Lockscreen after waking up is a black screen with only the mouse pointer present

I’m having this issue since a few months and it’s really annoying:

Whenever the system (ThinkPad Carbon 7th gen) locks the screen after a certain timeout, I need to type in my password to get back in. Unfortunately I don’t get a login GUI, which I would expect, but only a black screen.

I’m still able to type my password and press enter, but I’m flying blind. This is an issue, because I don’t see which keyboard layout is currently selected, when typing the password. I’m also using the fingerprint reader for login. But sometimes it doesn’t work, but since I don’t get any feedback I don’t know when (it first tries the reader and if that fails three times, it asks for a password.).

Today I somehow managed to lock my account for 10 minutes because of this (too many failed attempts). And now I’m annoyed enough to ask if someone has any idea of how to resolve this issue?

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Hi @neo2001,

Have you tried changing to a different TTY and back?

To change, when the login sfcreen does that, trry to switch to a different TTY with Ctrl+Alt++Fx back again, perhaps that works.

Replace Fx with an F-key, i.e. F1, F3. and so on.

The default, working one should be F2. Well, mine is that, at least.

It might also be beneficial to inspect the logs:

Finding errors for specific boot

journalctl --priority=warning..crit --no-pager --boot=-1

Where:

  • The --priority=warning..err argument limits the output to warnings and errors only;
  • and the --no-pager formats the output nicely for use here, on the forum;
  • the --boot=-1 argument limits the output to log messages from the previous boot. This can be adjusted to -2 for the boot before that, -3 to the boot before that, and so on and so forth.

Feel free to provide the output here, should you wish for us to take a look.

Regarding that, please note that when posting terminal output, copy the output and paste it here, wrapped in three (3) backticks, before AND after the pasted text. Like this:

```
pasted text
```

Or three (3) tilde signs, like this:

~~~
pasted text
~~~

This will just cause it to be rendered like this:

Sed
sollicitudin dolor
eget nisl elit id
condimentum
arcu erat varius
cursus sem quis eros.

Instead of like this:

Sed sollicitudin dolor eget nisl elit id condimentum arcu erat varius cursus sem quis eros.

Alternatively, paste the text you wish to format as terminal output, select all pasted text, and click the </> button on the taskbar. This will indent the whole pasted section with one TAB, causing it to render the same way as described above.

Thereby increasing legibility thus making it easier for those trying to provide assistance.

For more information, please see:


:bangbang::bangbang: Additionally

If your language isn’t English, please prepend any and all terminal commands with LC_ALL=C. For example:

LC_ALL=C bluetoothctl

This will just cause the terminal output to be in English, making it easier to understand and debug.

1 Like

the black screen with the mouse pointer visible after typing the password seems to become a quit frequent issue.

Which theme are you using for the sddm login window? Maybe try changing that, as the one you are using may be incompatible. I had a similar issue recently.

To be precise, the black screen occurs before typing the password. After typing the password the black screen goes away.

I’m using the regular Breeze theme.