I have been a long-term Windows user and recently switched from Windows 11 to KDE Neon Plasma 6.2.3. Since the switch, I have encountered multiple issues.
Black Screen on Boot: When I start or restart the system, nothing appears on the screen—not even text or a cursor. I am also unable to enter TTY (I’ve tried all combinations of Ctrl + Alt + F1–F12 and Alt + F1–F12). Only the following two solutions work, but temporarily:
Option 1: Entering the GRUB 2 Menu by pressing Esc repeatedly after pressing the power button and then entering the following commands:
set pager=1
set root=(hd0,2)
linux /boot/vmlinuz-6.8.0-48-generic root=/dev/nvme0n1p2
initrd /boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-48-generic
boot
Option 2: Booting into a Live USB environment and executing the following commands:
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
sudo chroot /mnt
update-initramfs -u
reboot
Login Screen (SDDM) Issue: Regardless of the Login Screen (SDDM) theme I select, I only see the default login screen (I have attached an image sourced from the internet). Even the Breeze login screen does not appear.
sounds like your installation is broken - especially if you have to manually specify the boot command in the grub command line, but also the fact that you see the default SDDM fallback login screen instead of the Neon one.
It may be possible to fix your setup, but its probably going to require a much more intensive care than a forum post can help with - so my recommendation is to reformat your PC and reinstall. Please make sure you download the Neon user edition and not any developer snapshot.
Ok, but please note that Linux Mint is not recommend for KDE Plasma - it only has Plasma 5.27 and isn’t scheduled to get Plasma 6 until sometime in 2026.
If you are interested in running Plasma, and you are unhappy with Neon, then I recommend either Kubuntu 24.10 (and tracking the non-LTS normal releases), Fedora or OpenSUSE.
The black screen issue is fixed (for now) by adding /dev/nvme0n1p2 after quiet splash in the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line of the /etc/default/grub file. The updated line now reads:
Exactly the same issues on my system (on a fresh install because the update to 24.04 went wrong).
I fixed the black screen issue by removing the ‘splash’ part in grub.
Not able to fix the SDDM issue (along with other issues, like placing widgets resulting in a black screen).
Installed Fedora KDE spin on a spare SSD, just to try it out: none of the above issues, it all works.
KDE Neon is a train-wreck at the moment, and I think will be switching.
Yeah, KDE Neon is not very stable at the moment. I’ve also encountered other issues, such as the ‘Settings’ app crashing, which only a restart seems to fix. Additionally, the boot-up times are as slow as with a hard drive, even though I have an SSD. Even Windows 11 booted up much faster. Still, I’m sticking with it for a while to see how it goes.
Uhmmm…it seems the same issue I have.
A question: how did you modify the grub file?
Do you used a live ISO, mounted the OS disk and modified from there or another way?
