TL;DR: I freshly installed Fedora 43 KDE on a new drive in a new laptop three times but it crashed/hung on boot with a black screen. Installing Fedora 43 Workstation (GNOME) worked. I then installed KDE & SDDM and it has continued to work. Why? What happened with the KDE installs? Hi. I just had an…

[image] Lionel Mandrake: TL;DR: I freshly installed Fedora 43 KDE on a new drive in a new laptop three times but it crashed/hung on boot with a black screen. Installing Fedora 43 Workstation (GNOME) worked. I then installed KDE & SDDM and it has continued to work. Why? What happened with the KDE…

Thanks! It looks as though the bits on my USB drive are dated October 2025, so that could be a red flag. The Thinkpad does have an Nvidia GPU installed but the Intel iGPU is the default so the Plymouth handoff issue sounds less likely, and there’s no external monitor. However, the Thinkpad did appe…

I flashed the USB drive with the latest Fedora 43 KDE bits and reinstalled the OS, keeping user data and exactly the same thing. System starts to boot and then crashes hard.

I did manage to catch a red line in the output when booting: something to do with unrecognized JEDEC 1d bytes (capture is blurry; 2nd attempt). The Thinkpad has the latest BIOS (1.39) but I did upgrade the memory to 64GB Crucial DDR5-5600, allegedly the same speed supported from the factory. There a…

I swapped the new memory for the original: exactly the same behavior.

I swapped out the NVMe SSD for a new one and installed Arch. It’s working: GNOME, Hyprland and KDE. Just no idea what’s going on with the Fedora 43 KDE installation on this machine.

I seem to recall there may have been an issue with booting some machines with f43 kde that was solved by removing rhgb from the kernel command line by editing that from the grub menu. Don’t know if that may be the issue but worth a try and cannot hurt.

Thanks. I did see that, but only after I’d managed to boot with Arch (KDE). I have the M.2 drive with the re-broken KDE 43 install so I could give it a try. It has the feel of a video problem given the black screen, but the machine does crash which is unexpected. Also, I don’t believe the usual Nvid…

I reinstalled the F43 KDE SSD and removed rhgb from the relevant grub line and rebooted. It didn’t change the behavior. Now trying yet another F43 install but I’m not anticipating anything different. After a couple of system updates running Arch I got similar behavior - black screen at boot, no SDD…

I’ve reinstalled KDE 43 Workstation over the previous installation then installed KDE and SDDM over that. It appears to be working like a charm (again). One thing I have noticed, and I don’t know how salient this is: with the Workstation install the system boots straight into the Fedora screen, no …

Fedora 43 KDE Installation failures on a Thinkpad P1 Gen 6

Ask Fedora

pg-tips (P G) January 21, 2026, 4:53pm 3

If you installed from the original Fedora 43 KDE ISO, you may have fallen foul of this issue.

Installing the latest KDE packages using dnf will have given you an up-to-date system including the fixes to that issue. (So would an install from the Network Install ISO or from the latest respin ISO, probably.)

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Fedora 43 KDE Installation failures on a Thinkpad P1 Gen 6

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