Lost a full day of dev time to a botched update that ended in a config reset. Logging the post-mortem so the next one hurts less.
What happened
A routine system update (Fedora KDE Plasma) went sideways. On next boot, some desktop/session config didn’t come back the way it should — the shell came up in a locked/odd state and a chunk of my Plasma setup wasn’t behaving.
Rather than burn more hours untangling whatever the update scrambled, I made the call to reset the affected config and rebuild it from my dotfiles. The reset itself was quick; the lost day was the interruption — momentum on whatever I was mid-way through went out the window.
The save
This is exactly why the dotfiles repo exists. After the reset I could stand the config back up from /home/exia/dotfiles instead of reconfiguring by hand — wallpaper, window decoration, MaterialYou scheme, Krohnkite tiling, panels. It all came back from files, not from memory.
What I’d do differently
- Snapshot before updating. A full config backup before the next big Plasma/system update, not after.
- Don’t panic-reset mid-flow. Give the session a real chance first (clean logout/login, not just a shell restart).
- Push dotfiles after every change. The repo is now also on GitHub, so even a full disk replacement won’t cost the same day again.
A day lost, but the tooling that prevents the recurrence is in place now.