@cmuratori I just don't understand why 1. Plasma knows that the screen is supposed to be locked 2. Plasma knows that the screen locker died 3. Plasma is AN ENTIRE DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT 4. Plasma refuses to provide a textbox and button to input your password

@VoxelPrismatic Given the apparent prevalence of this failure mode, it seems like they need a text-mode fallback here that is heavily code reviewed and doesn't crash. I mean, preferably the regular lock handler wouldn't crash either, but I guess that's not on the table :)

@cmuratori Well, that's the problem. The screen locker is a separate program with a bunch of customization, eg wallpaper & clock. It shouldn't crash, but if it does, the DE needs to detect this and stay locked. Again, the desktop environment producing this image. They can absolutely do

@VoxelPrismatic Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I wouldn't want it using that much underlying code if it has already encountered a failure state. Who knows where the failure was? So in a fallback, I would prefer a completely isolated codepath, preferably with an option to reset the desktop env.

@cmuratori If the reason the screen locker crashed is at all relevant to the textbox and button, you wouldn't be seeing that screen; you'd be either back at the full login or the terminal. 99% of the time, it's some misconfigured widget on the lock screen if not someone/something killing

@VoxelPrismatic I really don't think the confidence is warranted here. I get this on vanilla Ubuntu with no lock screen fanciness of any kind. Also, not that anyone bothered to ask, but the session was unrecoverable AFAICT - manual unlocking from a console did not restore the session.

@cmuratori That's fascinating. I've never seen a case where loginctl didn't work. Usually Plasma would crash entirely and fall back to the SDDM login screen.

@VoxelPrismatic The pathology in this case was that I was able to access alternate consoles just fine, I was able to log in to a console, and I was able to run loginctl, and it ran without error. However, if I switched back to the desktop, it was just frozen at what looked like a lock screen,

@cmuratori So it did switch back to something like this, but frozen?

@VoxelPrismatic Correct. I didn't think this would become such a large thread or I would've taken a picture of that too (and probably spent the time to see what the state of the system was).

@cmuratori Now I'm no Linux expert, but the only time that the GUI would completely freeze for me is when my dGPU crashes for whatever reason. My laptop is old and probably needs new thermal paste, but whenever I force Plasma to run on the dGPU, it works for maybe an hour before slowing