About 9/10 times, when I reboot or cold boot, I am left on a black screen with a blinking cursor. I used to just hold the power button to force shut down my laptop and boot it again, and usually on the third try I was able to log in.
Recently, I realized instead of force shutting down I can just cycle a few ttys (for instance tty4-tty6-tty2-tty1) to be able to get the login screen to show up and allow me to login.
While not a deal-breaker it is certainly annoying. Anything I’m doing wrong?
It’s a fresh Architect installation, using Gnome, nvidia-hybrid-440.100, kernel 5.8.0-2.
Can you share the: inxi -Fxza --no-host
and mhwd -li
if i’m not mistaken should be video-hybrid-intel-nvidia-440xx-prime but we have to make sure is not any bumblebee there. Also some laptop models need some custom kernel boot parameters, so maybe this will help
Not sure if ACPI kernel boot parameters would be required for your laptop model, but AFAIK the acpi_osi=! acpi_osi='Windows 2012' works in most cases. A second guess would be acpi_osi='Windows 2018'
Is hard to tell, so probably a bit of tinkering and experimenting/testing is required from your part.
What i want to make sure is that you have installed only the video-hybrid-intel-nvidia-440xx-prime driver, and no other. Not sure when the video-hybrid-intel-nvidia-450xx-prime will arrive to stable branch, but that might be best choice and hassle free option. (based on rumors, not tested by myself, so don’t quote me on that) mhwd -li
will display what drivers you have installed. Remove any other driver if is installed except the mentioned one. Then, i would add this kernel boot parameter nouveau.modeset=0
Once this is done, you should have a functional laptop and be able to make use of the prime-offload capability, aka run prime-run glxinfo as example, so prime-run application would launch that application using the dGPU (Nvidia).
To have even more options and control over this, the optimus-manager would be a good choice. I had no time to bring the old tutorial here from the archived forum, so i apologize to send you over there to check it out. Let me know how it goes.
Great, we render out the possibility of a faulty driver install, so now we move our focus on GDM and/or check if there is another DM installed?
What is from TTY the status of GDM? systemctl status gdm
Once you log in with startx (i suppose) or is that the login screen only gets accesible once you cicle trough multiple TTYs, what is the session type, X11 or Wayland?
To find out run this command from terminal: echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
Now, if the login screen comes to “life” after you cicle trough TTY, then installing and enabling haveged might be helpful. sudo pacman -Syu haveged systemctl enable haveged --now
then reboot the system.
That can happen because of a couple of reasons, so we can try to fix without entering in a lot of details, just run from terminal: dbus-launch gsettings reset org.gnome.clocks world-clocks
in case time settings is an issue.
More extreme (you will lose all custom settings but have them in that backup file): mv ~/.config/dconf/radu ~/.config/dconf/radu.bak
More direct and with no backup, run this: dconf reset -f /
Reinstalling some packages might also help: sudo pacman -Syu gdm gnome-shell gnome-keyring libgnome-keyring
Yes, @bogdancovaciu after reboot I am greeted with a black screen and a blinking cursor. This time, not even switching ttys allowed me to log in. I had to force shutdown by long-pressing the power button, boot again to the same black screen and blinking cursor, cycle through a few ttys and only then was I able to get to the login screen.
Very strange indeed, could you check your logs after a successful boot if there is any indication of what causes it?
Run bmenu if it’s already installed, press D in the main menu and check options 5,6,7
Yeah… well… I wouldn’t know how to read those logs. All that programmer talk means nothing to me. I have just started using Linux this spring, after having been on Windows exclussively for the last 20 years.
. Let’s start with: