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Warning: no login screen after sddm upgrade (KDE)
no_information_here Mar 9, 2021
Normally, my KDE Plasma system has been very stable. However, I just tracked a difficult bug and wanted to warn others.

System: running KDE Neon (*buntu 20.04) desktop with an NVidia 1050 GPU.

Symptom: intermittently hanging before the graphical login screen (sddm). However, I was able to switch to tty6 and repair the system from the cli.

The error that sddm gave was:

 
Failed to read display number from pipe

It seems like on fast machines, the boot process can try to start sddm before the graphics driver is fully loaded. Bug here:

https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/1316

I downgraded from sddm 0.19.0 to 0.18.1 and it now seems to be working. I hope this might help others.

Last edited by no_information_here on 9 March 2021 at 10:35 pm UTC
dpanter Mar 10, 2021
Been using sddm 0.19.0 on Siduction since the beginning of November and haven't seen any issues. System autologins to a KDE Plasma X session. Been using both AMD and Nvidia GPU's.

I don't know about this 'fast machines' theory... maybe my 8700k booting from a nvme drive isn't fast enough.
no_information_here Mar 10, 2021
Quoting: dpanterBeen using sddm 0.19.0 on Siduction since the beginning of November and haven't seen any issues.

Interesting. That is certainly a fast machine.

It was so intermittent for me, it took quite a while to figure out. I think very small differences in the bootup sequence were affecting it since it only happened about 50% of the time.

I am glad that it is not an issue for you.
no_information_here Feb 17, 2022
Quoting: no_information_hereIt seems like on fast machines, the boot process can try to start sddm before the graphics driver is fully loaded.

I wanted to follow up here in case anyone stumbles on my post from last year. The comment above was a symptom and not the actual cause. My system was confused into trying the onboard Intel GPU before switching to the Nvidia GPU. The problem was fixed by completely disabling the Intel GPU in the bios. A minor side effect is that my (Intel) audio often takes an extra minute to engage after getting to the desktop, but I can live with that.

Not sure if the main problem was a Dell bios issue, or something in the Nvidia driver bootup sequence.
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