Display off / Blackscreen on login

warbotz

warbotz

FreeBSD 15.1 + KDE Plasma 6 + NVIDIA — Black Screen with SDDM on HP OMEN

Hi everyone,

I've been using FreeBSD for years, and I've recently installed FreeBSD 15.1 with KDE Plasma 6 on my HP OMEN laptop, using ZFS as the filesystem.

I've traditionally preferred XFCE because of its simplicity, stability, and relatively low resource usage. However, given the improvements KDE has made to Plasma 6, particularly regarding Wayland and NVIDIA support, I decided to give it another try.

To my surprise, most of the hardware works remarkably well under FreeBSD, including the NVIDIA graphics drivers. Overall, the system has been more functional than I initially expected.

However, there's one frustrating issue that prevents me from having a fully integrated desktop experience.

The problem

I'm running Plasma 6 with a Wayland session, and the NVIDIA drivers are installed and appear to be functioning correctly.

Unfortunately, whenever I boot the laptop, SDDM displays nothing but a black screen. The graphical login screen never appears.

I've also experimented with other display managers, but the behavior seems to be similar, which makes me suspect that the issue might not be specific to SDDM itself.

Interestingly, Plasma Wayland works when started manually, using the following command:

dbus-launch ck-launch-session startplasma-wayland

Once the desktop session starts, KDE Plasma appears to function relatively well.

This suggests that the underlying graphics stack and Wayland session are operational, and that the problem might be related to how the display manager initializes the graphical environment, handles the NVIDIA driver, or launches the compositor.

System configuration

- Laptop: HP OMEN
- Operating system: FreeBSD 15.1
- Filesystem: ZFS
- Desktop environment: KDE Plasma 6
- Display protocol: Wayland
- GPU: NVIDIA (proprietary drivers installed)
- Display manager: SDDM (also tested alternatives)
- Manual session startup: Works using "dbus-launch ck-launch-session startplasma-wayland"

What I'm trying to achieve

I know that a display manager isn't strictly necessary and that I can launch Plasma manually from a TTY.

However, I'd really like to have a complete desktop experience, including a working graphical login screen, without having to manually execute commands every time I start the computer.

I've been using FreeBSD long enough to expect some configuration challenges, especially with NVIDIA hardware, but this particular issue has been surprisingly persistent.

Has anyone successfully configured SDDM with Plasma 6, Wayland, and NVIDIA on FreeBSD 15.x?

Could this be related to NVIDIA DRM/KMS initialization, SDDM's greeter backend, or the way graphical sessions are started under FreeBSD?

Any suggestions, configuration examples, or troubleshooting advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!
 

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i solved the issue... it was trying to start with nvidia gpu as primary driver... i changed to amdgpu and made some changes...


sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/sddm.conf.d
sudo ee /usr/local/etc/sddm.conf.d/99-wayland.conf


then i added:

[General]
DisplayServer=wayland
GreeterEnvironment=QT_WAYLAND_SHELL_INTEGRATION=layer-shell

[Wayland]
CompositorCommand=dbus-run-session ck-launch-session -- kwin_wayland --drm --no-lockscreen --no-global-shortcuts


sysrc sddm_enable="YES"

reboot.

you can see the hardware info here:
 
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