Hello. My old Thinkpad T510 has been showing me a garbled, but usable, sddm login screen. That has been an annoyance, but I*can live with it.

More recently, though, after I*enter my password and the laptop continues to start Plasma, the screen sometimes boots normally, but sometimes shows another garbled screen and freezes.

I'm trying to troubleshoot. Looking in the `/var/log/gpu-manager.log`, I see many lines that say "can't access /run/u-d-c-nvidia-drm-was-loaded file" and finally:
"Takes 10000ms to wait for nvidia udev rules completed.
Single card detected
Nothing to do"

What other logs should I*be looking at? `/var/log/Xorg.0.log` looks like it should be relevant, but it's a lot to sift through.

Also, is this the right forum for this sort of question? I'm not sure if this is a KDE*problem, an X11 problem, or a ThinkPad problem.

Any help in troubleshooting or finding enough info to ask an intelligent question in the appropriate venue would be appreciated! Thanks!

From "About This System":
Operating System: KDE neon 5.27
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.10
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.114.0
Qt Version: 5.15.12
Kernel Version: 6.5.0-18-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5 CPU M 520 @ 2.40GHz
Memory: 7.6 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: NVA8
Manufacturer: LENOVO
Product Name: 43142MU
System Version: ThinkPad T510

Given that you say this is an older machine, the first thing I recommend is to boot to a Live CD/USB of some other (ideally not Debian-related) distro to rule out the possibility that it's a hardware problem with the display.

Thanks for this! I made a Fedora 39 Plasma Live USB, and it worked PERFECTLY. Boot, Plasma startup, the Plasma desktop itself, SDDM, all worked just fine.

Also, it was a Wayland session, which has been problematic for me in the past. But it was fine.

Of course, a Live USB would have "Make this work on ANY computer" settings. I think that's what I want!

All of this now leads me to think that maybe my problem is broken configurations, since I haven't done a re-install in YEARS.

Now I get to figure out what to do about it.

Thank you!