KDE won't launch since latest update

Desktop Environments Plasma
1

I updated my machine last night (which should’ve been all the updates from friday to sunday) and now KDE no longer starts. SDDM still starts up fine and the AMDGPU driver still seems to run since I have the proper resolution everywhere, but instead of KDE, I just get a cursor with a black screen and nothing else.
Tried to download sddm-git instead, to no avail. Didn’t seem like I had any older versions of either sddm or mesa/amdgpu in my cache, so I couldn’t install those yet.

EDIT: starting Plasma through xinit does work tho, so I guess sddm 0.20 is the culprit.

2

I’m having the same issue on my desktop. At work now so haven’t been able to look into it yet today. I assume it is an SDDM issue.

3

@lemone
If you are able to get into a tty i would suggest trying to run another update just to be sure that it did complete the updates.

This is not typical on Kde Plasma. You could also look at /var/log/pacman.log to see what updates were done on that date.

4

I am afraid you’ve been hit by Plasma/KDE/Arch :rofl: :cry:

SDDM was recently resurrected (development was stuck, no new versions released for a long time) and it seems these actors’ decision to apply/merge a huge amount of commits in one update was dangerous.
Too many critical changes in the way a DM works, especially environment variable handling.
I haven’t yet checked each of them, but by my KDE and bash experience, I expect a storm of problems. Some are already reported upstream.

Edit:
After login from xinit, you can test your sddm themes and look for errors:

You can test your themes using sddm-greeter. Note that in this mode, actions like shutdown, suspend or login will have no effect.

sddm-greeter --test --theme /path/to/your/theme
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5

there’s nothing that looks remotely like a warning/error during the sddm update in pacman.log.

6

yeah I’ve heard that it got resurrected already… didn’t think updating it would break it now tho lol.

7

Check sddm log. What session type? Wayland or X11?

$HOME/.local/share/sddm/

Also check journal log.

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8

X11,
this is the only file in that folder

image
image918×152 44.6 KB

I can’t say I even know why . "$HOME/.cargo/env" was in my .profile in the first place, but it also hasn’t made any problems so far…

9

Since you are your computer’s System Administrator, you should have known, or you have to find out about it.
It seems that that line fails and then sddm refuses to continue.
.profile is a bash file. Make it not fail, or post its contents to get advice.

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10

I mean I know what put it there, just not sure why it’s still there/no longer works.

And yes, removing that one line did end up fixing it.

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11

It is there because nobody removed it.
It doesn’t work, because the referenced file does not exist (was deleted, or renamed), or permissions were modified.

12

ok I should say I know why it technically doesn’t work anymore. I’m more thinking about why this env script in the .cargo folder was removed (presumably by cargo itself, since I doubt I removed it myself)