Fresh install, can't login with SDDM, but I can login into a TTY session

[shu]

Hi! I have a problem with a fresh install of Tumbleweed today (I actually installed twice, I think the snapshot was 20260302 with KDE Plasma 6.6.1).

The problem: I install, reboot, SDDM appears, I try to login with my username/password and it doesn’t work. SDDM just does it’s little shaky thing.

I can open a TTY with ctrl+alt+F1 and login there with the same username/password (so that’s fine), and I can then also use startplasma-wayland to enter the graphical plasma environment. It’s just SDDM that doesn’t work.

When I look into the logs with sudo journalctl -b 0 there’s this section at the time of the login attempt:

Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm-greeter-qt6[1510]: file:///usr/share/sddm/themes/breeze-openSUSE/Main.qml:241:17 Parameter "username" is not declared. Injection of parameters into signal handlers is deprecated. U>
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm-greeter-qt6[1510]: Reading from "/usr/share/xsessions/plasma6.desktop"
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm[1459]: Message received from greeter: Login
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm[1459]: Reading from "/usr/share/xsessions/plasma6.desktop"
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm[1459]: Session "/usr/share/xsessions/plasma6.desktop" selected, command: "/usr/bin/startplasma-x11" for VT 2
[...]
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm-helper[1699]: [PAM] Starting...
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm-helper[1699]: [PAM] Authenticating...
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm-helper[1699]: pam_kwallet5(sddm:auth): pam_kwallet5: pam_sm_authenticate
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm-helper[1699]: [PAM] Preparing to converse...
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm-helper[1699]: pam_kwallet5(sddm:auth): pam_kwallet5: Couldn't get password (it is empty)
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm-helper[1699]: [PAM] Conversation with 1 messages
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw unix_chkpwd[1700]: password check failed for user (shu)
Mar 04 13:06:06 tw sddm-helper[1699]: pam_unix(sddm:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty= ruser= rhost=  user=shu
Mar 04 13:06:07 tw systemd[1498]: Socket to launch DrKonqi for a systemd-coredump crash skipped, unmet condition check ConditionUser=!@system
[This message appears fifteen times more]
Mar 04 13:06:07 tw systemd[1498]: Socket to launch DrKonqi for a systemd-coredump crash skipped, unmet condition check ConditionUser=!@system
Mar 04 13:06:07 tw systemd[1498]: drkonqi-coredump-launcher.socket: Unit needs to be started because active unit sockets.target upholds it, but not starting since we tried this too often recently. Will re>
[...]
Mar 04 13:06:08 tw sddm-helper[1699]: [PAM] authenticate: Authentication failure
Mar 04 13:06:08 tw sddm-helper[1699]: [PAM] returning.
Mar 04 13:06:08 tw sddm[1459]: Authentication error: SDDM::Auth::ERROR_AUTHENTICATION "Authentication failure"
Mar 04 13:06:08 tw sddm-helper[1699]: Failed to write utmpx:  No such file or directory
Mar 04 13:06:08 tw sddm[1459]: Authentication for user  ""  failed
Mar 04 13:06:08 tw sddm-greeter-qt6[1510]: Information Message received from daemon:  "Authentication failure"
Mar 04 13:06:08 tw sddm-helper[1699]: [PAM] Asked to close the session but it wasn't previously open
Mar 04 13:06:08 tw sddm-greeter-qt6[1510]: Message received from daemon: LoginFailed
Mar 04 13:06:08 tw sddm-helper[1699]: [PAM] Ended.
Mar 04 13:06:08 tw sddm[1459]: Auth: sddm-helper exited with 1
Mar 04 13:06:08 tw sddm-greeter-qt6[1510]: Message received from daemon: LoginFailed
Mar 04 13:06:12 tw systemd[1]: NetworkManager-dispatcher.service: Deactivated successfully.
Mar 04 13:06:17 tw systemd[1498]: Socket to launch DrKonqi for a systemd-coredump crash skipped, unmet condition check ConditionUser=!@system

I see a few suspicious lines there, but I have no idea what’s the actual problem and howto fix this.

As I said this is after a fresh installation (TPM disabled btw.) and the first reboot. I did set the checkmark during setup that this user is also an administrator, but I did that before and it used to work with it.

I had a working installation of TW before, this reinstallation is basically me doing ‘spring cleaning’. The PC itself is working fine.

Any help is appreciated!

[swannema]

I’ve seen some people complaining about not being able to login after a fresh install, in some cases it turned out to be the wrong keyboard layout in sddm. For those people it defaulted to the US keyboard layout, even though the language was set to something different during the installation.
There is a bug report.

[shu]

Turns out I can use the “automatic login”, and then I won’t see SDDM during restart at all. But that’s not what I want. I need to be able to login.

I also tried to change the theme to the default ‘Breeze’, but that doesn’t help with the problem.

[shu]

@swannema

in some cases it turned out to be the wrong keyboard layout in sddm.

I checked with localectl status and it tells me that my keymap is de (which is correct). The password also works in the TTY session.

Has SDDM a different config for its locale setting? I’ll try to find out.

In any case thanks for the reply!

[shu]

Hey, I think that’s it! I haven’t found the keyboard setting for SDDM yet, but I changed my password to an unambiguous one that should work with english and german keyboards, and with that one I CAN log in!

Thanks a lot, @swannema!

[swannema]

Check: Systemeinstellungen - Tastatur
Is Belegungen aktiv and what language is there? You might have to add German there.

[shu]

Yeah, I did that now! (I actually use english as system language with a german keyboard).

But it’s fine now, I changed the password back to the one I had before and it works!