Hello everyone,

Some of you may have already noticed: When waking up from the lock screen under Wayland, there are certain conditions under which the system may appear not to respond to password entry.

Good news: We’ve identified the cause! It’s not a graphics driver crash, but rather a classic permission and timing issue between the KDE lock screen (kscreenlocker) and the Linux security module (PAM). Since the lock screen does not find a suitable PAM rule by default, it refuses to unlock, which briefly blocks KWin and the graphics stack.

What the solution will look like

To solve the problem permanently, cleanly, and without “tinkering,” a major architectural improvement is planned for Kader⁴²:

1. Central configuration package: I will convert the existing kader42-hwdb package into a comprehensive “kader42-default-configuration.” The missing PAM configuration for KDE will be integrated directly there. As a result, more and more global settings will migrate from the static ISO filesystem (airootfs) to pacman’s clean package management in the future.
2. The Hook Fix (kader42-hooks): Another important issue concerns the package manager and Initramfs hooks. In the current ISO image, the pacman and mkinitcpio hooks are still buggy in some places (which can lead, among other things, to problems with automatic system startup or kernel rollback). These bugs have already been fixed in the separate “kader42-hooks” package.

As soon as the new package structure is rolled out, these fixed hooks will take effect automatically and ensure that system databases (such as the hwdb) rebuild correctly in the background after updates.

Why it’s taking a few extra days

Since I’m currently in a day clinic and fully focused on my recovery, the build scripts are on hold for now. I simply don’t have the time right now to finalize and test the code for the configuration package.

So, the solution is theoretically set, but it won’t be incorporated into the official repository and the new ISO images until the coming weeks. As soon as the patch is live, you’ll find out about it here, of course!

Thank you very much for your understanding and patience—Kader⁴² is growing up step by step in the background! 😉