So this is completely on me:

I installed Arch
I installed the plasma desktop without any additional programs
I installed sddm and told it to launch plasma desktop
I rebooted

And it did what I told it to do perfectly:

I’m now within plasma desktop.
I have no terminal emulator installed, so no way of accessing a command line from within the GUI.
Whenever I reboot, I get put back into plasma desktop.
I tried to switch to a different tty with Ctrl+Alt+F-keys but that key combo seems to be used for additional desktop sessions instead (shows me the sddm login again).
I tried creating a shell script that launches pacman and installs a terminal, but I can’t, since I don’t have a text editor installed.

Help!

[Edit: Solved. I was able to go to a different tty after disabling function keys]

  • preciouspupp@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    Alt-F2 or similar maybe gets you a run dialog or alternatively pass the “init=/bin/bash” option to the kernel.

    • superkret@feddit.deOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Alt-F2 launches a program search window.
      It seems the KDE folks have hijacked all the standard key combos.
      But that gave me an idea: I might be able to configure key-combos to launch bash commands from within the system setting tools…