MX Linux Forum

My laptop Xwindows just stopped working at boottime. I'm running the KDE distro build of MX 21.3. System comes up then switches into GUI mode but just has a black screen with a white blinking cursor in the upper left corner.

When I alt-F1 I see this error message about plymouth service not working. This picture is what I get. Any ideas on how to restore a working KDE GUI?

Did you install an Nvidia driver ? Or... did you check whether partition(s) got full ?

Partitions have plenty of space. I did not knowingly install any new video drivers but would be interested in learning how to reset my video driver at the command line as it seems to me that this behavior could be due to a bad video driver. I'm curious what plymouth actually does and what might cause it to fail.

Plymouth does that splash screen, you can even remove it. That message might occur for different reasons (can be just a coincidence , also can be just silenced or ignored)..

After logged in like that manually

Alas, upon reboot I got the exact same behaviour.

and might be useful to give a clue.

How many hours on your hard drive? Not likely, but possible....

Try "startx" in the terminal to see if any errors come up when the GUI fails to start.

Turns out somehow Nvidia drivers got installed over my other ones during some update. Don't know how but doing 'ddm-mx -p nvidia' cleared them out and after a reboot I'm back up and running. Thanks for everyone's assistance.

Please click on the check mark in the post that provided that line of code so that your topic will be marked as solved.

Not solved at all if the Nvidia drivers we pushed to MX AHS repos as automatic updates for every Nvidia user broke the OP's GUI and forced him back to the nouveau driver.

I'd much rather get to the root of the Nvidia driver failure.

Maybe his card is no longer supported by "nvidia-driver" and a switch to one of the legacy drivers is necessary.