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#1 2025-01-13 21:02:51

jumperfox
Member
Registered: 2025-01-13
Posts: 12

KDE crashes to black screen - tty console unresponsive

I had this happen this morning after I woke up and interacted with my PC which was on all night. I started using firefox and writing emails in outlook online. My DE (task bar, wallpaper, everything else) suddenly crashed to a black abyss. My firefox window was still present, and i could interact with it, i just couldnt re-open it after I closed it. All I saw was a cursor and a backlit black monitor background.

I rebooted the system, and started trying to launch a virtual machine with qemu/kvm, and after a few times of doing this, I can fairly reliably crash my KDE to a black screen and need to restart my PC to recover.

I try to switch to a different terminal (tty) via ctrl+alt+f1... and I get the terminal, i plug in my username, or root, press enter, I expect a password prompt, but it hangs and then reprompts for a username.

I did a bad thing yesterday, I was messing with old appimages, installing pipx packages (trying to get superpaper to work) but it ended up never working, and now I have these artifacts that effect the daily use of my system.

I tried restoring with timesift but I get segmentation faults and unless I remake grub before reboot, my arch install disappears from grub. I dont want to re-install, but im fairly sure something deep in my system is broken. Ive tried reinstalling all packages `pacman -S $(pacman -Qnq)` but this did not fix my kde black screen issues.

Can someone help me repair my install? Is there a sfc /scannow equivalent on arch?

system: Kernel: 6.12.9-arch1-1
DE: Plasma 6.2.5
WM: kwin

Last edited by jumperfox (2025-01-13 21:05:47)

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#2 2025-01-14 02:57:17

jumperfox
Member
Registered: 2025-01-13
Posts: 12

Re: KDE crashes to black screen - tty console unresponsive

I have uninstalled python_pipx, and python_wxpython, and have reinstalled timeshift.

I also recreated my grub config, and then made a new vm and am able to launch it without issue.

Most recently when the kde would turn black was when I tried launching a special vm in virtmanager that had a pcie pass through u.2 drive, that the kernel didnt let go of to vfio (i know, i know)

But now im just doing a regular old vm with a local qcow file and it works without crashing my kde. Though I dont know why kde crashed the first time a few days ago when i just left the pc on overnight and simply started writing an email in outlook on firefox. I have

`journalctl -f | grep --line-buffered kde`

running and have not encountered the kde black screening so i have nothing useful to share from this log output yet.

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#3 2025-01-15 13:12:41

jumperfox
Member
Registered: 2025-01-13
Posts: 12

Re: KDE crashes to black screen - tty console unresponsive

This was most likely caused by me trying to attach the host ssd to a virt manager box by mistake. have not seen this black screen for a day now even after doing intensive tinkering

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