Fresh install on bare metal - No window manager or desktop

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I am having an interesting issue… (actually having a lot of weird issues, but one thing at a time):

I have been playing around with NixOS for a few days in a Proxmox VM, with virtually no issues that I didn’t cause. This morning was my first brand new install on bare metal, after dealing with corrupted ISOs, failures to boot from the USB, having to choose to load it to ram instead of boot directly I finally was able to Install. I chose Plasma6, format whole drive, yada yada, everything seems to finally go smoothly, however… but It doesn’t boot into sddm, or into plasma.

Firt thing I checked was the journalctl however everything looked good, I didn’t have any errors. It even said that sddm launched correctly, and that auto sign-on worked and that it launced Plasma, but that is not obviously not the case since I am presented with a cli login. thinking that it was possibly needing the gpu drivers I set up the requirements in the configuration.nix, did a rebuild switch, and a reboot just to be sure, and still just presented with the cli login.

Hardware:
Lenovo ThinkStation P340
CPU: i3-10300T
RAM: 8GB
GPU: Nvidia Quardo P620 (monitor plugged here)

These are the only lines I have adjusted, adding the openGL and nvidia support, and updating the auto login lines. (oh, and enabling ssh to easier troubleshoot and make changes)

  # Enable openGL.
  hardware.graphics.enable = true;

  # Enable the X11 windowing system.
  # You can disable this if you're only using the Wayland session.
  services.xserver.enable = true;
  services.xserver.videoDrivers = ["nvidia"];
  hardware.nvidia.open = false;

  # Enable the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment.
  services.displayManager.sddm.enable = true;
  services.desktopManager.plasma6.enable = true;


  # Enable automatic login for the user.
  services.displayManager.autoLogin.enable = true;
  services.displayManager.autoLogin.user = "zeus";

Edit:

I just tried running sddm and it launched, but not on the first console, it launched on the third. Which is great that it works at all… but, logging in to plasma(wayland) does not work and just goes to a black screen for a few seconds before coming back to the sddm login screen, only an x11 session.

2

According to KDE - NixOS Wiki, you also need to enable Wayland support for SDDM:

services.xserver.displayManager.sddm.wayland.enable = true;

Don’t know if this is enough to fix the CLI issue, though.

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3

Couldn’t hurt… I’ll give that a try.

I am curious why it worked flawlessly without that on my VM over the last few days.

4

This is not entirely accurate anymore.

services.xserver.displayManager.sddm.wayland.enable = true;

the correct line is now:

services.displayManager.sddm.wayland.enable = true;

Thanks for pointing in the right direction!!

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5

That’s a good question. I’ve also been in a similar situation when I first started with NixOS and all I can really say is that VMs don’t always represent what will happen on real hardware.

Indeed. Fixed it in the Wiki, thanks!

Does your system still boot to console or does SDDM automatically show up now?

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I will turn off auto login and double check, but it appears to do what its supposed to now.

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7

Yes, can confirm that SDDM launches correctly, and logging into Plasma6(Wayland) works correctly too now.

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