Troubleshooting

Gotchyas that will break fauxput in non-obvious ways.

SDDM with an X11 greeter results in logout on fauxput down

If you’re running SDDM with an X11 greeter, fauxput down (or anything else that destroys a vkms instance) will kick you back to the login screen.

The greeter crashes on the DRM hot-unplug event, taking your session down as collateral.

To check:

loginctl show-session $(loginctl list-sessions --no-legend | awk '/greeter/{print $1}') -p Type
# Type=x11      > affected
# Type=wayland  > safe

The fix is to use SDDM in Wayland mode, or PLM.

Sunshine portal-capture token doesn’t survive an unclean shutdown

When using the Sunshine’s portal backend, after a reboot, Moonlight reconnect re-prompts the portal chooser instead of silently restoring the previous fauxput selection.

If Sunshine shuts down uncleanly, the compositor will ask for a new token on the next connect.

Pick the chooser display before --disable-real-outputs

The xdg-desktop-portal permission dialog appears on the host desktop. If --disable-real-outputs is enabled, there’s nowhere to interact with the modal. On first connect, run fauxput up with just --primary, accept the permissions modal when it appears, and pick fauxput’s virtual output. Subsequent connects auto-restore the choice without the dialog.