Hello all,
I’ve been using fedora kde for a month now, and today I tried installing steam from the discover software center. I tried downloading the ‘fedora linux’ version (not the flatpak which is apparently better) and once it had finished downloading I tried to launch it. It didn’t launch, so I decided to reboot and see if it worked then. However, after rebooting, the login screen did not appear, and I could only see a black screen. The bios menu works fine, and the boot screen works, but I can’t log in or start the desktop GUI. I was able to rollback via btrfs to a snapshot I’d taken from before installing steam using the console (ctrl+alt+f3), but the only affect that had was instead of just a black screen, now there is a cursor as well (which functions as normal). I tried running sudo dnf update, but that didn’t change anything. I haven’t done anything beyond these two things, and I’m hoping I can fix this without destroying anything on my computer. If anyone has any help, I’d appreciate it greatly.
EDIT: I’m considering trying to set up a new installation of fedora. If anyone knows how I could transfer my data onto the new installation from the console (maybe via a snapshot?) I might do that.
From the console run dnf list --installed steam which should show the installed version and the source repo used to install it.
You also said you installed the ‘fedora linux’ version of steam. I hope that you properly installed it from the rpmfusion-free-steam repo as expected and would have hoped that you had used the command line instead of discover. sudo dnf install steam would have installed it properly from that repo.
On my system (fedora 44) I see this
$ dnf list --installed steam
Installed packages (available for reinstall, available for upgrade)
steam.x86_64 1.0.0.85-10.fc44 rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
Note though that the version installed from the rpmfusion-nonfree-steam repo would be 1.0.0.85-6.i686 while the one from the rpmfusion-nonfree-updates repo is version 1.0.0.85-10.x86_64
If installed from any other source than the 2 repos I mentioned above I suggest removing it then enable at least the noted rpmfusion-nonfree-steam repo before attempting a reinstall.
Also note this: There is a distinct difference in the packages available from the 2 different repos.
$ dnf list --available steam --repo rpmfusion-nonfree-steam
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
Available packages (available for reinstall, available for upgrade)
steam.i686 1.0.0.85-6.fc44 rpmfusion-nonfree-steam
If you only have the i686 versin installed I suggest you enable the rpmfusion-nonfree repos and then perform an upgrade to the later version.
You are using kde which has had some issues with the upgrade of plasma to plasma 6.7, including the black screen you are reporting.
I was not aware that using discover would break my computer. However, my system does not have steam on it anymore since I rolled-back to an earlier snapshot without it (which I confirmed by checking other files in my system). Since the computer worked completely fine when I made that snapshot, it sounds like the plasma 6.7 issues you mentioned are the actual culprit.
So I tried the solutions mentioned here (Troubleshooting/Black Screen - KDE UserBase Wiki) but none of them worked. If it helps, the error I got when I ran ‘journalctl --user -xeu plasma-plasmashell.service’ was 'Could not find the Qt platform plugin “xcb” in “” ’ followed by ‘This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized.’ I’m not sure how much this helps but I thought I’d share it regardless.
Apparently the plasma version 6.7.1 solves the earlier black screen issue.
According to dnf info plasma-workspace (kinfo and plasmashell --version didn’t work) I’m on plasma version 6.7.1. I’m thinking something actually broke and this isn’t just a bug of some kind. Since I can still transfer files off of the computer, do you think exporting a system snapshot onto a fresh install of fedora would retain all of my user data?
For anyone else who has/had this problem, I gave up, transferred all my files to a usb from the tty and installed kubuntu (which is way less likely to break: I accidentally installed steam from discover and it still worked). Everything’s been working alright, but I wish I’d been able to stay on fedora and avoid all this.