Updated KDE Neon from 6.5.0 to 6.5.1 and now i have a black screen

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1

Hello,

i was using KDE neon 6.5.0 for a few weeks and was happy.

Now i updated the system and after boot i only see a black screen. Some digging around shows up that sddm crash at startup. Then i removed all nvidia driver packages from the build. After reboot my screen is flickering like hell.

So i tried the live cd “neon-user-20251106-0745” and the flickering occurs the same direct after boot into the desktop view.

Can i revert to 6.5.0 till this is somehow fixed or what can i do to get it running again?

I have a ryzen 5800xt and a 1080ti if this info is needed.

Thanks for all suggestions! I really like the distro and hope i can keep it running.

2

I got it sorted out.

The update to 6.5.1 also included an Nvidia driver. It messed up my settings.

First, I removed all drivers with

sudo apt remove --purge ‘-.nvidia-.’.

Most instructions say that you should remove the components you no longer need with

sudo apt autoremove

. But that’s not enough.
You have to use

dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia

to display everything related to nvidia and then remove those remnants as well.

sudo apt remove --purge ‘^linux-signatures-nvidia-.’
sudo apt remove --purge '^linux-objects-nvidia-.’
sudo apt remove --purge ‘^linux-modules-nvidia-.’
sudo apt remove --purge ‘^libnvidia-.’
#… and so on…

Once everything has been deleted and “dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia” no longer finds anything, I tried again to remove something with

sudo apt autoremove

to try to remove something else, but nothing else was found.
Then I restarted the computer.
After that, I used

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-580

to reinstall my desired driver and get it running.

Someone should really write a script that works like DDU for Windows.
Does something like that already exist, or where can I get involved?

Best regards

3

This is the wrong command. It should be

sudo apt remove --purge '^nvidia-.*'

The wildcards would have caught all the other stuff your command missed. You don’t need DDU for that. :wink:

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4

Neat. Next time, maybe help with the question instead of grading the answer I gave myself.

5

So what is the actual answer here ?

Seems like there are conflicting statements regarding which is the correct command.

If someone experiences the same issues as you have, reads this thread hoping to resolve them they will ultimately run the wrong command.

6

The correct command is the one I posed. It purges everything. No need for the rest of the stuff he decided to do. I can only guess that his command came from chatGPT.

7

I did. Next time you need to purge the driver, you can save the extra steps and use the right command. Then you wont look like a Windows noob with an attitude.

8

Your pattern purges everything… except the packages it doesn’t match. '^nvidia-.*' skips linux-modules-nvidia-* and friends because they don’t start with nvidia-. That’s exactly why I enumerated with dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia and removed the leftovers.
If you’ve got a regex that also catches the linux-*nvidia* set, share it. If not, the “Windows noob” line is just noise.

9

Its not my pattern. This has been the standard method used by everybody for years. With this pattern followed by autoremove (which will clean up headers and unused modules) you will have a clean and ready to reinstall based graphical system with none of the extra steps you posted. I only replied because you whined about DDU, which is in no way appropriate for Linux as we do not use a system registry, which is what DDU cleans up (supposedly).

10

Just to clarify the technical point for anyone who finds this thread later:

sudo apt remove --purge '^nvidia-.*' only matches packages whose name starts with nvidia-. On Ubuntu/Neon systems the driver meta-packages pull in linux-modules-nvidia-*, linux-objects-nvidia-*, linux-signatures-nvidia-* etc., which do not start with nvidia-.

In many cases those get removed indirectly as dependencies and then with apt autoremove, so the one-liner works most of the time. In my case, after the 6.5.1 update, I still had leftovers, which is why I explicitly listed everything with:

dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia

and purged the remaining linux-*-nvidia-* packages manually before reinstalling the driver.

So:

-the '^nvidia-.*' pattern is a convenient shortcut,

- the dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia approach is a more defensive/explicit cleanup if the shortcut doesn’t fully fix the system.

If you have a single regex that reliably covers the linux-*nvidia* packages as well, feel free to share it – that would actually be useful for a future script.

1 Like