I’m running fedora, and I tried to install KDE to try it out on a laptop. what I didn’t expect was KDE overriding the GNOME system icons, like show apps in the overview, and the maximise, minimise, and close icons in the top right, with their own equivalents. any idea how to get the gnome icons back, without uninstalling KDE?
This sounds like KDE set a different icon theme.
You could try this command to reset it to the default:
gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme
As @CodedOre says it will have changed your icon theme. It will also have changed a lot more than that unfortunately, such as the cursor theme, and possibly font and cursor scaling. The easiest way that I find to fix it is via GNOME Tweaks: go to the hamburger (three line) menu and select “reset to defaults”. That will get you most of the way.
If you’re still having issues, try the following. Note that this is basically a hard reset on theme, and back to vanilla GNOME, rather than e.g. customizations that might be applied by your Linux distribution (e.g. Ubuntu uses Yaru rather than Adwaita themes, this will get you back to Adwaita). You’re on Fedora so it’s pretty much vanilla GNOME anyway I think.
Reset the following whole gsettings schemas:
dconf reset -f /org/gnome/desktop/interface/
dconf reset -f /org/gnome/desktop/sound/
dconf reset -f /org/gnome/desktop/wm/preferences/
Delete any of the following files and directories if they are in your ~/.config directory. Whether they exist or not depends on what KDE or any other desktop environment has done, and what GNOME may have done in response (like create monitors.xml?). Some of these are just KDE config files, but better to clear them out at this stage too (you won’t break KDE, it will restore them when you next log in… and your GNOME theme will be broken again 
):
gtk-3.0/
gtk-4.0/
gtkrc
gtkrc-2.0
monitors.xml
xsettingsd/xsettingsd.conf
kcminputrc
kdeglobals
kglobalshortcutsrc
kwinrc
kwinoutputconfig.json
plasmashellrc
plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc
systemsettingsrc
Trolltech.conf
I’m not writing that as a big rm -rf because I don’t want to encourage blindly copying and pasting! You might want to back these up just in case, or at least send them to your Trash so you can get them back later if you want.
That should be all. Log out and log in again to be sure.
Incidentally, the reason I know this is that I just last week released a GNOME app to fix it, which took some study. Check that out if you’re interested: Mending Wall. It won’t (yet) automate the recovery from your present situation, but it will stop it happening again once you’ve fixed it, so that you can try KDE again, if you like, without further breakages.
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Thanks, I’ve done what you suggested, and am now trying mending wall, it stopped the theme from changing, which was my main concern, it also was able to contain KDE apps to KDE, (apart from KDE connect for some reason), I’m guessing either cosmic is different from KDE and gnome in some way that breaks compatibility, but none of its apps get filtered like the KDE and Gnome ones do. Thanks for the help!
Glad it worked for you!
On Cosmic, it is not yet supported by Mending Wall. If you are interested in contributing support, it just needs entries for its apps added to the config file.