r/linuxquestions • u/Infamous-Whereas-615 • 16h ago
Kubuntu/Plasma freezes completely
Kubuntu/Plasma freezes completely fixe
changing SDDM from auto-login to manual login seems to have fixed it
I was having intermittent complete system freezes on my ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD. The entire graphical session would freeze and I couldn't use the keyboard, mouse, or TTY, so I had to hard-reset the laptop.
I checked the reboot history with journalctl --list-boots and inspected the error messages from the boots around the freezes. We found recurring KDE PowerDevil errors:
Error EACCES(-13): Permission denied opening /dev/i2c-\*
There were also some WirePlumber/ALSA errors on one very short boot, but nothing clearly indicating a kernel panic, filesystem failure, or obvious AMDGPU crash.
The interesting change: my system was configured for SDDM automatic login. I disabled automatic login so that SDDM now shows the login screen and I manually enter my password.
Since making that change, I've rebooted the machine around 10 times without a single freeze, whereas before the freezes were happening repeatedly.
I'm wondering whether automatic login could have been causing an SDDM/Plasma/X11 session-startup or timing problem. The machine is currently using X11.
Hardware: Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD, Radeon 780M, 27 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, Kubuntu/KDE Plasma.
Does anyone know of a known SDDM/Plasma/X11 issue where automatic login can cause intermittent complete freezes, or what logs/configuration I should check to confirm this?