I’m on Endeavour. Suddenly I can’t get past the login screen. My password is accepted but it sits at the login screen and plasma doesn’t start. I created a new user and that account works fine, so there’s something in my account. I’m not good at reading logs, I didn’t recognize a problem. Any ideas on what to check?
Might actually be an sddm problem?
You can check if SDDM is the problem by checking the logs with systemctl status sddm in a tty shell after attempting to log in. Any entries in yellow or red would be worth investigating.
Thanks. Other than ‘preset: disabled’, there’s no yellow or red. No warnings. Everything seems successful. So maybe the problem is with plasma.
I’ve thought to delete everything plasma related. The kde/plasma-related file lists I’ve found seem to be a few years old. Is there an updated definitive list of files that will return plasma back to default when deleted? Are they all in ~/.config or are some in /usr or /etc?
Deleting .config (renaming) advances to a black screen with a cursor, but nothing else.
Copying the .config from a new working user (and changing ownership) gets the same black screen/cursor.
Deleting .cache (renaming) freezes after password, just as before.
Still struggling.
Check out the log files in ~/.local/share/sddm/. There may be some clues in there.
Thanks Nate This happens with both Wayland and x11. Odd that the x11 log file in .local/share/sddm is empty, but access-dated, while the Wayland log file has the following error (2 identical lines):
kf.service.sycoca: The menu spec file ( “” ) contains a Layout or Default layout tag without the mandatory Merge tag inside. Please fix it.
I asked about this in the endeavor group and it was suggested it wouldn’t prevent booting. Now I’m not so sure. There’s precious little to be found online about this error, and I have no idea how to fix it. Help would be appreciated.
That’s not going to prevent booting indeed. It’s just a harmless warning.
Ok, it’s the only thing there. I see reinstall in my future.
Maybe if you enter another tty, log in there and run startplasma-wayland, you’ll get some useful output?
The same sycoca errors, and a flashing cursor. I broke out with ctrl-c a half hour later.
same suggestion here, log in with a new user and see if it works.
Other than that a wild guess: Do you access a remote/local NAS file server (nfs or smb) mounted e.g. with systemd automount or autofs?
New user logs in fine. No NAS or special mountings. Nepti–tried variations of this. Got it to finish booting once but the next reboot snagged again.
My patience ran out yesterday and I reinstalled EOS. Things are good now. 
Thanks to all who offered help.