Can't get sddm to work

kevlar0 · n00b Joined: 05 Aug 2024 Posts: 2

I've "finished" my install, but have been unable to get sddm to work (I've now spent more time fighting this than installing, but I'd prefer to learn something above trying a fresh install).

I'm using OpenRC, kde/plasma, wayland/kwin (more details/configurations to come below).

When I boot, I see:

I verified this was vt1 and popped over to vt2 to investigate. Also, I later discovered if I press enter, I get prompted to log in (unlike vt7 which isn't responsive to enter).

After I started digging around, I found quite a few errors in "/var/log/sddm.log" (I'll start editing this post with pastebins of configs after my first draft is done).
https://bpa.st/35XQ - last 1000 lines of sddm.log
There are many loops of:
"Using VT 1"
"Various things starting/authenticating"

rab0171610 · Guru Joined: 24 Dec 2022 Posts: 402

If you are trying to run SDDM on Wayland or rootless X, then stop. Try running SDDM on X, even if you log into a Plasma Wayland session from there. Once you have it working when running in X, then you can experiment with running it in Wayland or rootless X.

It would be easier to help you troubleshoot this if you can at least verify that it works as expected on X. Once it is working on X, if you want to experiment with other options, fine. It would give us a better jumping off point to help you if the baseline is that it runs as expected on X, but when running it under Wayland, there is an issue. As of right now, it sounds like you have tried a lot of things, have various config modifications and are not sure what the issue is. The log you provided is not very insightful either.

kevlar0 · n00b Joined: 05 Aug 2024 Posts: 2

Sigh. I was revisiting the manual to switch from wayland to x, and realized I'd installed "kde-plasma/plasma-desktop", not "kde-plasma/plasma-meta". Gave that a spin and woke up to everything working great after a reboot.

Everything is working now.

Thanks for your help.

rab0171610 · Guru Joined: 24 Dec 2022 Posts: 402

If you want to run SDDM on Wayland, you can. This is now the default in Fedora. It may be a better experience for you than it was for me. I would not recommend it personally. I tried it out recently on a physical machine, not virtual. I found it to be buggy and flaky as hell. I can't remember the exact issues but it was related to the fact that SDDM behaves differently under Wayland than X. Don't hold me to this but if memory serves me correctly one of this issues was that the SDDM greeter session didn't terminate after login as under X. It is still open on TTY1 and Plasma session is launched in parallel on TTY2. This interrupted the SDDM respawn behavior. I also use the old fashioned Ctrl+ALT+Backspace to terminate the Plasma Session and that didn't work as expected. I have Nvidia graphics so there was another caveat that I don't recall. For me all of the issues were showstoppers, so I reverted SDDM in Fedora to run on X for that trial run.