Apart from the new TTY login welcome screen behavior, which I asked about in a different thread, I have noticed something else odd, not immediately after, but not long after updating from Leap 15.2 to 15.3. By that I mean, I had successfully rebooted and installed some package updates since my release update to 15.3 before this happened:
After booting up, the system was frozen at the GUI login (sddm I think?) with no response to keyboard input and without the clock chaning at all for several minutes, after those several minutes I gave up and probably did a hard reset (by holding down the power button). I repeated this multiple times (restarting, sitting at the login screen, giving up, hard reset) but I did not count exactly how many times. I tried different kernels: preempt, normal, 5.3.18-57, 5.3.18-59.16, but this had no effect.
At some point, I gave up and left it on in this frozen state, and when I returned it was (sort of) working: the clock was updating, and pressing keys on the keyboard actually did something, but it was doing something strange:
When I would press a key it would type a letter in the password field, but highlight it, so that the next letter I typed would replace that letter. This second letter would not be highlighted, but this would happen again for the third letter I typed, which would be overwritten by the fourth, and the cycle would continue. If I were not paying attention, this would have meant that only half of my password would be typed (only the even-numbered letters).
Before shutting down, I did try using the virtual keyboard to see if it would behave differently. It did not work at all, clicking on the onscreen keys did nothing, and using the physical keyboard afterwards still had the same highlighting and overwriting issue.
After restarting (without logging in, since typing in my full password in a weird-behaving password field did not seem like a good idea) both problems were gone, the login page freezing has not happened again, and neither has this password highlighting and overwriting glitch which only ever happened once. This is despite having restarted the computer several times since then.
I do use the Nouvea driver on an old Tesla (architecture, not the fancy new enterprise cards) GPU, so that could have explained the freezing, except that it stopped happening without me making any config changes, or updating anything; my experience with Nouvea issues has been that they never magically go away like this.
I can’t help but imagine that this is point in the movie at which your “hacker” character breathes a sigh of relief, and says something akin to, “I don’t know what happened there at first, but the keylogger is working now.”
I know a real keylogger would probably be more consistent, behaving differently for every other letter makes no sense at all, but having something like this happen is more than a little bit creepy, and I am wondering if anyone has any clue what it could have been.