Ever since I did a standard (non-distro) upgrade a few weeks back, kde neon freezes on startup. I get past the login fine, and then to the " > " with the dots symbol and then nothing - frozen.

I haven't switched to Wayland, just doing standard updates. I've installed xfce as a fall back and it works fine, so I doubt it's an x11 issue. Is there a way to completely clean out all plasma settings so I can recreate my desktop from scratch? Is there some other issue I should be looking at?

Thanks

Open a file manager using xfce. Select show 'hidden files' and change the home/.kde folder to say:

kde.old

Then try kde again and it will re-create your your kde config settings. Another option would be to set up a new user and try that.