From the beginning: i was greeted this morning by turning on my displays at first seeing a different wallpaper on each monitor which i had not changed, but promptly it crashed to this message / screen i saw this crash / lock screen. Ofc it was wrong, it was ctrl + alt + F1 to get the system to react not ctrl + alt + F2, but nevermind because it never showed the TTY, just made it all blank so i had to SSH in from my nice and stable boring Linux Mint laptop to initiate a proper reboot on my main pc.
Upon rebooting i had the pleasant task of again setting all the KDE settings, like position of the 3 monitor layout, speaker output, taskbar size and width, widgets , wallpaper etc, every time i run out of space.
Dolphin upon reboot mentioned that somehow i was running out of space, this is not the first time I’ve run out of space and had REALLY strange things happen to my system. for example KDE Plasma seems to factory reset it’s settings every time i run out of free space, i mean… WHY?! Another thing, i have 16 gb of ram and have the swap set to 16gb too but it seems when i run ram intensive things like the chia blockchain plotting it just without warning closes certain programs, shouldn’t it use the swap at that point? of just start lagging slowly until i free up ram by closing apps, why just arbitrarily close things like eiskaltdc++ and not amule for example?
The display configs are stored under the users home directory. If the /home file system is full then the DE is not able to write its current config (which it does with every startup) and thus cannot properly display the current config and defaults to the, well, default.
Having a file system full is NEVER a good thing since writing to it is no longer possible and it quickly gets fragmented as it approaches 100% so you wind up with 2 issues, not just one. Fragmentation + full.
Those of us who have been using linux from the 90s have mostly seen the downside of having a file system fill up (I know I have) and we mostly pay attention and try to avoid the issue.
My suggestion is to:
Remove a considerable amount of data and make sure /home is at less than 90% used at all times.
or
Enlarge /home and still make sure /home is at less than 90% used at all times.
You do not say that you have a physical swap partition so if you are using the default zram config for swap it is all in RAM. As swap fills up then ram fills up and the system is forced to close some things.
Using a physical swap space (partition and not swap file) can mostly halt that issue until that swap space fills up. If using a swap file on /home then the same issue with /home getting filled up also affects swap.
Another thing that can cause RAM to fill up is the write cache. If the system cannot write the data out and empty the cache then it will also grow and fill the RAM space.