Plasma Session Menu missing

Ask Fedora
1

After doing in-place upgrade from Fedora 39 to Fedora 41 the login session menu is not showing an option for Plasma so I can get into a KDE desktop.

I’ve had this same computer and doing in-place upgrade for at least 7 years now and happily logging into KDE desktops without problems.

Who knows what files and configurations I may have hand-tweaked over the years.

I’d rather not start over with a fresh install if possible.

The session menu shows a few GNOME options, plus default and custom. but nothing KDE or plasma specific. I can login into a GNOME desktop fine.

any tips?

2

I found similar posts on this subject and tried various things without success.
I can run startplasma-wayland fine

systemctl disable kde; systemctl enable sddm didn’t help
/usr/share/wayland-sessions/plasma.desktop looks ok

what else can I try?

3

I had /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service pointing to kdm.

my solution is:
systemctl disable kdm; systemctl enable sddm

not sure when/why I’ve been using kdm rather than sddm for all these years, but I do like the sddm login screen better.

next problem: I had to move my .bashrc and .bash_profile out of the way. the login for both gnome and plasma was dying with something I don’t know yet.

another problem: systemctl status sddm prints

ddm-helper[1842]: Detected locale "C" with character encoding "ANSI_X3.4-1968", which is not UTF-8.
                                         Qt depends on a UTF-8 locale, and has switched to "C.UTF-8" instead.
                                         If this causes problems, reconfigure your locale. See the locale(1) manual
                                         for more information.
4

for posterity: I was setting DISPLAY=:0 in my .bash_profile . removing that fixed the login hang problem for me