No double screen settings, no login screen

Desktop Environments Plasma
1

i have 2 screens that used to be configurable yesterday but today in display & monitor i don’t see any option to configure their display, it’s mostly blank.

apart of that i can’t logout as i used to, because i’m only met with a black screen and never the actual login screen.

this one is probably not caused by updates but by some missing packages as i removed some plasma ones… i have no idea of what i’m doing. regardless i found no package specific for this in arch forums. if you need any info log tell me and i’ll post

2

You can see what packages you removed in file
/var/log/pacman.log.

To log in you can try pressing Ctrl-Alt-F4, that should show a big black TTY sith a login prompt.

If that fails, then you can use arch-chroot to get into the installed system. See our wiki about arch-chroot.

Then you can reinstall the missing packages.

3

hi. thanks. the problem is i don’t really know what each package does and troubleshooting this doesn’t seem to work.

better framed: what am i looking for if i can’t configure double monitor in display settings?

4

kscreen is probably what you removed that nuked the monitor settings. Probably.

As for the login/logout problem, you should have a look at the log that @manuel pointed you to and - since you admittedly “don’t know what you’re doing” - reinstall the packages you recently removed. Then research what a package does before removing it again.

5

installed kscreen but it isn’t that black and white. the log problem is that i removed tons of bload like discover welcome and so so many useless apliccations of a huge list…

6

It would probably be sufficient to reinstall packages that start with a k or with the word plasma, as they will pull in needed dependencies. Also anything with SDDM in the name (for example, something like sddm-kcm).

You could use something like this to get a list of packages that you removed on a specific date:

grep "\[2025-10-25.*\] removed" /var/log/pacman.log

That’s yesterday’s date (2025-10-25); substitute the actual date you removed these packages on (i.e., 2025-10-24 or whatever).

Keep in mind that this will show packages that were manually removed as well as packages that were automatically removed - for example, if you removed the packages with the -Rs or -Rc options you’ll see any dependencies that were removed with said packages. If you built an AUR package on that day and told yay not to keep the build dependencies installed, you will see those build dependencies listed as removed. Choosing to reinstall just packages starting with k or plasma, plus anything with SDDM in the name, would be a very good start to correct your mistake.

7

thank you.

it wasn’t sddm related though. in fact i haven’t figured out at all, but thank you anyway.