What in the world is this screen?

[joneall]

I am trying to install Neon on my wife's computer and it is a mess. After a whole afternoon, I finally booted this. What in the world is it? I had managed to install a year-old version of Neon, but could not change the screen size. So I did a dist-upgrade and when I rebooted, I got this. I cannot log on from this screen. It ignores everything I enter.

This sort of thing is why I want to be damn sure that if I purchase a new computer, I can install KDE on it easilyl

[claydoh]

That is a default, un-themed SDDM login screen. Usually it only shows up when something is broken, usually when someone has installed a Plasma 5 theme for it on Plasma 6. But something else is broken.

Installing and updating from old neon images, I do not recommend. They do not test this sort of situation, and with the number of changes and updates in a year, plus juggling Ubuntu updates to keep some things from replacing neon packages, can make for funky dependency problems.

Now, you can get to a desktop manually if you want to -- ctrl-alt-r3, log in, then enter startplasma-wayland (no sudo!)
So you should be able to try updating, installing any video drivers if it is Nvidia, etc.

Can you provide any basic specs for the computer?

Was the problem an incorrect resolution, or you could not resize/scale it?


Did you try an old ISO because the current one doesn't work?



For new computers, compatibility really hasn't changed a lot, in terms of support.

Intel CPUs and most graphics should Just Work. Ultra current integrated Arc graphics, I am not sure of, and very new CPU releases can sometimes have issues, possibly.
WiFi is the same - Intel is almost always working out of the box. Anything else has a good chance of needing an external driver installed from source code or something.

AMD usually has no issues, but sometimes needs a kernel parameter added to grub for the CPU or the iGPU. Finding which one(s) is the fun part.

Nvidia, well, that seems to still be a crap shoot.

[dk9he]

Hi joneall, just will mention you are not alone here. I've exactly the same issue. It was only possible to type in the passwd, but no Enter was possible, no mouse klick,
means no login. I could just move the mouse around. The last update wasn't too old.
HW: MacBook Pro, until this update KDE neon runs great on this Laptop. The 6.5.1 wasn't a good idea....

Unfortunately, after some reboots with the same result this Loptop didn't power for the moment. Hope I can fix that soon.
Andy

[joneall]

Hi joneall, just will mention you are not alone here. I've exactly the same issue.

Thanks for the sympathy, When I get a minute, I will try again with the very latest version of Neon. Maybe it's worth trying another version of kubuntu or even ubuntu. What's the easiest one? Mint, maybe?

[claydoh]

What's the easiest one? Mint, maybe?

This is the normal go-to for easy to use. Even more so for a season *buntu user

[dk9he]

claydoh, thanks for your comments

CPU Intel i5-2415M 2.30 GHZ Mem 16GiB
Graphics: VGA compatible controler Intel Corp 2nd Generation Core Processor Family
No problem about the resolution anyway.

After ctrl-alt-F3 I can login to the shell. Welcome to KDE neon User Edition (GNU/Linux 6.14.0-35-generic x86_64)
ESM not available...

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, finished

"startplasma-wayland" can't be found
"sudo pro status": command not found

The result is finally the same as from joneall too. No clue where this frozen screen is good for, a direct login shell
would made the day much better (my proposal for KDE)

Any idea?

Andy

[joneall]

I tried Mint. Installed the latest version available on its web site. After installation and reboot, it worked fine. So I did a dist-upgrade. Bad idea. It has not worked since. Hangs in login.

I got identical results on two different partitions. The dIst-upgrade killed it. I can't log on now.

[dk9he]

The idea about mint is not too bad if you just looking for a running system. Unfortunately, the is no option KDE, very sad.
Anyway, I simply don't want to change my desktop like the wind blows, using KDE from 1.0 or so means KDE 6.x is the best here (without crashing).
Looking forward about new ideas and I'm curious how the story goes on.

[joneall]

I was just trying Mint because I thought it might be faster to install. It wasn't. It was interesting tho to find the dependence on system level in Mint, whereas neither of two levels of Neon worked.

[dk9he]

As analyzed here the update to 6.5.1 was a big mistake without any warnings. Just to keep the story short I installed Debian forky
with KDE 6.5.2 and everything runs great now.

Topic can be closed from my point of view

Thank you all
Andy