I wanted to switch to Manjaro with KDE Plasma for the first time. So I made myself a boot usb device, downloaded the latest installer with KDE and went for it. However, before the UI even loads, somewhere around after the step to create the virtual Filesystem was done, it just freezes. No Key on the Keyboard works, nothing. To make sure it is not related to Manjaro itself or KDE itself, I also tried the live boot for Manjaro Talos with Gnome and it was just fine, same as Kubuntu 23.04 with Plasma 5.27 - works there as well.
It seems to be an issue just with the manjaro - KDE kombination on the live boot. Is there a way to troubleshoot this? I read a whole lot of your forums, but it seems nobody has this issue reported here that I have. The closest one seems to be a few users already running manjaro, that some git packages did not work and they replaced it with the original ones, see “Login Screen not working after update reboot” topic.
I tried the following isos:
manjaro-kde-22.1.2-230518-linux61
manjaro-kde-22.1.1-230509-linux61
manjaro-kde-22.1.0-230421-linux61
those 3 Talos Images did not boot from USB
I also tried
manjaro-gnome-22.1.2-230518-linux61 - which does boot and work, but I am not a big fan of Gnome
manjaro-kde-22.0.5-230316-linux61 - which does boot, but has the invisible mouse cursor issue on the RDNA3 GPU I have
kubuntu-23.04-desktop-amd64 - which contains KDE Plasma 5.27 as well as the manajro talos one, so I know it is not KDE specific
Any Input appreciated, thank you.
My system currently runs Windsows11 with
AMD Ryzen 5800x3d
AMD Rx 7900 xtx
64 GB Ram
Gigabyte Aorus Master x570 Board revision 1.2 with F36 Firmware Version
The ISO does work - albeit not for your hardware combination - so there is that - most likely it is graphics related.
You need to pull up your sleeves and get to work.
Can you boot the ISO to the GRUB selection screen?
If yes - then press e on the default selected entry - as we need to verify if you can get onboard the console of the live system
Append a space and the number three (3) to the kernel command line arguments and press F10 to load the kernel.
This verifies that you can actually load the kernel when you reach the console (press escape to remove the plymouth screen).
If you get this far - I recommend installing a base system.
Login as root using passwd manjaro
install a base system
This can be done complete manual or using architect.
A manual install will use some unconvential combination of pacman arguments to avoid pulling updates for the ISO itself as this would be pointless and waste of time.
so runlevel 3 works just fine, starting the ui via startx or systemctl start sddm.service create the freeze again. I might go further with your suggestion, but first I try @philm suggestion with kernel 515 or 510 later today.
also will try fedora 38 live with plasma as well just to see how that is booting up. will get back later, thanks so far for the suggestions.
so after further testing it seems Plasma has some issues with my RDNA3 Hardware and Kernel 6.1 which comes with the Talos Release.
Kernels 5.10 and 5.15 are too old and have no RDNA3 support. Everya other Plasma 5.27 release I have tried (Kubuntu, Fedora) have Kernel 6.2 on their live distro and it just boots.
For to me unknown is why the same 6.1 kernel in manjaro Gnome just works.