Is there an official guide to KDE troubleshooting? Especially for what is going on when I try to log in. I'm on Ubuntu 18.04, with plasmashell 5.12.9. I am using this system as it has been for the last 6 months, with whatever updates come along; I don't make many changes and none recently.

It was working yesterday with no problems, but today, the login screen simply appears to freeze after I enter the correct password (if I enter a wrong one, I get a message, so it clearly manages to communicate with pam). CTL+ALT+F2 still works to get me a console, even after the screen freezes, and I can log in from the console or via ssh.

The problem is, I don't know where to look for clues - this is what I can see before I submit my password:

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# ps -ef | grep -E 'X|sddm'
root      6767     1  0 11:17 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/sddm
root      6769  6767  0 11:17 tty1     00:00:00 /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -nolisten tcp -auth /var/run/sddm/{7a6b63c6-6862-4d03-ac0f-7a173265b3c5} -background none -noreset -displayfd 18 -seat seat0 vt1
root      6780  6767  0 11:17 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/sddm/sddm-helper --socket /tmp/sddm-auth4e988585-a1c0-4479-817d-ebf9409fd7e3 --id 2 --start /usr/bin/sddm-greeter --socket /tmp/sddm-:0-xlEGii --theme /usr/share/sddm/themes/breeze --user sddm --greeter
sddm      6783     1  0 11:17 ?        00:00:00 /lib/systemd/systemd --user
sddm      6784  6783  0 11:17 ?        00:00:00 (sd-pam)
sddm      6795  6780  1 11:17 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/sddm-greeter --socket /tmp/sddm-:0-xlEGii --theme /usr/share/sddm/themes/breeze
sddm      6800  6783  0 11:17 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --session --address=systemd: --nofork --nopidfile --systemd-activation --syslog-only
root      6813  6733  0 11:18 pts/1    00:00:00 grep -E X|sddm
#


And this is what I see after:

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# ps -ef | grep -E 'X|sddm'
root      6767     1  0 11:17 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/sddm
root      6769  6767  0 11:17 tty1     00:00:00 /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -nolisten tcp -auth /var/run/sddm/{7a6b63c6-6862-4d03-ac0f-7a173265b3c5} -background none -noreset -displayfd 18 -seat seat0 vt1
root      6900  6733  0 11:18 pts/1    00:00:00 grep -E X|sddm


- but I don't know what else to look for. The logs don't seem to contain any clues. So, where to go from here?