Qubes installation frozen

And un-sticking it with kernel-latest

John Skiles Skinner
September 6, 2025

Today I installed Qubes for the first time! Here are symptoms of a problem I encountered. The solution was to reinstall with the kernel-latest option rather than the default.

Problems I saw

Installing Qubes onto a Framework laptop from a USB drive I encountered a few different versions of a frozen or stalled screen. Freezing happened after initial setup step. Upon reboot and entering my disk password it would freeze again. Here are variations I saw:

  1. Text output getting stuck just after this message:

    Started accounts-daemon.service - Accounts Service

  2. A progress bar, which appears to indicate the disk unencrypting, freezing after reaching 100%

  3. A screen totally black except for a single flashing white line (a cursor?) at the very left edge of the screen, upper corner

My solution

To solve the problem, I booted again from the USB drive to reinstall Qubes. At the installer screen I picked:

Install Qubes OS Rx.x.x using kernel-latest (x.x.x-x.qubes.fcxx)

(Note that my previous, non-working installation was, per the instructions, done instead with the "test media and install" option from this screen.)

While reinstalling with kernel-latest I saw a warning that free hard drive space for the reinstall was unavailable. I was guided to delete and reclaim space from the prior, nonworking installation of Qubes with the "delete all" button — but obviously don't do this if you have anything of value on your hard drive. After completing the reinstallation, I was able to use the Qubes desktop.

I think this works because the newer kernal supports newer hardware. In particular some GPU or display-related hardware appears to have been the hitch in this case. This solution came from apparatus on the Qubes OS forum, so thank you to that user.