Can't Start Desktop - Encrypted Home Partition

Can't Start Desktop - Encrypted Home Partition - Plasma ISO

15 October 2024, 16:52:53

artix-plasma-openrc-20240823-x86_64.iso
Manual partitions (EFI mounted to "/boot/efi" - Fat32, root mounted to "/" - Ext4, encrypted home mounted to "/home" - LUKS/Ext4)

The Calamares implementation on the Plasma ISO has given me nothing but problems, the main one stopping me now is that when I try logging in after a "successful" install, the desktop fails to launch and it crashes back to SDDM. This is due to it failing to mount a valid home dir. This "successful" install always ends with a user folder inside the encrypted partition that contains garbage data. Copying a home folder from another new install to the encrypted partition does not fix the problem. Installing and configuring Pam Mount also does not fix the problem. Fstab isn't capable of doing what I ask, so don't flood the topic by suggesting or asking about it.

The problem I am having is not a bug in Calamares at all. I tried the exact same setup on Endeavour OS and it worked as expected, aside from a crash (So Artix isn't to blame for the crashing). It did create the partitions in the correct order (That almost never happens with the Artix installer) and it did create the encrypted home partition with the user folder fully generated, then I booted into it without issue. This is significant evidence that the problem is in Artix's implementation of Calamares and not Calamares itself.

1: On the stable ISO, the partitions get created in a random order, on the weekly ISO it seems to create them in the correct order

2: On both, when I get to SDDM and attempt to log in, the screen is black with a cursor for a moment then crashes to SDDM

3: On both, the user folder gets created inside the home partition with garbage data. (I can see this by decrypting the folder from a live env)

Re: Can't Start Desktop - Encrypted Home Partition - Plasma ISO

Reply #1 – 16 October 2024, 17:47:07

This may or may not be directly relevant to your issue, but Plasma is currently broken on Artix after Artix shipped qt6.8.

I have two systems running Artix and the update to qt6.8 gave me a black screen with a cursor on both of them. I had to downgrade all my qt6 packages back to 6.7.3. Seems the version of Plasma they are shipping was not rebuilt for qt6.8.