Hello,

I have a problem with booting KDE neon 18.04. I get past the disk encryption dialog, then the user log in screen shows up for a fraction of a second, it is replaced with a black blank screen. Only the mouse pointer is visible and can be moved around, apart from the PC won't visibly respond to anything. When I keep the power button pressed, the usual black screen with the KDE neon logo appears briefly before the computer switches off.

Before somebody asks: Yes, before shutting down I did install the updates made available in Discover yesterday; unfortunately I didn't pay much attention to what they were. Other than that I didn't change anything about the system recently.

I'd be really grateful for any tips!

Disclaimer: I'm a newbie. I've been toying around with various distributions over the years, but only began to use KDE neon productively about two weeks ago. Please be kind if anything about this post is wrong or incomplete. I did a search first but didn't come across this particular problem.

Something to try, not sure it will work for you, but I have used it on several occasions when booting to a blank screen with just a cursor (usually after something happens, either a fresh install, an update, or some sort of crash). Upon boot (i.e. at blank screen), can you get to a TTY, e.g. Ctl+Atl+F2? If you can, log in with you user name and password. Enter these commands:

Code: Select all

pkcon refresh
pkcon update

If all goes well, reboot:

Code: Select all

sudo reboot now

The times this did not work, the problem was always related to a hard drive problem (not necessarily with the boot drive one time I knocked a cable off of a drive, though it wasn't the boot drive, none the less the Neon didn't want to boot without it). This involved digging around in the boot/startup logs to find hints of the problem.