Broken lock screen after Fedora 34 installation

I’ve been using Rawhide for a while but decided to go back to a stable version of Fedora. I burned a Fedora 34 KDE live disc, verified the image, and then used my existing BTRFS volume for installation. I created a new subvolume for the new root filesystem and used my old volumes at their old mount points. Installation went smoothly and after booting into F34 I deleted the old root subvolume and its snapshots.

I have a problem with the new installation though where the lock screen is broken after suspending. If I allow the computer to sleep, then wake it, I get a message saying that the lock screen is broken and I need to log into another terminal and run loginctl unlock-session 2. If I do that and then switch back to my main session, the screen is covered in graphical artifacts to the point that it’s unusable. “Beneath” these artifacts, everything works like it should. I took a screenshot with the Print Screen key and it looked normal, and I can move to the bottom left of the screen and see the artifacts change colors where the menu should be when I click.

The only thing that seems to fix this is to go back to the other terminal and run startx, which attempts to start an X session and immediately disconnects. After that, I can go back to the first terminal and my graphical session is there with no artifacts. Another thing to note, this doesn’t work if I don’t switch back to the original terminal after the loginctl command. The process has to be CTRL+ALT+F4 → loginctl unlock-session 2 → CTRL+ALT+F1 → CTRL+ALT+F4 → startx → CTRL+ALT+F1.

I’ve tried reinstalling all packages and running rpmconf -a to ensure there are no old config files left over from Rawhide that could be messing something up. What else could be breaking the lock screen?

This happens for me, too—not every time, but fairly regularly. Actually, it seems to happen specifically when my screen powers down while locked (I just deliberately turned it off and was able to trigger the error message). Mine is a clean install of Fedora 34 KDE, so I don’t think the switch from Rawhide is your problem.

Are you using KDE? Radeon graphics, by any chance? Apparently there was a bug fixed last week: 439096 - kscreenlocker broken with error message on wayland. It’s anyone’s guess when this will land for us, though!

For the record, the unlock process works for me without startx shenanigans, but it’s worth noting that the suggested Ctrl+Alt+F2 is no good. My main problem is that the desktop isn’t properly restored: the task panel is absent and windows all change sizes.

Searching the problem also gave me a Manjaro forums thread that supposedly has a fix, but I haven’t tested it yet…

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