Occasionally, whenever I wake up my laptop (AMD 13, 7840U) from sleep, my laptop will give me the following message.
The screen locker is broken and unlocking is not possible anymore. In order to unlock switch to a virtual terminal (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F1), log in and execute the command:
loginctl unlock-session
Then log out of the virtual session by pressing Ctrl+D, and switch back to the running session (Ctrl+Alt+F2).
Note that while it responds to me moving around the mouse, inputting any of the shortcuts mentioned doesn’t seem to achieve anything aside from toggling control of my mouse cursor.
This has occurred for a while, despite me updating my system (Fedora KDE 39) multiple times. And every time so far, I’ve been forced to forcefully shutdown the laptop via holding down the power button. I’ll mention again that this is an intermittent issue, and doesn’t happen every time I wake up my laptop.
Any advice on figuring out what’s wrong or fixing this issue?
I don’t use Fedora myself, and haven’t seen anything like that under Ubuntu, so I’m not sure how useful this will be, sorry.
It looks like that problem can be caused by a lot of different things. The Stack Exchange link, currently at the top of that search page, describes a way to “figure out why it’s broken,” though if it’s only happening intermittently, I don’t know if that’s going to help you.
The “Maximum number of clients reached” one mentioned on that Stack Exchange page (and going to here) could be a useful starting point though.
I was testing Fedora 39 KDE for a bit (just surface testing), I did not run into this myself. May be a whole new issue. Worth collecting logs and providing a bug report to the Fedora team.
Gets you past this, then the issue is likely kscreenlocker related.
Since you have a workaround to get back to a working state, we can take a look at the logs with:
journalctl -xe
(This will likely be the best bet)
or journalctl -b | grep kscreenlocker
or journalctl -b | grep sddm
As to why this is happening, if I was to hazard a guess - mixed incompatible Qt libraries perhaps. On a default install, while I have not done a ton of testing with KDE lately, I don’t recall running into this.
The unfortunate thing however is that the given workaround does not work for me. I was hoping for a way of potentially finding logs or something post-restart, since all the shortcuts do is take away/give back cursor control.
