[Solved] SDDM booting into a black screen

Sattis · 2026-02-16 14:41:04

SDDM boots into a black screen with an underscore at the top left whenever I boot into Arch. I've booted into tty3, logged in and done

startplasma-wayland

for a while, but this is very inconvenient. My config is KDE Plasma with Wayland and I have an nvidia gpu. Any suggestions or logs to get?

Last edited by Sattis (2026-02-16 15:17:57)

seth · 2026-02-16 14:44:14

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 8#p2256418 - but you'll have to edid the sddm.service

Sattis · 2026-02-16 15:04:51

didn't work, but I've probably misinterpreted it as the idiot I am... this is what I have ended up with when I have edited sddm.service and rebooted.

### Editing /etc/systemd/system/sddm.service.d/override.conf
### Anything between here and the comment below will become the contents of the drop-in file

ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/sleep 1

### Edits below this comment will be discarded
 

### /usr/lib/systemd/system/sddm.service
# [Unit]
# Description=Simple Desktop Display Manager
# Documentation=man:sddm(1) man:sddm.conf(5)
# Conflicts=getty@tty1.service
# After=systemd-user-sessions.service getty@tty1.service plymouth-quit.service systemd-logind.service
# PartOf=graphical.target
# StartLimitIntervalSec=30
# StartLimitBurst=2
#
# [Service]
# ExecStart=/usr/bin/sddm
# Restart=always
#
# [Install]
# Alias=display-manager.service

Apologies if I've done something stupid.
(edited after Seth's reply to add code and /code tags)

Last edited by Sattis (2026-02-16 15:13:24)

seth · 2026-02-16 15:11:42

Please use [code][/code] tags

[Service]
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/sleep 1

The group header is required

Arch Linux

#1 2026-02-16 14:41:04

[Solved] SDDM booting into a black screen

#2 2026-02-16 14:44:14

Re: [Solved] SDDM booting into a black screen

#3 2026-02-16 15:04:51

Re: [Solved] SDDM booting into a black screen

#4 2026-02-16 15:11:42

Re: [Solved] SDDM booting into a black screen

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