However, it does wake up if I switch to another TTY (e.g. ctrl+alt+F4) and lets 
me log on, so it has obviously booted up. If I switch back to TTY 8 from there 
it just shows a blinking cursor (i.e. not SDDM, which is what I'd expect). If I 
reboot from the TTY that lets me log on, the boot process is usually normal and 
leaves me at the SDDM login.

Any tips on how to debug this would be much appreciated.

Since you can switch ttys, this means your computer “properly” booted. So as far as we know, the only culprit is your login manager which failed to start, or started improperly.

For starters you could check, once logged in, if it is actually running or not.

  ps faux | less

will output the whole list of processes on your computer, check it to see if you can find sddm in the list. If not, then it failed to start, so you want to check if the service in charge to start it has been run.

  rc-service sddm status # for openrc
  systemctl status sddm # for systemd

These commands should tell you if the process has been started and failed, or if it never started in the first place. If it started and failed, search for logs, or even try to start it manually. This will give you indications as to why it won’t run.

Otherwise, if it was never run by your service manager, this means something earlier in the dependency tree failed to run. Same solution here: search for logs, `rc-status` will give you the list of running services on your computer and their state for openrc.

Good luck,
Hoël

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