Arch Linux

Scaatis

Member

Registered: 2025-04-27

Posts: 7

Advice Box in systemd Article Broke My Plasma Install

There is a Tip box at Systemd#Basic systemctl usage which advises that plasma users can install systemdgenie as a graphical frontend for systemd.

This is not necessarily good advice. I just installed this system and installed Plasma with the plasma-meta package, as advised by the wiki, wihch installs Plasma 6. After installing systemdgenie, my system did not boot properly anymore. I was able to get to the linux console with ctrl+alt+F3, but SDDM did not start, I saw only a blank screen with an underscore caret.

Probably I will get jumped by people saying I should have read the dependencies, which include several packages with a 5 in the name. I thought that referred to the QT version, not the KDE plasma version.

If you are having the same problem, I reinstalled the packages from the plasma-meta package with

sudo pacman -S $(expac -S '%r/%n: %D' plasma-meta | cut -d' ' -f 2-)

which fixed the problem.

I posted here, because I'm not sure what the correct solution is: Removing the advice from the Tip box? Marking packages as conflicting in pacman? Adding more explanation that this package is for Plasma 5? The repo seems active, but it looks like there is no release (on github) since 2013! Maybe it would be better to remove the package entirely.

Edit: This official KDE page reinforces my opinion that this should definitely not be a Tip on the wiki and probably not an official Arch package either.

Last edited by Scaatis (2025-04-27 12:28:48)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 12,666

Re: Advice Box in systemd Article Broke My Plasma Install

Installing the compatibility packages would not mess things up, and reinstalling the packages that are already installed would not fix anything on a normal system. This sounds like a partial update issue if I had to guess.

Scaatis

Member

Registered: 2025-04-27

Posts: 7

Re: Advice Box in systemd Article Broke My Plasma Install

Interesting point.
I continued to have problems with sddm not starting even after applying the above "fix". Maybe that problem is unrelated, then.

My point stands about the official KDE page listing this package as unreleased, so maybe it is not entirely appropriate to list it as a recommendation?

lahwaacz

Wiki Admin

From: Czech Republic

Registered: 2012-05-29

Posts: 767

Re: Advice Box in systemd Article Broke My Plasma Install

There is a port to Qt6 which was merged a year ago, but there is still only the initial 0.99.0 release and 355 commits on top of it. Feel free to open an issue on GitLab and talk to the package maintainer.

Scaatis

Member

Registered: 2025-04-27

Posts: 7

Re: Advice Box in systemd Article Broke My Plasma Install

That is all good and well for the development of the package, but doesn't answer the questions raised about the wiki "Tip:" box.

Btw, I tested it now and the package does work with Plasma 6, but it does not show up in the system settings as advertised on the Wiki. So the Tip is inaccurate at least.

lahwaacz

Wiki Admin

From: Czech Republic

Registered: 2012-05-29

Posts: 767

Re: Advice Box in systemd Article Broke My Plasma Install

Feel free to correct the tip

Last edited by lahwaacz (2025-04-27 19:39:15)