Hello,

After logging out and attempting to log back into kde, I receive the message "Could not start kdeinit5" after successfully typing in my user password in sddm.

sddm loads and runs perfectly well. If I disable sddm and start xorg manually from the terminal, xorg starts and works just fine. But sddm can't start kde / plasma. I renamed my .config folder (where all the plasma rc files reside), and that did not fix the problem.

Looking through the systemctl log, the authentication is working well, and sddm starts the startkde script. The startkde script is failing and generating the "Could not start kdeinit5" message - no errrors are logged in the systemctl log file, just the fact that I kill the xorg session from another terminal.

On Arch Linux, this error is generated on line 356 of the startkde script, and I have no idea why. The script seems to want to load start_kdeinit_wrapper, which is where it should be.

I'm now stuck...how do I continue to debug this issue?

Problem solved - it was a conflict between freetype2-infinality and harfbuzz.

The way I was able to better track this down was to start an xorg session and then enter the startkde command in the terminal - this resulted in an error message about harfbuzz being printed to the x terminal, which did not otherwise appear.

Thanks Nathan. This helped me on Manjaro. I did't find relevant logs, too. Just replaced freetype2-infinality with freetype2 and kde was able to start up again.

nathanc wrote:Problem solved - it was a conflict between freetype2-infinality and harfbuzz.

The way I was able to better track this down was to start an xorg session and then enter the startkde command in the terminal - this resulted in an error message about harfbuzz being printed to the x terminal, which did not otherwise appear.

Thank you so much. Spent way to much time on it already. You're a life saver!