[Solved] GUI doesn't load after login - Light DM

Dinosalsa · 2022-09-23 17:49:43

Greetings.
I have been running arch on my laptop for a couple of months now. I am enthusiastic when it comes to seeking out solutions and proper commands to improve my Arch experience, and I've been doing fine when it comes to everyday use and troubleshooting, but I am also not that experienced, which causes me to take a little bit of time to get around problems involving how the system works on the background, and, as that is the computer I use to work, I needed to expedite the process here. So I apologize in advance for any inconvenient or questions that might sound slow or, well, stupid.

I have LXQt as a desktop environment, Open Box as a window manager (to be honest, I am not crazy about it and might change it in the near future, but that's, well, the future) and there's nothing extraordinary about the hardware(just clearing out the fact that it has Nvidia graphics with the proper drivers installed). I haven't had to troubleshoot anything for weeks
Yesterday I ran my routine system update (I absolutely always use sudo pacman -Syu). It all went smoothly and I turned off my laptop.

Thing is, when I booted it up after that, my login interface shows up, I can type in my password and... that's it. The screen doesn't change, it just gets stuck like that while I blankly stare at those little coded balls concealing my password.
The system is not frozen, though, as I can move the mouse cursor around and even click stuff such as the greeter settings button or tell the computer to reboot or shut down after patience runs short. When I go back to the greeter first page, I can type in the password again, again to no avail.

I can log in via TTY2, but can't really launch anything I need for work (Firefox, LibreOffice Calc), though I think they are bound to crash in the current circumstances

This is the output of journalctl

In case it helps, this is the output of ldd /usr/lib/qt/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so, and these are the outputs for when I try to run a few applications:

qt.qpa.xcb: could not connect to display
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vkkhrdisplay, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, xcb.

Aborted (core dumped)

Error: no DISPLAY environment variable specified

[1005:0923/143702.845699:ERROR:ozone_platform_x11.cc(247)] Missing X server or $DISPLAY
[1005:0923/143702.845956:ERROR:env.cc(226)] The platform failed to initialize. Exiting.
The futex facility returned an unexpected error code.
Aborted (core dumped)

I did sudo pacman -S libxcb to reinstall it (and, for that matter also the lxqt packages, nvidia drivers, sddm, etc), but it doesn't work
I browsed all the way to /etc/X11 to check the xinitrc folders there and listed the contents,but there's no .xinitrc anywhere

That's all I know about this current problem, but I'll be happy to collaborate if you need anything else

I've browsed solutions and found this one, this one and this one, where the users seem to mention similar problems, but couldn't really put my finger on the actual solutions.

Edit: clarity

Last edited by Dinosalsa (2022-09-23 23:18:06)

seth · 2022-09-23 21:27:12

my login interface shows up, I can type in my password and... that's it. The screen doesn't change

Do you use lightdm?
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=279862
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=279854

Dinosalsa · 2022-09-23 23:15:47

I do use LightDM and I have no idea why I was always blaming SDDM, and that's partially the reason why these threads did not ring a bell when I was looking for the problem. The problem seems to be their latest update, so nothing wrong with the system and the solution for the defective greeter this must come from them. I simply salvaged a grumpy SDDM from its dusty drawer in the basement and made it my greeter again

For the fellow unexperienced who might be experiencing this problem and are wondering what I'm talking about, running the apps is indeed naturally impossible under the current circumstances, but that's got nothing to do with it.
There are 2 workarounds:

1) Downgrade your Light DM package, as done by the last poster on this thread mentioned by seth or the last poster on complaint made by the thread's creator on Github. In my case, there was so much stuff in my cache that the webkit2 files were lost somewhere in the console I could not see

2) Switch your greeter. I used SDDM, which most of you probably have installed along with Arch. If not, just run the basic install command:

sudo pacman -S sddm

If you're using Plasma and want to edit anything, also install sddm-kcm. I don't really care about it

Stop and disable LightDM, enable and start SDDM:

sudo systemctl stop lightdm.service
systemctl disable lightdm.service
systemctl enable sddm.service
systemctl start sddm.service

I hope this helps anyone else with this problem, and thank you, seth, sorry for posting a repeated issue.

Last edited by Dinosalsa (2022-09-23 23:19:46)

Arch Linux

#1 2022-09-23 17:49:43

[Solved] GUI doesn't load after login - Light DM

#2 2022-09-23 21:27:12

Re: [Solved] GUI doesn't load after login - Light DM

#3 2022-09-23 23:15:47

Re: [Solved] GUI doesn't load after login - Light DM

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