TL;DR: When I attempt to log into my account on a fresh install of Fedora 30, the display manager (or maybe some related component) fails. The screen shows the last few lines of terminal output from bootup and brings me back to the login screen. I’m able to login on a non-graphical session just fine.
I’m switching my personal computers back to Fedora after a couple of frustrating months with another distro. I burned a DVD with a copy of the installation image available on the KDE spin page and used a GParted live CD to partition my hard drives. Then I rebooted with the Fedora live CD in place and ran the installer. I selected the partitions I previously created, specified their mount points, and checked the “reformat” and “encrypt” options on all but the /boot/efi and /boot partitions, for which I chose “reformat” only.
I continued the installation and set the root password, didn’t check “Lock down the root account,” and set up my main user account as an administrator (which effectively adds the account to the sudoers file, as I understand it). The installation completed successfully, I rebooted without the live CD, and I was able to enter my encryption password and get to the login screen.
Graphical login fails as I explained at the beginning. If I switch to a non-graphical session I’m able to log in just fine. If I try running sddm
I get an error:
(EE) DAEMON: Failed to read display number from pipe
(EE) DAEMON: Display server failed to start. Exiting
Aborted (core dumped)
I tried updating my system and this still happens with all packages upgraded. I ran the verification process on my live CD before installing and it completed successfully. What would cause this problem?
Update: I’ve been working on this for a few hours and may have figured out what causes the problem, but there doesn’t seem to be an obvious solution. I’ve got three partitions I’d like to mount within my home directory: one for Documents, one for Downloads, and one for a second Documents directory containing lots of old files. I re-ran the installation process but mounted these in /home rather than /home/myuser, and graphical login worked fine afterward. I edited /etc/fstab to mount these inside /home/myuser and Fedora crashed when I rebooted. I’ll have to test this out more tomorrow.