Hello everyone and thanks so much for looking.

I recently bought a few old ThinkPad T61's of which I love very much. And on each of these machines, I have done a clean install of Debian 10 non-free ( because of the wifi card ) and have selected to install to optionally install KDE (because I really dislike Gnome).

I unfortunately have one big problem. Sometimes the home directory has none of the files and folders that I have placed in it. All the favorites I have pinned in the Application launcher disappear. And all the shortcuts in the task bar disappear too.

It is as though I am logging in to the machine for the very first time.
I would say that for every 10 starts of the machine, 7 will be fine and when it boots up and I log in, everything is there and it is just as I left it and shut it down.
But the other 3 starts will result in a situation where it appears as though I am logging in as this user for the very first time.

If anyone can give me some pointers as to what to check I would be most grateful.

I am also thinking that maybe to try and pin point this, I might need to look at the logs when this happens? But I am not sure which logs I should be looking at or what application to use to view the specific logs. So if anyone can suggest an application and which logs I should be looking at, much appreciated too!

Thanks all and have a great weekend!

Zahari

Which exact Plasma version do you use?

Is the Session set to be restored on login?

Hi Mamarok

Thanks so much for your reply. And my apologies for not including the Plasma version.

To answer your questions Mamarok:
The Plasma version is 5.14.5
On Login, it is set to Restore previous session

Any suggestions on what to try or look into would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again!

Zahari

Is your /home on a separate partition? Then I suggest checking your filesystem for errors.

Hi Mamarok

Thanks again for your reply.

All my directories are together on one single partition including home.

If there are any file system errors... what log file would you suggest I look at? I am not too familiar with log files. But I am willing to do the research. Any pointers on which logs I should look at for file system errors and what is a good log viewer to use?

Thanks again!

Zahari

well, if it is the same partition the likely not, as it would affect more than just the home folder.

Do you suspend your laptop often or for a long time?
Have you experienced crashes?
Do you have enough space on your disk?
Did you ever check your disk for bad sectors?

The last question is especially relevant if you use an older laptop, as disks unfortunately have a limited lifespan, and bad sectors are usually the first sign of an upcoming disk failure.

Hi Mamarok

Thanks again for your suggestions. All much appreciated.
Needing to get my computers up and running reliably and urgently, I decided to look into and try a distribution that supports KDE "natively".

I tried installing both OpenSUSE and Kubuntu.
Both seemed to be working great on all my laptops!

Since Kubuntu is a much closer relative to Debian (of which I am more familiar), I have decided to commit myself to Kubuntu.

I themed my Kubuntu install to look exactly like it did in Debian 10 as that was nice and subdued.
The Kubuntu theme was lovely but rather too exciting looking
I am now absolutely thrilled with my minimal Kubuntu 18.04 LTS install.
And everything works now.

So problem solved albeit in a very extreme manner...

Thank you so much again for your assistance!

Regards

Zahari

Great choice, I myself use Kubuntu since it first appeared in the Ubuntu family and was never disappointed

Hi Mamarok

I think I may have found the solution to my original problem.

One of my machines (all of which are Lenovo ThinkPad T61) started displaying the same problem again.
This happened just after installing some new kubuntu system updates released just today.

When restarting up this computer again after I had my problem re-occur, this time, before it got to the kubuntu splash screen, I could see an error message 6 times saying that it could not communicate with TPM.

Googling this reveals that, at least in the case of some Lenovo laptops, that the security chip might be disabled.

In my case, after going into the BIOS, I saw that the security chip was indeed disabled.
It turns out all my machines have the security chip disabled.

After enabling the security chip, the error messages have gone away and it now boots back up to it's previous state.
Also, whilst inserting a USB dedicated to GParted, I saw another warning messages saying that KVM is disabled by BIOS
Googling this suggests that we need to enable Intel Vrtualization in the BIOS. Again mine was disabled. I have enabled it.

All seems ok now with my machine.

Anyways... hopefully this helps someone sometime in the future.
Try to experiment with the status of the security chip and virtualization in your BIOS settings if you have inconsistent boot states!!

Regards

Zahari