This sounds like my problem. System jumps directly to the computerās bios screen. I already pulled the hard drive from the affected computer with the intention of installing a new hard drive and then reinstalling linux. Is it possible to locate and edit the efi boot entry with the affected hard drive mounted on another computer via USB?
Should be possible yes. In case you have an old usb stick lying around somewhere you might save some time by making it a live usb of any distro, then booting into that and editing the efi entry with it
Well, I made a backup of my SSD that Neon is running off of. I restored the image to a virtual machine. Then I upgraded it in the VM as a test.
I have to say that after that test, itās still a rough upgrade process. The upgrading tool still had issues. And when it finished, it errored out and locked up.
Surprisingly after I forced rebooted the VM, the system still loaded up properly. But I had to run dpkg --configure -a to finish configuring packages. Then use apt autoremove to clean up any unused packages. There was no broken packaging. So thatās promising.
Gonna maybe give it another week or two. Again, I am in no rush. Just gonna wait until the upgrading process is a little more smoother.
Hi, not sure if everyone here has the same problem, but the black screen ones might be related to this ht tps://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/1f6naow/ubuntu_24041_fresh_install_no_splash_on_boot/, simply edit the /etc/default/grub and remove āsplashā from the āGRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULTā line.
I wonder whether this is purely grub related or if other bootloaders got messed up as well
Hi Everyone,
I got the same problem. Did the upgrade and no problem ocurred during the upgrade. But, after the update, i had a endless black screen on boot. Could boot only with recovery mode and safe graphics mode.
It seems like a plymouth issue. I found the answer on reddit but i cannot post the link here. But, in summary, i did this: sudo vi /etc/default/grub and remove splash from the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= line, then sudo update-grub .
OpenSUSE/Tumbleweed iso is now KDE 6.2, so I gave it a try. It loaded and booted fine (FYI, I use refind), but itās got problems too. No sound, kdewallet wierdness. I liked Garuda, but Arch and refind never play well together. Iām sticking with Kubuntu for a while until this mess is (hopefully) fixed.
I also got the issue with the black screen, I took a different method to correct it.
I did use the mainline kernel program and installed a newer version of the kernel.
I have checked linux kernel versions 6.8.0-6.8.12 and got the black screen.
And kernels 6.9-6.11 start up fine.
The method with changing the /etc/default/grub also works for me, only it disables autologin to the system.
Even though this problem has permanently pushed me away from KDE Neon and towards Tuxedo OS, Iām going to add my experience given that this is the most active thread about this problem and already indexed by Google.
I think it might help get to the root of the problem given the error happening on two distinct laptops of different manufacturers, but more importantly how the error was triggered on the second laptop.
Given the symptoms, I can confidently say that the culprit of non-booting is caused by the latest KDE Neon install, NOT the upgrade process itself.
First Laptop: I first upgraded KDE Neon on my daily driver, a Gigabyte G5 MF5 laptop. This laptop is now bricked. Whatever boot sector changes are present in this new versionās GRUB config corrupts the way the BIOS handles boot entries and this is a death sentence for these particular Gigabyte motherboards (canāt add link, but /r/gigabyte/comments/1csio1p/comment/l4e5z50/ on reddit would be the source).
The symptoms for the Gigabyte G5 MF5 laptop after the upgrade:
- After reboot, I get the KDE Neon GRUB menu, but selecting any boot item causes the screen to go blank and the entire computer to freeze to the point of only responding to a hard reset
- This problem persists even after trying to turn off
acpiand/or disabling C-State with eitherintel_idle.max_cstate=0orprocessor.max_cstate=0 - Also tested HDMI and Mini Display ports in case it was a wrong display issue, but no signal was coming out of these
- I had a dual boot setup, when trying to boot into Windows, I would get the Gigabyte logo but the loader animation never showed and again the laptop was fully locked up
- EVEN REMOVING THE SSD COMPLETELY (as in the laptop had no other hard drive installed) and trying to boot into another OS using a Ventoy USB stick FAILED EXACTLY THE SAME (tried booting: previous Neon version, Debian standard, Windows Install ISO, SystemRescue), doing the same on another laptop (no ssd/hdd, boot from USB stick) worked fine, so, this is the first concrete evidence that something got corrupted at BIOS level
Sadly, even resetting the BIOS (disconnecting CMOS battery, etc) changed nothing, this is a known issue of these particular Gigabyte laptop motherboards, at least the laptop is within warranty and able to be replaced.
Second Laptop: As I was cutting my losses, I took the SSD from the Gigabyte laptop, put it in an M.2 to USB enclosure, and connected it to a Dell G5 gaming laptop.
I was glad none of the data was affected, I was able to backup the files from the Gigabyte laptop using the Dell laptop. All went well in that regard.
Once I had my backup, I decided to install Tuxedo OS on the Dell laptop. All went well. Rebooted several times, was able to access the Tuxedo install without an issue.
Itās important to note that throughout this process I still had the Gigabyte SSD with the broken KDE Neon install plugged into the USB port on the Dell laptop.
