Black screen with cursor after upgrading KDE Neon Plasma 6
Solution and recommendation for black screen

After the last updates of Plasma 6 we are seeing problems with the desktop. When you restart the computer you get a completely black screen but with the cursor available, you can launch applications via shortcuts or from the terminal itself, but the desktop itself seems to be broken.
This is because some uses of apt don't install new packages which makes it less suitable for KDE neon.
For example, sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade

Solution black screen (desktop recovery):

There are several solutions available to be able to recover the desktop, here we are going to tell one of them.

- Access one of the TTY terminals, using the keyboard combinations 'CTRL+ALT+F1' to 'CTRL+ALT+F7', to access each of the TTYs.

- Log in to your user.

- Launch this command to recover the desktop.

sudo pkcon install plasma-desktop plasma-desktop-data
sudo reboot

- After the restart, the desktop should appear again.

Recommendation for next updates:

KDE Neon does a continuous rollout of the latest software, which means there are always new versions to update. They recommend using the Plasma Discover updater that appears in the panel.
If you prefer to use the command line terminal, you can do so with the pkcon command:

sudo pkcon refresh
sudo pkcon update
sudo reboot

This will install all new packages and uses the same PackageKit code as Plasma Discover.


Black screen with cursor after upgrading KDE Neon Plasma 6
Eusebio Giner Slimbook
21 January, 2025
share
Tags
Edit
Linux
archive