I was feeling nostalgic about screensavers the other day and so I use pamac to install xfce4-screensaver. After installing checking the settings and setting a screen saver I walked away and came back around 10 minutes later. The screen was black with no screensaver. Oh well, I guess it doesn’t work. I tapped the keyboard and shook the mouse and LightDM shows up on the screen. I typed in my password and instead of my desktop I am presented with… another lock screen! But this one does not accept any keyboard input. I try to enter my password, no dots show up in the text box. Hitting enter does nothing. When I click “login” it fails for obvious reasons. Now stuck in lock-screen purgatory, I entered a TTY and rebooted my machine.
Since everything was working fine before installing xfce4-screensaver, I went into pamac and removed this package. I was warned that xfce4-screensaver is an optional requirement for some other application, I don’t remember which one. I figured, it’s optional and whatever it is must have been working before I installed screensaver so I removed it anyway.
Now when my system locks up after 10 minutes, I still get LightDM. But when I enter my password, I get nothing but my mouse cursor and a black screen. This only occurs when the system automatically enters a locked state after a period of inactivity. If I manually lock the machine, I can enter my password and get back to my desktop just fine.
System: Host: desktop Kernel: 5.9.16-1-MANJARO x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: Xfce 4.16.0 Distro: Manjaro Linux