Yesterday I installed Kubuntu 23.04 (fresh install), set everything up, and everything was working fine, including after multiple restarts. This morning, the icons on my desktop were missing and I couldn't launch any apps. Only thing I could still launch was "Configure Desktop and Wallpaper" by right-clicking on the desktop, though the "Configure Display Settings" below didn't work.
Using journalctl (in recovery mode), I noticed a number of kernel: __vm_enough_memory: pid: 1364, comm: plasmashell, no enough memory for the allocation messages that seemed to match the timing. I don't know if they're related or not, but they seemed the most obvious candidates.
After much experimenting, it turns out the problem only occurs when I set the Desktop to show the contents of my Desktop folder (~/Desktop) under "Configure Desktop and Wallpaper" -> "Location". If I set it to show my Home folder, everything is well (after a restart).
In my ~/Desktop folder I have my Documents, Downloads, Pictures and Videos folders, as well as one other folder. Nothing else.
I thought maybe it had to do with folder previews, that maybe a preview of some file was causing trouble, but turning off folder previews did nothing, and neither did moving all the files in Documents, Downloads, etc. to a sub folder (so they wouldn't be included in a preview).
As mentioned, it worked fine yesterday, and the only change I can think of between the last restart yesterday and this morning is that I installed Inkscape and changed my wallpaper. However, removing Inkscape did not help, and neither did changing my wallpaper to one of the defaults.
Update The mystery grows: If I set it to show ~/Desktop as a "Custom location" instead, everything works.
