A very strange thing happened to me today. I had to restart my PC, and it lost all of my precious settings - no icon theme, no icons, fonts are all messed up. .xsession-errors log is filled with errors about files not being found. I was very sad.
But that's what I love about Linux. Those errors prompted a DuckDuckGo search, which quickly led me to the root cause:
$ ps -ef | grep xfsettingsd | grep -v grep
The core settings daemon is not running... The solution? Well, I simply deleted (renamed) ~/.config folder and relogged in. The themes are fine, icons are back and the fonts are all nice once again. 5 minutes later I have most of the settings restored.
I love Linux. So robust!
P.S. I do not blame Linux for the initial error. I have been forced to install some shady software (VMWare, Oracle stuff, some other oddities). And, you know, running some closed-source installer under sudo is never a good thing...