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.