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?
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.