During the fourth reboot I performed on the Dell laptop I accidentally booted into the KDE Neon installed on the SSD attached via USB (the main OS on the Dell laptop is Windows, so on every reboot I was using the BIOS boot selector).
The symptoms for the Dell laptop:
- It booted normally into the upgraded install of KDE Neon within the SSD (my GRUB config pointed to the SSDās UUID, precisely so I could boot from an enclosure if needed)
- I was able to log in and everything was functioning normally, which I (wrongly) thought of as a pleasant surprise
- But trying to get back to my Tuxedo OS setup, I rebooted, and THE DELL LAPTOP BIOS FELL INTO RECOVERY MODE AND REPORTED āNO DEVICES HAD BOOTABLE ENTRIESā
- After rebooting again I was given a choice to run a BIOS level repair utility, and, thankfully, after running it, my Windows and Tuxedo OS entries showed up again, and Iām writing this reply from the Dell laptop, within the Tuxedo OS install
TLDR; KDE Neon Install Caused Boot Issues on Two Distinct Laptops
-
Gigabyte G5 MF5 laptop:
- Bricked after KDE Neon upgrade
- GRUB menu appears, but all boot options freeze the computer
- Issue persists even trying to boot from USB stick (without SSDs attached)
- BIOS reset ineffective
-
Dell G5 laptop:
- Initially unaffected
- Booting KDE Neon from Gigabyte SSD (attached via USB enclosure) caused Dell BIOS to enter recovery mode and report āno devices have bootable entriesā
- Problem (thankfully) fixed with Dellās BIOS repair utility
Key takeaway: Latest KDE Neon install (GRUB and/or other boot config) appears to corrupt boot entries at BIOS level (not the upgrade process, but the install itself)
I understand the implication of the āItās not thoroughly testedā stuff but they also ship end-user hardware with this distro too, which does imply a level of support beyond an experimental or developer-only distro; This can have monetary consequences!
I want to be able to contribute to the development of the KDE desktop, but diagnosing and fixing issues unrelated to the desktop should be minimised as much as possible - I can deal with bugs on the desktop and so can devs who receive my reports ā less so if certain changes are making systems unbootable.
Iām not a distro maintainer nor KDE dev so I donāt know how different Neon is to vanilla Ubuntu, but how is it that changes to a DE can make an entire system bootloop?
As for why Iām even replying here, Iāve noticed that Neon appears to be refusing to boot to SDDM sometimes. It just sits on a black screen. If I boot into UEFI and then exit it seems to work fine, and can go multiple boots working fine, but I was genuinely worried Iād bricked my system!
Thankfully, I keep offsite backups of my Nextcloud (which stores 90% of my data nowadays) but it would still suck to reinstall my system, even to migrate to something else.
FYI, none of this should be taken as a personal attack on the Neon maintainers, Iāve gone as far as donating to the project thanks to Neon and how stable it has been (outside of the issues Iāve when upgrading major system/DE versions).
Neon has been the most stable and enjoyable distro Iāve ever used, which is why Iām so vocal about issues I do find (When I ran into issues in Manjaro, Mint, etc. I simply moved on because they were game-breakers). Iāve never reported and suggested so many changes to any other DE/Distro because usually they end up being so numerous and annoying that I just donāt bother, whereas with Neon I know Iām making something I want to use!
Anyway, lots of love to the devs <3
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The 24.04 update was in relation to the base OS. Sure, there were likely changes to packages regarding the DE - But the issues booting appear to be related more to the base OS than the DE specifically.
Just updated to 24.04 LTS, or at least tried to.
It crashed half way through saying something about the Firefox source not being the same? Didnāt write down the exact error sadly.
I restarted and was met with a black screen. No lock screen, no KDE logo, nothing.
I have a CyberPower UPS, and when KDE is at the lock screen, the UPS makes a beep sound. And even though I got a black screen, it beeped every time I booted KDE.
No other option besides the recovery mode would boot, and I thought it was a GPU driver issue. I was wrong as I installed the drivers from a guide on getting Proton-GE working and it didnāt fix it.
At this point I started to google and came across this post.
deusilvaās suggestion of removing āsplashā from the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line worked for me!
I simply loaded the recovery mode from GRUB, accessed the terminal in maintenance mode, and used nano to edit the /etc/default/grub file.
Last time I did a big update like this, it would error out because of my 3rd party packages. I was not expecting the whole installation to fail.
I really do hope the update processes are smoother from here.
Next time I will create a backup of my system before installing anything. I really did not want to re-install KDE and Windows again.
So the screen went black as soon as you logged into the system? These issues just keep getting weirder
Did you install firefox from neons ubuntu repo or from somewhere else?
Whatās your system specs?
And your Windows install got borked as well?
If you have 20 years experience with Debian, you should just try Arch itself. Block off a weekend for learning and religiously follow the Arch wiki and youāll get familiar fast. Yes, you occasionally have an update that bonks things but usually its pretty obvious what it is (the most recent update in pacman logs), but in my experience it is rare. I think itās happened to me maybe twice in multiple years and its always due to bugs in 3rd party software.
