Plasmashell-wayland won't start after login. (AMD)

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1

If I login to SDDM with the display manager set to Wayland, I get a black screen with a mouse cursor. Background services such as bluetooth, audio etc. do start. Alt+F2 brings up krunner, but attempting to launch any programs will usually result in them opening, displaying a few frames, then freezing, which also freezes krunner.

The strangest thing about this is it seems to start two wayland sessions - trying to Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get into a tty doesn’t work, because tty2 is the one I’m already on. Switching to tty1 shows much the same, but there is no krunner, and the mouse is reset to the default theme (or SDDM’s theme, i think)

Checking journalctl, plasmashell aborts due to KActivityManager, but from what I can tell this isn’t the root cause and is just indicative of some other problem?:

Jun 11 21:56:25 riko dbus-daemon[1103]: [session uid=1000 pid=1103] Successfully activated service 'org.kde.ActivityManager'
Jun 11 21:56:25 riko systemd[1083]: Started KActivityManager Activity manager Service.
...
Jun 11 21:56:25 riko plasmashell[1229]: Aborting shell load: The activity manager daemon (kactivitymanagerd) is not running.
Jun 11 21:56:25 riko plasmashell[1229]: If this Plasma has been installed into a custom prefix, verify that its D-Bus services dir is known to the system for the daemon to be activatable.
Jun 11 21:56:25 riko plasmashell[1229]: Aborting shell load: The activity manager daemon (kactivitymanagerd) is not running.
Jun 11 21:56:25 riko plasmashell[1229]: If this Plasma has been installed into a custom prefix, verify that its D-Bus services dir is known to the system for the daemon to be activatable.

(Full log here: Jun 11 21:56:10 riko kernel: Linux version 6.3.5-2-MANJARO (builduser@fv-az619-3 - Pastebin.com)

Things I have tried - it’s worth noting that this issue appeared seemingly out of nowhere, as far as i can tell, and not as a result of changing or upgrading any packages, but I could be wrong:

  • Swapping mesa, vulkan-radeon etc. for their -git versions (from the mesa-git repository) and back.
  • Kernels 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 show no difference
  • Using X11 works fine. (both via startx and by selecting it in SDDM)
  • Uninstalling SDDM and manually running startplasma-wayland to the same effect.

Unfortunately this is about as far as my linux knowledge can take me :frowning: any tips on what else I could try would be greatly appreciated!

2

The log you shared shows that SDDM is started on VT1 as expected, and then the user’s (Chris) session is started on VT2. I didn’t see anything obviously wrong in that output, and the KDE session seems to initialize ok.

If you create a new user while in an X11 plasma session, then log out, and try to start a Wayland plasma session as the new user, does that succeed ok?

3

Thanks for the suggestion! It actually worked - although I had just tried it by coincidence yesterday. I was able to narrow down the issue by adding a new user and reconstructing my desktop configs until it would no longer login. After a few frustrating attempts and several new accounts, I narrowed it down to… a cursor theme :expressionless:

The theme loads fine on X11 but causes all the above issues on wayland. I haven’t investigated the files in detail, I just deleted it so I wouldn’t accidentally select it again.

At least I know what to do next time this happens :slight_smile:

4

Glad to read that this approach helped you to narrow the problem down. It’s usually something simple that causes these things. :slight_smile:

5

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