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IDProjectCategoryView StatusLast Update
0009828Kali LinuxKali Package Bugpublic2026-09-16 01:54
ReporterLiekedaeler Assigned Toarnaudr  
PrioritynormalSeverityminorReproducibilityhave not tried
Status resolvedResolutionfixed 
Summary0009828: Kali Plasma version does not come up with login screen, but TTY login instead. sddm is not enabled.
Description

When installing a Kali Linux using the netinst ISO (note that the following issue does not occur with the "standard" ISO) and choosing KDE Plasma as the desktop environment, the resulting Kali installation only comes up with a TTY login. The issue can be fixed with a simple sudo systemctl enable sddm --now.

The resulting install does not have sddm enabled. Neither is the display-manager.service symlink created. To me this strongly suggests sddm is simply never enabled, but I can't tell why that is the case.
The issue only occurs with the netinst ISO and has been introduced within the last 2 months (old VMs from before then didn't have the issue). Unfortunately I do not have enough old VMs to further narrow down the time window. There is a chance it has something to do with the bump to Plasma 6.6, which introduces Plasma Login Manager (see: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/PlasmaLoginManager). Though to my knowledge sddm should remain the default and this should not cause any issues.

Please do let me know if you need any further info.

Activities

Liekedaeler

Liekedaeler

2026-09-08 09:51

reporter   ~0021992

I just tested again to see if anything changed within the last month after my initial report. The issue still persists. Have you had the chance to look into it yet?

arnaudr

arnaudr

2026-09-09 05:40

manager   ~0021993

I can reproduce the issue. I'm trying to understand why sddm is not enabled automatically.

arnaudr

arnaudr

2026-09-11 00:36

manager   ~0021998

Last edited: 2026-09-16 01:53

Hello, it should be fixed, can you please retry when you have a moment?

To clarify, the offline installer will be fixed with the next weekly build (next Monday). But the offline net installer should be fixed already by now.

Liekedaeler

Liekedaeler

2026-09-15 10:15

reporter   ~0022002

I got around to testing it yesterday. Looks good now. Thanks a lot for fixing :)

If I may, I've got one more adjacent question: I mentioned the Plasma Login Manager in my report and was wondering what the plan is for Kali here. The problem I'm seeing is that many hypervisors struggle with Wayland (usually copy paste is broken). So the current fix is to switch to X11. However PLM will drop support for X11 as far as I understand it, so this fix will no longer be possible. Hence it'll be impossible to get copy paste to work in most hypervisors. I couldn't find any discussion on that yet, but it should become relevant pretty soon

arnaudr

arnaudr

2026-09-16 01:52

manager   ~0022003

many hypervisors struggle with Wayland (usually copy paste is broken)

If you have something more precise than that, please open a bug report. We don't have access to all the hypervisors or setup that exist out there, so I can't promise we can do something about it. But if we can reproduce your bug, then we can probably fix it. We'll do our best.

Generally speaking, GNOME switched to Wayland long ago, KDE also switched, and XFCE has started to work on it. X11 is not coming back. So if ever some hypervisors need some work to support Wayland, then your best bet is that they'll work on it, sooner rather than later. Open bug reports on their side if it's their fault ;)

arnaudr

arnaudr

2026-09-16 01:54

manager   ~0022004

Closing as fixed. Thanks for reporting this issue.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
2026-08-10 12:42 Liekedaeler New Issue
2026-08-20 11:14 daniruiz Assigned To => arnaudr
2026-08-20 11:14 daniruiz Status new => assigned
2026-09-08 09:51 Liekedaeler Note Added: 0021992
2026-09-09 05:40 arnaudr Note Added: 0021993
2026-09-11 00:36 arnaudr Note Added: 0021998
2026-09-15 10:15 Liekedaeler Note Added: 0022002
2026-09-16 01:52 arnaudr Note Added: 0022003
2026-09-16 01:53 arnaudr Note Edited: 0021998
2026-09-16 01:54 arnaudr Note Added: 0022004
2026-09-16 01:54 arnaudr Status assigned => resolved
2026-09-16 01:54 arnaudr Resolution open => fixed