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I would suggest EndeavourOS (my daily-driver): itās Arch (not like Manjaro) but with a easy installation and some nice default configurations.
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Upgrading to 2024 borked my graphics drivers and thereās not a solution that I have found yet, just gotta wait for a patch I guess 
Iām on a AMD RX 6950 XT if anyone out there is a driver dev!
I spent almost a week trying to fix my computer, trying to fix grub, reinstall to no avail. Eventually, rather frustratingly, installed Kubuntu (which I absolutely hate).
Really hoping someone can help with an older KDE Neon ISO.
Well well, another casualty on the listā¦
Iāve been quite happy with KDE for the past several years, so when the little notification popped up in the system tray āUpgrade to 2024.04 available!ā I figuredā¦why not give it a try? FWIW this is on a Dell Inspiron 16 7620 laptop.
(For what itās worth, I have experienced upgrades go completely wrong, as was the case with an older version ZorinOS 6-7 years agoā¦so itās not like I had no idea what could happen.)
At first, things looked pretty sane. Downloading packages, then installing themā¦
After awhile, suddenly the laptop went to the lock screen (I was doing little things while waiting for the update). Strange, I thought.
Logged back in, and the update process had failed with an error: Couldnāt update VLC Media Player. Weirdā¦well, I can reinstall that. Tried to uninstall itābut that failed with a different error. Interestingā¦letās try restarting the computer.
It restarted fine. Pulled up the Software and Updates window, and it had several thousand packages to updateāwell, OK, sounds about right.
Clicked the update buttonābut it couldnāt make any progress. I tried some of the hints on this page + suggested commands (i.e. āapt --fix-broken installā), but this also failed, now saying it couldnāt unmask āpackagekit.serviceā. Tried running āsudo systemctl unmask packagekit.serviceā, which didnāt produce any errorsābut trying to āstartā said service resulted in an error. OK, time to find more solutionsā¦
Then I realized that I couldnāt browse the Internet with Firefox! Laptop was connected to WiFi (which worked just fine on my phone), but the laptop ācouldnāt findā anything.
Bit of digging around, and I found a YouTube video that said to check ā/etc/resolv.confā.
Mine only had a single line in it: ā10.0.0.10ā, and had been changed by the update process. Ummā¦that didnāt match what was shown in the video (which had 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4āGoogle DNS).
Fixed that, restartedāand ah, the Internet is finally working.
Went back to rerunning update commands (āsudo apt-get upgradeā and āsudo apt-get dist-upgradeā plus the Software and Updates thing. Restarted a time or twoāseemed like I might just get away without any serious issues. I did notice that rEFInd stopped coming up on bootāwell, OK, so the Neon upgrade has rewritten the bootloader stuff. Something minor to tweak.
Next morning, all was going well until I realized that I couldnāt start Thunderbird: āThunderbird is already running, but it is not respondingā¦ā (Firefox was working fine.) Never mind that Thunderbird wasnāt actually running. I deleted all the ālockā and ā.parentlockā files in the Thunderbird profile folder, but that didnāt do the trick. OK, letās restart.
Apparently the update wasnāt finished with surprises. Now my laptop wouldnāt bootāit would just hang at the Dell BIOS splash screen.
Got into the BIOS and saw that (unsurprisingly) the update had added a new EFI entry (āKDE Neonā, adding to the already-existing āubuntuā and āneonā entries), and of course had set it as the primary boot entry.
I moved it down in the boot sequence, and put rEFInd back on the top, and tried booting.
rEFInd came up, but trying to start any of the Linux boot entries (āKDE Neonā, āubuntuā or āneonā) resulted in a similar hang. Only after restarting, the boot entries were promptly reverted so KDE Neon was back on topāwhich got me right back to the BIOS logo hang.
Changed it back to rEFInd on top. Found that somehow rEFInd still had access to āvmlinuz-5.15.0-124-genericā old headerāwhich actually worked to boot back into KDE 24.04. Well, except that my WiFi adapter did not appear in the list of devices; needless to say, I didnāt have any WiFi either.
After some tinkering around (getting nowhere), I finally did the patch suggested here and elsewhere: remove āsplashā from ā/etc/default/grubā.
(Curiously, I noticed that the file had been modified at the time I applied the system update, i.e. the breaking change was not due to new libraries, but rather due to a change of the configuration.)
Now I can boot back into Linux without too much difficultyāand the WiFi adapter works. Still havenāt gotten rEFInd working (booting KDE Neon keeps resetting the EFI boot sequence every time I boot so itās number 1), but that only blocks my access to Windoze anyhow, soā¦ 
Thunderbird still is broken. Definitely not running in the background, and I deleted all lock files in the profile folder (plus removing ālocked=1ā lines from the profile.ini.)
Win some, lose some.
This might just cure me once and for all from ever trying to do a full Linux upgrade again instead of a simple clean reinstall! Two strikes so farā¦
Ohā¦
Now sound doesnāt work after the upgrade to 24.04 LTS, āno input or output devices found.ā
Quite the ball of surprises this is.