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?
You must log in or register to comment.
systemd-analyzeCan tell you about how long thing took to start, and the -blame flag can help pinpoint hangs and so on.
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.
i had some of that too, too many times with Debian 13, I ended up moving to Fedora to try and i dont have those problems any more.
Mine would be some type of config corruption, making a new user it would log in fine,and deleting kde config files from my user would also let me log in instead of a black window.
Also when shuting down some systemctl service would block the stopping 1 minute and 40 seconds or something similar because of some connection issue ( I do not remember the reason well enough to be precise).
This made me decide to seek some other more stable desktop for the time being, and Fedora seems to just work all along.
Change your time servers or add more to the load balanced con, and make sure you don’t have a block on your network for those hosts. You can also set the timeout for that particular service to something shorter so it doesn’t hang, or remove deps that rely on it from the service files.
