First of all, I just switched to Linux from windows 10 so I'm new to all this, and so despite my best efforts to find an answer to my issue on the internet, it may be a really simple fix, or obvious UI thing that I skipped over... I'm a simple man, I like pretty Icons on my desktop to click on, that's how I organize my workflow.

I'm running pop!_os which came with gnome, but I wanted to use Plasma so I grabbed the most recent version of it, Plasma 5.* or whatever....
I have my files and shortcuts on my desktop set to open when i double click on them but for whatever reason, and rather often I am not able to double click on files to open them nothing happens.... I can still right click and interact which is super weird to me..... I tried spamming my super / "windows" key a few times and after a few times of that or refreshing the desktop I then become able to use my desktop shortcuts and files as before..... this is reaaaaaaaaaaally annoying as it happens like 30% of the time, and I was wondering if there was a way that I can mitigate this.

In addition to that I notice that sometimes when I restart my computer and many of the desktop icons (which I've assigned custom icons) no longer display them... although when I observe the properties window concerning them it show the proper icon I selected in the viewing window but even when I refresh the desktop they don't update

Thank y'all for any responses in advance I really appreciate it... sorry if I left out important information or didn't explain the situation well...
I really want my hopefully permanent transition to Linux to be as seamless as possible... oh and I'm not open to changing my distro, I got pop!-os because of NVIDIA graphics card driver support which is really important to me.

I don't know your specific distribution, so maybe this doesn't apply.

Check you have a package called "plasma-desktop" and it is installed. Any decent distribution groups their desktops into meta-packages so the users can just install it all in one go instead of selecting individual files.

It seems I am running Plasma 5.19.5 64bit, and Pop!_OS 20.10 and I do have "KDE Plasma Desktop" listed as installed, according to my package manager. Thanks for the response!