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[SOLVED] Sddm shows mouse cursor for a few seconds before crashing to a black screen (pawb.social)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/linuxquestions
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Rebooted my computer earlier today and walked away while it did its thing. When I got back to to it some minutes later, I saw a black screen with that "_" text cursor flashing on the topleft corner. Which was, of course, odd.

Hitting Ctrl+Alt+F2 sent me to the TTY. Which is to say: The system was still up, and indeed, calling for a process manager loaded showed that sddm was still running, as were a bunch of other processes.

Still, attempts to get sddm to do its thing failed. I tried to systemctl restart the sddm service, I tried to reboot the computer. I tried to delete customizations to its config files in case they were breaking something.

In all of those cases -- Title happened. The mouse cursor would show up for a second or two. And then it'd kick me back to the black screen with text cursor because something was fucked.

I eventually managed to get to my desktop by entirely disabling the sddm service, rebooting so I'd just get the TTY, and then doing dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland to run Plasma manually once logged in (thank FUCK for smartphones and access to internet search on them for helping me figure this out).

So that's a workaround, and it sorta works but I'd like to get my display manager back, please. :P

Further information:

  • I am running EndeavourOS.
  • As implied, I use KDE Plasma under Wayland as my DE.
  • I have an AMD GPU
  • I am at the latest version of every relevant package -- The reboot I mentioned at the start of the thread was just after running a sudo pacman -Syyu
  • I did try to search for my specific issue but nothing relevant came up? A lot of older issues, under X11, and most involving NVidia stuff. None seemed relevant to my case.
  • Having found the workaround I used the computer all night and had no other issues, which to me signals it's something about sddm and ONLY sddm that is broken, whether it's some config that got fucked up or some bs with my own incompetent package management.
  • I am, of course, able to provide logs and stuff if you tell me which ones and where to get them, cuz yeah.
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm no help, but I will say I remember having one of the login managers screw up on me and instead of figuring it out, I just installed a different one which has been running with no problems for a couple years now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Improvise, adapt, overcome :P

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Update! It is fixed:

It really was due to me having sddm-git installed rather than regular sddm. Switching back solved the problem. Not 100% sure why it was caused, but since I didn't even remember WHY I had installed the git version, cost nothing to switch back.

In other words, it was my own incompetency that caused this. It's fixed now. Making this post just so that, in case someone ever finds themselves searching this shit... Yea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Are you using fish as your login shell? I had a similar issue (though I was stuck on a black screen without a text cursor), and I think it was related to this issue https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/1592. I was using fish, ssdm, and trying to login to a wayland session.

The issue also does not exactly describe what you saw but I hope it's helpful. Unfortunately I don't have a solution myself, I swapped to using lightdm instead.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I am using Fish. And well, it costs me nothing to chsh so I can test that. Will also try later.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Did you check journalctl to get the logs after you go into a tty? You say "latest version" but that could be anything. I've never even heard of EndeavourOS, but it seems like it's an arch derivative. If it uses arch repos, KDE 6.0 was just released. Did you just update to plasma 6?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

EOS is arch-derived, yes. It's basically just arch-but-preconfigured to be entirely honest. It gets all its stuff directly from the arch repo (unlike, say, Manjaro which has its own separate repo) and then just adds its own repo with some extra packages.

And speaking of -- The Arch repo hasn't updated to Plasma 6 yet (I am on the hypetrain for Plasma 6, I would have known!), or at least, hadn't by last night.

As for journalctl -- I did check, and there is something error-shaped relating to sddm -- Here's a pastebin that contains the error and stuff.

I did realise -- Like, right now -- I had SDDM-git installed rather than regular SDDM on my machine (don't even remember why I did that. I did say on OP that I was incompetent at package management) -- So I just changed that and will attempt a reboot cycle later today (am working rn). Will post results.