[Cialug] requesting help for troubleshooting

[Eyüp Hakan Duran]

Dear all,

I am a linux enthusiast without a technical background. I have been using
various flavors of linux as my primary OS since 2005, but I still feel I
have lots to learn. I would like to ask your help in troubleshooting my
following problem.

I have a computer which I use both as a server and workstation. Host OS is
Manjaro linux with 2 guest VMs on it. I noticed that if I leave the machine
on SDDM login screen for prolonged duration (>1 week), it usually freezes,
needing a reboot, which is hard to do remotely. Therefore, I decided to
keep it at runlevel 3 (multi-user.target in systemd language) and only
convert it to runlevel 5 (graphical.target) when I need to use it as a
workstation, which is a few hours a day. The first part of the plan works
well; however, when I try to switch back to graphical.target, something
goes wrong. I have a black screen on tty1 with a responsive but useless
mouse cursor. Neither KDE5 nor i3 launches when tried separately. tty2-7
continue to be usable. Killing X server by ctrl+alt+backspace doesn't fix
the problem. The only thing does is a reboot. Since both KDE5 and i3 fails
to launch, I suspect it is an X-server problem, or may even be due to
nvidia module/driver, but these are my speculations. I tried "journalctl -e
--user" command, but the information there did not seem to be meaningful to
me and probably indicated X crash.

I am good at following instructions and very curious about figuring out the
underlying problem here, if you are patient enough to deal with me. If I
can solve this with your help and the machine continues to freeze weekly
afterwards, that would obviously be very frustrating, and another problem
to figure out, but I can only take one step at a time.

Thank you so much in advance for your suggestions and patience with me.

Hakan Duran