Arch Linux

ultraaziz

Member

Registered: 2024-05-05

Posts: 18

KDE Plasma on wayland only shows black screen with cursor

I tried a bunch of things from the wiki but nothing seems to work, firefox runs on startup and it shows up fine but every other thing just doesn't work, not sure what information is needed to diagnose this information so tell me if anything is needed, I'm using an Nvidia card on driver 555 and X11 works with no issues

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,894

Re: KDE Plasma on wayland only shows black screen with cursor

You need to enable modesetting https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA … de_setting for wayland nvidia anything to work. Use the nvidia_drm.modeset=1 kernel parameter method on the command line to do so to also disable the potentially conflicting simpledrm device.

alsorew

Member

Registered: 2024-06-10

Posts: 1

Re: KDE Plasma on wayland only shows black screen with cursor

I have the same problem, and I’m on AMD.

Working through it, I figured out a few things:

$ killall plasmashell
$ plasmashell
kde.plasmashell: Aborting shell load: The activity manager daemon (kactivitymanagerd) is not running.
kde.plasmashell: 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.

$ systemctl start kactivitymanagerd
Failed to start kactivitymanagerd.service: Unit kactivitymanagerd.service not found.

$ systemctl enable kactivitymanagerd
Failed to enable unit: Unit file kactivitymanagerd.service does not exist.

---

Update 1.
I cleaned up pacman cache and fully reinstalled kactivitymanagerd. Now I can:
$ systemctl start plasma-kactivitymanagerd --user

and it works. How do I make it automatic, though? `systemctl enable` is not working. What started it before?

Update 2.

Seems like it wasn't a KDE Plasma problem at all, but a dbus problem. I got a lot of such errors:
failed to commit changes to dconf: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name is not activatable

Switching from `dbus-broker-units` to `dbus-daemon-units` and removing `dbus-broker` fixes this. But if I want to keep using broker units, how do I fix it? Full reinstall, refresh, whatever?

Last edited by alsorew (2024-06-11 06:37:49)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,894

Re: KDE Plasma on wayland only shows black screen with cursor

You probably have some old dbus config around that makes dbus-broker throw a fit, maybe run https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=292494 and post the results in a new thread.

ultraaziz

Member

Registered: 2024-05-05

Posts: 18

Re: KDE Plasma on wayland only shows black screen with cursor

You need to enable modesetting https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA … de_setting for wayland nvidia anything to work. Use the nvidia_drm.modeset=1 kernel parameter method on the command line to do so to also disable the potentially conflicting simpledrm device.

how exactly do I go about activating modeset?
I tried the method described on the wiki by using

modprobe nvidia_drm nvidia_drm.modeset=1

but it didn't work.
running

 cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset 

still returns N after rebooting several times

Last edited by ultraaziz (2024-06-11 14:44:24)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,894

Re: KDE Plasma on wayland only shows black screen with cursor

That's not how you do this. You do this with the kernel parameter commandline option which you configure in your bootloader config.