[TRACKING] KDE Plasma boots to black screen even though sddm initializes correctly

I am using my new FW 16 to learn Arch (btw). After finishing the install, I went get KDE Plasma up and running. I installed the nvidia-open-dkms driver for my 5070, all of the mesa drivers for the iGPU, plasma, the plasma applications, and sddm. I made sure the DRM kernel mode setting was set to Y and enabled the sddm daemon. When rebooting, I am met with a black screen. When I enter tty and check the status of sddm, everything seems to be in working order. My best guess is there is some issue with the hybrid GPU setup, but I am having a hard time finding any documentation about this. Can anyone more experienced than me point me in the right direction?

edit - my shift key isn’t working while typing this post. sorry. i saw another thread with people experiencing the same issue. by entering my password on the black screen, the desktop environment loads as expected. seems like a bug that is beyond the scope of my comprehension but will await a fix for.

There is a race condition with sddm that can lead to this. I’ve posted about it in the past, but basically the workaround is to delay starting sddm until all GPUs are actually ready.

Sorry to bug you but I’ve tried looking through your profile and googling a million variations of what you said. Can you please link me to one of your posts with a bit more detail?

Think this is one of the first bug reports for Fedora on it

i have this issue as well using both amd for both the igpu and dgpu.

i am running sddm on kde plasma, how do you delay starting sddm? what i tried did not work unfortunately.

if this matters, i do not want to use x11.

I think running sddm on Wayland could help potentially. Otherwise I seem to recall there is a PR in that bug that could help.

I still have the issue. If I type in my password on the black screen, it works until reboot and I ran out of time/energy to make it work. Let me know if you figure it out though!

well i am running sddm on wayland already. it is minor but it really annoys me.

i found a fix but that was on my previous laptop that had a nvidia gpu

Another workaround might be to disable simpledrm and put amdgpu in the initramfs.

did not work unfortunately

I’d open up a new bug at SDDM then with your logs and see if anything else jumps out to people.

I personally use SDDM with Wayland, but I build my own kernel and so I might have different stuff loaded at different timing than you.

I spent hours last night trying to get SDDM to work correctly, reinstalled arch so many times, I got it to work once, no idea what combination of troubleshooting steps worked. Sadly I did this on a backup SSD and my attempts to replicate my success on the SSD I was planning on using never worked.

Can’t you check history to get an idea of what you did?

Doesn’t look like it, I was in and out of TTY and I don’t seem to have a complete command history.

Haven’t looked at this post in depth but I think I had a similar issue. Ultimately my solution was to edit /etc/sddm.conf.d/wayland.conf, and make sure these settings are set (not replace file contents with this, but you should be able to find these in the file):

[General]
DisplayServer=wayland
GreeterEnvironment=QT_WAYLAND_SHELL_INTEGRATION=layer-shell

[Wayland]
CompositorCommand=kwin_wayland --drm

The gist of my understanding was there is some sort of issue with the handoff from SDDM’s X11 greeter to KDE (SDDM uses X11 by default, apparently, even if you use Wayland for the main DE).

This worked. I didn’t actually have a wayland.conf file, but creating one with this config worked immediately. Thank you!

1 Like