While my migration to Linux has been a joy, overall, some bits of craw sticking still occur. One of my favorites - derogatory - lately has been dealing with Wayland issues. If you don’t know what Wayland is, apart from being yet another bad dev take on naming things after speculative fiction, it’s the replacement for the aging X11 windowing system for Linux GUIs. X11 is long-lived and needs a rest on a farm upstate. Wayland aims to be a simpler, more modern compositing solution for graphical display. Without getting into all of the bullshit from Nvidia keeping things from running smoothly (and they are manifold. Jensen Huang is a cultist freak troll who is sucking on the AI nozzle like it’s giving out absolution during the inquisition), it’s the new hotness, but also the new newness. So it comes with a lot of nits for which to pick.
But this isn’t about that. This is about SOLUTIONS. I have had a number of bad driver updates (vibe coding is for mood rings, you capitalist twunts) cause all manner of problems and Wayland is not easily fixed if it gets in a crappy state. Like Arkansas.
Multimon seems to be one of the leading causes of stress for Wayland users, specifically when coupled with VRR and HDR. Not being able to access your GUI is incredibly frustrating, especially if you just lugged a 12 kilo monitor from the garage and are already sweat-raged. Even though you were the idiot who decided it needed to go behind the box of Christmas tat because it was drier. I’m looking at YOU, me.
Unlike a gigolo with bad aim, I won’t be beating around the bush. Here are a few of the error cases I found myself in. All of them were fixed, ultimately, but temporarily renaming the FONTS folder, of all things, in my home directory. It seems that, particularly in KDE Plasma, there is zero fallback for a font subsystem that can’t load a file. Which seems like a HUGE thing to overlook in testing. Hah, TESTING. Ask your parents, kids.
This assumes that you get your session manager screen with no issue, but the command line terminal path can be used even if you can’t get to your normal sign-in screen. Usually.
After a failed Wayland session launch, if you’re presented with just a blank screen and a cursor, you can usually do one of two things. Jump to another terminal than the one which is handling your graphical session (usually Ctrl + Alt + F4 will get you there, but depending on your configuration you may need to try a few function keys to find one open for interactive login), or log in as root or another user account if you have access to the session manager (login) screen.
Once you’re in a working session, be it CLI or graphical, your next move is to use journalctl to see exactly what’s falling on its face. My favorite way to do this is to tail the log and repeat the failing process. But if jumping back and forth between a failed GUI and a terminal instance sounds like a hassle, you can just use “journalctl -b | grep -i “fail”" at a terminal prompt and sift through the messages. You can add “plasmashell” instead of “fail” or just jump right to the speculation and use “libfontconfig.” My particular error read:
kernel: traps: [ProcID] general protection fault ip:[instruction pointer] sp:[stack pointer] error:0 in libfontconfig.so.1.17.0
Which was then followed by a full stack unwind. Google is worthless. But also in this specific case. Most of the responses to similar issues are, ‘did you read the manual and search every single existing forum post ever made everywhere?’ or ‘me too, can’t help you bro.’ Both of which are just the worst kind of ‘pickme!’ answers to a legitimate problem ever. The font failure seems to get lost in the discourse because the failing module call occurs higher up the execution chain. But, Linux dicks gonna Linux dick.
Once you’ve identified that the font configuration library is having a bad day, locate and rename your USER fonts directory. I’m using an Arch-based distro, so for me it’s in:
/home/
For some distros it’ll be simply /home/
Move the folder to another location temporarily, rename it, or if you’re sassy, just delete it. Log out and return to the graphical session (Ctrl + Alt + F1 or F2 usually), or reboot.
Attempt to log in to the broken session and it SHOULD work if you’re experiencing a corrupt font loading situation. You can then add back fonts a few at a time and see if they cause problems. More often than not, the font folder has been carried over from another place or was managed by a font manager at some point. You may find a number of corrupt or nonworking font formats in the folder. I know that pulling Windows fonts, which had zero issue on a SINGLE monitor setup, wreaked havoc when dual monitors were involved.
I hope this helps someone out there. The internet is garbage thanks to agentic sycophant CEOs who want you and your money to not be friends anymore. Most people just give up and reinstall since when you’re starting out with Linux, that’s a valid troubleshooting step. But the answer was shockingly simple. I just had to self serve the whole thing because the social nature of nerds is one of gatekeeping and ‘trial by fire.’ Best of luck if you’re starting out on this ride!