SDDM not launching, but DEs start fine from TTYs

Issues & Assistance
21

That’s not what I see on mine:

sudo ls /boot
[sudo] password for me: 
80ed64e9d99347019e4a817826c7eded  amd-ucode.img  EFI  limine.conf  limine.conf.old  limine-splash.png

The only thing I can offer and this is just a guess, Plasma or Cosmic is not playing nicely together.

Friendly sugestion for Multi Desktops Create a New user for that. (recomended)

22

Then I’d go with @hotte idea and reinstall I think.

sudo pacman -Rns sddm

sudo pacman -S sddm sddm-kcm

sudo systemctl enable sddm

Before the above you could try:

sudo systemctl edit sddm

And add:

[Service]
ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 10

And then:

sudo mkinitcpio -P

And the:

sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target

Sorry I was getting a bit confused there. I think this will work, you’d have to take the risk and try then reboot. If you’ve got anything important on the system make backups.

23

@ayenack Thanks, I’ll give it a go.

Looks like failed at the first, since sddm is required by sddm-kcm and cachyos-themes-sddm, so I’ll add them to the list to remove and reinstall I guess.

Edit: Used sudo pacman -Rns sddm sddm-kcm cachyos-themes-sddm and that worked.

Then reinstalled all, rebooted and… black screen on reboot. Switch TTY and restart service and I get the graphical login! To where I was!

24

as I wrote: better use -Rdd, not -Rns

25

You could try the below of that post first.

sudo systemctl edit sddm

And add:

[Service]
ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 10

This pauses startup for 10 seconds

And then:

sudo mkinitcpio -P

This is to ensure that all associated initramfs images are updated according to the current settings.

And then:

sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target

This configures the system to boot into a GUI environment by default.

@hotte is correct use -Rdd if you try that solution again.

26

Woohoo!! Success!

So, took your suggestions and did sudo systemctl edit sddm.service

Then introduced a sleep, but opted for 3 seconds, since this is a pretty quick machine.

Then called sudo mkinitcpio -P which said it didn’t support Limine, but offered to run its version, and rebuild the images.

Then ran sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target and rebooted!

Voila, a graphical login.

That last bit made me wonder, so for my own sanity I edited the service again, removing the sleep, that said it wouldn’t save since now empty, so removed the override file it created and rebooted.

Nothing again.

So, edited again, added a 1 second sleep, and now is fine.
Very odd, but guess the sddm service is running before something it needs is ran.

All good now! Thank you so much guys for your help!

27

Great, so happy it worked. I wasn’t 100% sure about mkinitcpio with Limine, but thought it would work. Got lucky.

28

BTW you could put 0.5 for half a second and so on. Could be worth a try to make the system more stable.