · Guru Joined: 18 Jun 2005 Posts: 493

Submitted bug report.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=344055