The first keystroke is eaten by waking the lock screen. I figure this is expected behaviour, but fugly old gnome doesn’t do it. It puts all your typing goes into the password field, even when the screen is off.
I don’t suppose this is a setting I can tweak somewhere is it?
hi, welcome.
this is expected behavior for SDDM, as unwanted as it is.
the lock screen for plasma does not eat the first keystroke, so waking up from sleep is unaffected by this, but logging in after a reboot is where you encounter the SDDM screen.
KDE has recently produced an alternative to SDDM with the plasma login, but it’s only available for plasma 6 and i’m still on plasma 5, so i don’t know what it’s behavior is.
First of all: are we talking about the lock screen or the login screen?
The login screen is what you see when turning on or restarting the computer.
The lock screen is what you see when, after logging in, your screen locks after inactivity, or due to you manually locking it (e.g. by pressing Meta+L).
Also when you say “waking the lock screen”, do you mean “waking the monitor”? In the state when this happens, was the monitor sleeping, or was the computer sleeping, or both?
Lots of nuances in behavior here.
That sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole 
Thanks for that bit of context. I’m using kubuntu 25.10 thich seems to be using plasma 6.4. Apparently kubuntu 26.04 will have plasma 6.6, the first release with plasma login manager.
There is a kubuntu backports ppa, which I just found. It doesn’t include 6.6 yet though: Apparently there was a qt version change between 6.4/5 and 6.6 which makes it not worth the bother.
Also interestingly, I see this with the lock screen too. Not waking from sleep (my pc has issues sleeping/hibernating at the moment), just unlocking after the display has turned off.
Lots of nuances in behaviour here.
Thanks for the response. There always are nuances, but sometimes you have to ask a question to learn what you’re asking about.
backports will become more relevant as the LTS release ages… there is currently nothing there for plasma 5 since no more work is being done on plasma 5, it its a down period for backports.
but toward the end of 22.04 there was a backport available for the current (and final state) of plasma 5 which was nice that i didn’t have to wait for 24.04 to release.
expect something similar for 26.04 around the time 26.10 or 27.04 (non-LTS) release are out… perhaps we will get plasma 6.10 or some thing by then to replace the 6.6 and fold in all the latest advancements.