I noticed the default EndeavourOS background was changed to black, and when I went to it’s file location it was gone. So upon testing I narrowed it down to turning on login at startup. I watched it and the moment I turned that setting on the background image disappeared from it’s folder when viewed in Dolphin.
Is there a way to get it back? I kind of liked the default background and don’t feel like getting a different one right now.
Are you talking about this one?
Just hit the little download button on the right, then put it in
/usr/share/endeavouros/backgrounds
Pudge
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Thanks for the link. Do you know why the background was deleted though? Worried if I use my own background it would also get deleted. Is this just a bug with KDE Plasma?
Did you by any chance accidentally remove the endeavouros-theming package?
Highly doubt it because I freshly installed this OS and immediately tested my theory on the login at startup setting. However I checked with pacman anyways and it says it’s installed.
If it’s not too much trouble, can you take a screenshot of the setting? I’m not sure what “turning on login at startup” means. As in disable auto-login of SDDM?
This is on a Steam Deck so it actually is since navigating with a controller is wonky. Sorry for not being specific enough with the settings path, I’ll type it out fully.
System Settings>Startup and Shutdown>Login Screen (SDDM)>Behavior>Automatically log in as user (into a Plasma X11 session).
Once I enabled that setting it deleted the default wallpaper that came installed with the OS.
Nice!
Is this behavior reproducible every single time? As in, if you set a random file as the wallpaper and then enable the autologin setting, the image file used as the wallpaper automatically gets deleted? If this is true, then it is a serious bug and we may have to call into question the competence of the developer in charge. Software that unknowingly delete files is not acceptable by any standards. Worse, you mentioned that the wallpaper was originally placed in /usr/share/backgrounds, which means that deleting it would require root permission.
I assume the settings interface looks like this? What if you were to choose a wallpaper that’s in your home directory? Will it get deleted as well?
Give me a moment to test other stuff but other than slight ui changes that is the setting and turning it on does require your user password (assuming it uses sudo for root permissions).
I never specifically mentioned the file path so for clarity it’s /usr/share/endeavouros/backgrounds/endeavouros-wallpaper.png
EDIT
So I changed my background to something I could care less about, turned off auto login on startup in SDDM, turned it back on, then rebooted and the file was not deleted.
However, I am almost positive that setting widget is the culprit on fresh installs since this isn’t the first time I’ve lost the background and every time I did I reinstalled. So I knew on fresh systems at some point the background was getting deleted, so I opened up Dolphin, went through system settings and monitored it as I changed them and narrowed down SDDM as the culprit.
That certainly makes more sense. It is simply inconceivable to me that any developer would make a that kind of mistake.
This is to be expected. The settings gui app modifies the SDDM config file behind the scenes once you enable that setting. Writing to the SDDM config file requires root permission.
So the wallpapers only got deleted after a reboot? Or were they deleted right after you clicked on the “Automatically Log In” option? As in you put the Dolphin window and the settings window side by side and saw the file disappear right before your eyes after enabling the setting?
This is what happened. I saw /usr/share/endeavouros/backgrounds/endeavouros-wallpaper.png vanish the moment I changed the setting. I don’t plan on reinstalling the OS again on the Steam Deck because it is really annoying and got it mostly working (if you are interested in my progress I made this thread in the newbie sub-forum Setting up EndeavourOS on Valve Steam Deck)
I think someone should test this out on a VM to verify I somehow have a faulty installation media or something crazy. This is how I specifically recreated it.
- Default language, timezone, and keyboard layout.
- KDE Plasma as the Desktop,
- Grub as the bootloader.
- Uncheck Firefox from the preinstalled packages (If your wondering why it’s because I use Librewolf, no need to have Firefox installed along side it)
- Completely wipe the disk, format the disk as ext4, swap to file.
- Obviously leave automatically login on startup off.
- Use a separate password for root.
Then once the system reboots into the fresh OS monitor /usr/share/endeavouros/backgrounds/endeavouros-wallpaper.png and then go to System Settings>Startup and Shutdown>Login Screen (SDDM)>Behavior>Automatically log in as user (into a Plasma X11 session).