I agree that I should not be running Electrum as root, however at present that is the only way that I can get it to run.
~$ ls -lha ~/.electrum/
total 3.1M
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4.0K Sep 9 08:57 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 richard richard 4.0K Sep 10 10:22 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 46M Sep 9 08:27 blockchain_headers
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Sep 9 08:25 cache
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Sep 9 08:57 certs
-rw------- 1 root root 364 Sep 9 08:28 config
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42 Sep 9 08:57 daemon
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Sep 9 08:25 forks
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 495 Sep 9 08:57 recent_servers
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Sep 9 08:28 wallets
I tried running the electrum.desktop from terminal. First I right-clicked on Electrum in my Start Menu and picked Properties. In the File Properties I set "Execute terminal emulator", "Keep terminal window open after execution" and selected OK. Back in Start Menu I clicked on Electrum. The terminal window opened, text appeared and then the terminal window immediately closed (no time to read).
I then opened terminal and cd to ~/.local/share/applications where File Properties says my target file electrum.desktop is. I then tried the following:
~/.local/share/applications$ elecrum.desktop
elecrum.desktop: command not found
~/.local/share/applications$ electrum
W | simple_config | Cannot read config file. /home/richard/.electrum/config
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/richard/.local/bin/electrum", line 355, in
fd, server = daemon.get_fd_or_server(config)
File "/home/richard/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/electrum/daemon.py", line 77, in get_fd_or_server
remove_lockfile(lockfile)
File "/home/richard/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/electrum/daemon.py", line 58, in remove_lockfile
os.unlink(lockfile)
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/home/richard/.electrum/daemon'