Hello,

I am a bit in a panic mode right now, because I desperately need my machine to do my homework!

My Linux system: KDE Neon, up-to-date. VGA: ATI Radeon. Kernel-module: radeon. Kernel version: 5.4.33

Until two hours ago the system was running perfectly. Then I wanted to to run a game (Lincity-ng) to get some distraction. The game did not start, but the screen went black, and nothing happened. After a few moments I could hear the game's intro-sound, but still no picture was to be seen. Switching task (ALT-tab) was not possible, and switching to a console (CTRL-ALT-F4) was not working either.

So I pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL and waited for a minute, because that normally shuts down my machine if I don't click "abort".

But that did not work either, and so I had to shut down the hard way by switching off power.

After rebooting, the login screen (SDDM) showed up and I could enter my password. But then the screen went black again! One difference: this time CTRL-ALT-DEL worked, so I did not need to power off again. After rebooting again, I switched to console *before* I entered my password, logged in, turned into root and executed "service sddm stop".

Then I tried to "startx" from console, but the only thing I got was a message, saying X server terminated normally. No error, not kernel panic, no "EE" in /var/log/Xorg.log", nothing that could give any clue why X wouldn't want to start.

Furthermore, "startx" does not work for my user, it does not work for root (which it did before), and, even more misterious, it does not work for a freshly created new user! (If there was any thing wrong with XAuthority, newly created users should not face that problem, should they?)

I already re-installed every package that has "xorg" in its name and I did "configure-debian" to reconfigure X. But still no relief, desktop won't start!

What could possibly be wrong there? Why does sddm start and show the login screen, while the desktop won't start, even when called via "startx" in console mode?

Please, let's hope this can be solved quickly. I am really in desperate need for my machine! Thanks in advance for any help!

SOLUTION:

It took some time, but I managed to get the system running again by re-installing every single package. I created a list of installed packages with "apt list --installed" and then I used that list as input for "apt install --reinstall".