My system is running Debian 13, and has been running Debian great for well over a year however, recently when I went to reboot my computer KDE Plasma (X11) froze and didn’t want to log in, I found it odd and rebooted as per usual but it repeated itself yet again.
I jump into another TTY and start checking the journal, nothing out of the ordinary, obviously annoyed I start reinstalling packages.
kde-full, kde-standard, kde-plasma-desktop, sddm, nvidia-driver, linux-generic-headers xorg and so on. No luck. I figured I would give Wayland a try even though a lot of my software still does not support it, and to my surprise loaded up instantly, so I got some hope my system isn’t borked, I tried X11 again but instead of rebooting or shutting down after it froze I just left it to see if anything at all changes and after a while it decided to load my desktop!
So after a few more days of trying to catch something in my journal I finally noticed this 3 minute gap in these entries of my journal.
3/23/26 9:44 PM systemd systemd-timedated.service: Deactivated successfully. 3/23/26 9:45 PM systemd-timesyncd Timed out waiting for reply from 84.16.67.12:123 (2.debian.pool.ntp.org). 3/23/26 9:45 PM systemd-timesyncd Contacted time server 217.147.208.1:123 (2.debian.pool.ntp.org). 3/23/26 9:48 PM systemd Reload requested from client PID 2681 ('startplasma-x11')... 3/23/26 9:48 PM systemd Reloading...
I don’t have much to work off of but I’m guess this is what is kicking my system back in order, is there a way I could reduce the timeout of the above systemd request?
Update
So i manage to capture the time it takes for me to reboot and land back at my desktop, it's roughly ~30 seconds to reboot and land at sddm but another whopping 5-6 minutes to actually load the X11 desktop.
I captured the logs within this time frame to hopefully weed out the issue I'm encountering.
Try
journalctl -xeto get more infoJust as a reality check, disable systemd-timesyncd and verify if that is the problem - tbh, I'd be surprised it's that.
There can be an issue with things like databases holding up the shutdown / reboot (I have an issue with a systemd service waiting for mariadb that I've not found time to resolve)...
I don't use kde, but perhaps there's something there that might help point to the issue.
Well that's interesting,
I ran
journalctl -xeexpecting not to get much of an output however, my log is full of:Appears to be related to my wallpaper, perhaps the KDE Wallpaper Engine plugin i use borked, however i never did mention in the main post but i did backup and reset my desktop environment following Debians documentation and that didn't resolve the hanging issue either so i am hesitant to say the desktop itself is borked, seems more like a dependency that's failing to talk with plasma.
Edit: After doing some digging it appears others have encountered the same kwin error message along with comments of freezing and crashing. Appears to be a driver issue and is patched in 580.xx versions which Debian 13 does not ship on its stable branch.