Hello, All. I am new to Manjaro and pretty new to Linux in general. I’m having a super strange issue where my mouse, keyboard, touchscreen, USB mouse, etc. all go unresponsive after a machine boot. There are times where I can get a few characters of my pw typed in and random times when I can even get logged in fully, but 95% of the time it then locks up. This can happen anywhere from 5 seconds to 30 seconds. Before failing, I’m able to move my mouse around, touch the screen, type in the password field, whatever I want. When it locks, I have to do a full hard shutdown (holding the power button) to reboot.
Randomly, I may get super lucky and hit some sort of combo that it never locks. As long I don’t restart/shutdown, it seems to be fine. Even when the machine times out or I close the lid.
I had this issue with MX Linux XFCE and thought it was due to that so I switched to Manjaro KDE. I like it a lot better so I want to stick with this but the problem persists. I did a BIOS update but it didn’t help. I confirmed it is also present when booting from the live USB. I do not believe there were any issues with Windows 10/11 (I forget what it had) before I wiped it but that ship has long sailed now as I did a full reformat. I guess I could try reinstalling Windows and running without a key if that would help get to the bottom of it.
Laptop is a Dell Latitude 7390. Not sure what other information might be helpful but I appreciate anything you all can offer.
Was afraid of that. It seems that SOMETHING is loading that breaks it and the amount of time until that thing loads varies. I’m not familiar enough with Linux to know what all loads on boot. Is there something that would be common across MX and Manjaro that would be initializing that could take over and kill input devices? I know that list is probably pretty extensive.
I have a theory that if I keep the mouse moving nonstop for the first 1-2 minutes after boot it somehow locks the input device stream through whatever loads. That’s completely grasping at straws but it does seem that it doesn’t break while I’m actively moving the mouse. It’s as soon as I pause for even a split second. It often happens when I’m typing but of course there are breaks between key presses where no input is happening. I need to do more testing to confirm that the 1-2 minutes of nonstop input is reliable/repeatable.
Hardware faults can cause strange behaviour. For example, something that is failing might work for a while until the system has been on long enough to heat it up a bit.
Dell computers usually have built-in diagnostic tests, have you tried running them?
I can’t imagine it would be overheating due to the fact that, the 5% of the time I can get past the first 1-2 minutes, it works indefinitely until I reboot or shutdown. Hardware faults are always a possibility but, again, seem unlikely since I’m out of the woods after that initial boot up sequence. The fact that closing the laptop, which I assume puts the OS to sleep, doesn’t affect it when getting back to the login screen tells me it’s something with the OS itself initializing rather than something with the login screen/sequence.
It would be different if I ever had it lock up after that initial period but that hasn’t been the case, even once. I have not yet run the Dell preboot diags but I’m guessing that won’t return anything since all devices work fine after a successful boot sequence.