Brand new to NixOS, won't boot to desktop environment

Help
1

Hi, Just installed NixOS with Plasma 6 as the desktop environment. The bootable usb drive worked no problem. Now when I start the NixOS it boots straight to the tty.

Installed on a Lenovo Laptop with a 4500U “APU”. I’m assuming this is from a gpu driver issue.

I ran journalctl --boot -e and scrolled to the top to find the first error which is:

date nixos kernel: [drm] psp gfx command LOAD_TA(0X1) failed and response status is (0x7)
date nixos kernel: [drm] psp gfx command INVOKE_CMD(0x3) failed and response status is (0x4)
date nixos kernel: amdgpu 0000:04:00.0 amdgpu: Secure display: Generic Failuer.
date nixos kernel: amdgpu 0000:04:00.0 amdgpu: SECUREDISPLAY: query securedisplay TA failed. ret 0x0
date nixos kernel: amdgpu 0000:04:00.0 amdgpu: SMU is initialized successfully!

the next error is when loading sddm, couldn’t setup default cursor, then another error with sddm is something about locale “c” character encoding. Then some error with qt.dbus.integration. So many other errors. Final error is:
date nixos kwin_wayland[1022]: kwin_wayland_drm: Atomic modeset commit failed! Permission denied
date nixos kwin_wayland[1022]: kwin_wayland_drm: Setting dpms mode failed!

I’m then presented with the login at a tty.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

2

So I rebooted into the usb bootable version, confirmed that it starts into the desktop.

lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display'

This shows the vega gpu, shoes that kernel driver in use is “amdgpu”. This is the same as the when I boot into the installed version. I tried to look at the configuration.nix of the usb-boot but couldn’t find it.

Still stuck, help would be great.

3

For giggles I tried startx, returned command not found. I tried kstart plasma-desktop, it could not connect to display, and couldn’t load the Qt platform. I’m beyond lost.

4

Got tired of not being able to get anywhere. Reinstalled with Gnome. Worked no problem. If anyone has any idea what’s going on here it would be appreciated. It makes no sense since it seems like the bootable usb uses plasma/kde. Maybe there’s a bug with the install of plasma6.

5

ive ran into the exact same problem you have, thanks for saying that GNOME worked fine for you so i know what to try next. very weird problems

6

This is a known issue: NixOS 24.11 Plasma6 ISO is broken · Issue #363797 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
They are working to fix the issue. As a workaround you can use the Gnome ISO, the installer asks for which Desktop Environment you want to install.