Me too actually
Described: Why whenever I figure something out myself after posting a help thread, I'll write a whole report on what I did before it got fixed (because often I'm just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, and I never know what exactly moved the needle)
"You shouldn't do [y] either, you idiot, you absolute fucking buffoon. You should instead do [z, which costs a fortune and/or requires you to restructure your entire life]"
Deleted my previous comment, felt like I should give this a bit more attention.
To be honest I feel like all designs are good in their own way. I like the general vibe of Memphis, but being that I was born in the mid 90s, it's probably just that general energy you get from things that happened before you did, where they are "cool" due to how just-old-enough-to-be-old-but-not-old-enough-to-be-an-antique they are, yanno?
Y2K design -- Well. I like the transluscent plastic on Gameboys and Macs. Really underrated aesthetic, wouldn't mind having it back. The DreamCast had some very sleek angles too.
Frutiger Aero will never not "look like the future" to me. It was the age of computer interfaces having all sorts of fun colours and transparencies and animations, and it just LOOKED futuristic and neat. Don't care for the product designs of the era though. That shiny finish would draw in filth and fingerprints from accross the room and after a very short time it'd lose its prettiness.
Flat design I have issues with, like the hamburger menus and the abandonment of descriptive text in favour of abstract icons -- It is also a bit too serious, but I understand and accept that, even if I miss the playfulness of Frutiger. -- But it DID finally bring us dark mode. And my eyes are forever grateful.
... Just wish solarized themes were the norm instead, no idea why they must have such high contrast. I'd even give light mode its time of day if it was a solarized light instead.
Well fuck
I did what you suggested (actually, I didn't just mess with THAT file, I made backups of every file that looked kdeplasma-y on the .config folder and then copied over the equivalent files from the functioning test user profile)
I was going to come here and say "that made no difference and now I'm even more confused".
But THEN. I noticed an icon in the tray (that most certainly had not been there before!) saying "Plasma is using software rendering". Which was odd, it definitely wasn't supposed to be doing that. So I changed settings to make it use Vulkan and rebooted again. THAT seemed to fix the icon rendering issue (though by this point all my customizations are gone, but hey, if it unfucked the system, even if by a roundabout path, that's a fair price to pay)
But THEN. I did that thing where you flick your mouse to the topleft corner of the monitor to switch windows, and THAT made Plasma just crash completely.
Now I'm REALLY confused. I'll test one more thing (changed it to OpenGL now, will reboot again)
POST REBOOT EDIT: Sooooo, changing to OGL seems to have fixed it? SEEMS? I won't mark the thread solved yet, give it some 48 hours to see if anything changes, but I will post my findings to the kde bug report place too for good measure.
I checked, but seeing if there's anything "obvious" in there is beyond the limits of my knowledge.
Well I'll be thrice-damned. Creating a new user, and indeed, in a new user profile with everything fresh, the bug doesn't happen.
So. Something in my configs ig? But I wouldn't know what. Maybe if I hit "DEFAULT" on every tab in kcm it'll do something, but I won't try that YET.
Removing and re-adding the panel made no difference.
I'll attempt creating a new user in a bit.
Libre Graphics Manipulation App
LiGMA.
Brushes with bellpeppers attached to them
If it's Linux related say "open a terminal and do
sudo rm -rf /" for similar life-ruining effects.