Password auth failing randomly on Lock Screen

[sepulworld]

Anyone else having this issue. My computer will go into the lock screen. I entered the password which I know is 100% correct but it says authentication failed. I'll try multiple times.

Eventually reboot the computer and things are fine after that.

Issue will happen again after some random amount of time (days or weeks for me).

I'm on a Beelink SER 8

[petarm]

I have just faced the same issue.

[aneksz]

This happens to me on login as well, not only the lock screen. After several attempts, it eventually works. I've disabled the idle lock completely for the same reason, as it was happening on the lock screen too.

[dotsilva]

I faced a similar issue, but it was in terminal, i knew it was the correct password, but it failed, so i typed it in plain text and ctrl+shif+c / ctrl+shift+v it and still failed. Then i restarted the laptop and it worked again.

[aneksz]

My issue is the encryption, it seems to get corrupt for some reason. Since I'm using a PC and not a laptop, I've installed a fresh minimal copy of Arch, without the encryption and then installed Omarchy. Which disables the need for a password login, and loads Omarchy automatically.

[sepulworld]

What service is in charge of idle lock? Maybe we need to check issue tracker there

[sepulworld]

Looks like hypridle. Maybe there are some clues in the logs

https://wiki.hypr.land/Hypr-Ecosystem/hypridle/

Hopefully the reboot doesn't clear the logs. Assuming systemCTL controls it. So logs should be there. I'll dig around and see if I find anything.

[aneksz]

I've changed this line in hypridle.conf inhibit_sleep = 3 to 0 which disables it. I've also stopped hypridle from starting in the hyprland.conf just in case.

[mlive1992]

I also have the same issue and it is happens on both lockscreen and terminal randomly for me!

[sepulworld]

Let's document how to turn up trace or debug mode on hypridle and hyprlock. Then if we all flip it on, maybe we'll catch some information in the logs after a reboot.

[paul-fornage]

I had this happen once too, but I use Omarchy on 3 machines all day, so it can't be common. I actually had someone else try the password and they failed too. Fixed after a nervous reboot.

Have not had it happen in terminal/sudo

[dotsilva]

The random failing happened to me today again and while typing the password very carefully something came to my mind "what if for some reason it is trying to read the Enter as part of the password and because this it fails?" i have not the technical knowledge to investigate, but i would like to contribute my 2 cents with this hypothesis. Anyway, it is not something that happen very often and the reboot fixed it each time.

[mrdrbrdr]

I Think i know why This happens. What language have you mapped to your keyboard?

I’ve mapped Danish to laptops keyboard, but when I’m either on lock screen or the Linux booting from a USB, it is consistently mapped to English.

this results in special characters not being consistent, and hence your pc won’t accept your password

[paul-fornage]

I thought of this too, but I am on US only, and it still doesn't explain the inconsistent nature of the problem.

If everyone else has international keyboards, I won't rule out me being slow in the head or some other problem in my case, but I don't think this is the case.

[dotsilva]

I Think i know why This happens. What language have you mapped to your keyboard?

I’ve mapped Danish to laptops keyboard, but when I’m either on lock screen or the Linux booting from a USB, it is consistently mapped to English.

this results in special characters not being consistent, and hence your pc won’t accept your password

It is possible too, but not because of the English part. The thing is my "kb_layout" is "br" and i am used to use caps:lock instead of shift while typing password, but in Omarchy defaults the caps key is compose for emojis, so it is possible, at least in my case.

[jcarlosbecker]

Having the same problem...waiting for solution....

[Wistyyy]

did you find any?

[topazrn]

I experienced this problem immediately after restarting my system following the upgrade to v3.0.1. I was also unable to log in on the second TTY. To rule out a keyboard layout issue, I typed my password in the username prompt and confirmed it was not the cause. A subsequent restart resolved the problem, and I am now able to log in successfully.

[dotsilva]

In my case was the caps key, confirming the theory commented above! Yesterday i was failing the login password, so i typed carefully and it still failed, then i decided to test this and instead of caps look i choose shift for caps letters and it worked, but i would like to say i made a mistake in my other comment, the caps thing is not from my keyboard layout, its because i changed it from the emoji stuff to caps:lock and when the system decides to use the defaults, it comes to its default emoji thing and my password fails, so, at least for my case, this mystery seems to be solved.

[cellexec]

Also have this problem. Currently i've disabled it, til we know how to fix it... :/

[cellexec]

BTW! I might figure it out.... 🎉

My password has multiple symbols or uppercase letters, that need to press Shift. However if multiple symbols/letters in sequence use the Shift key, it sort of get "consumed".

What does that mean?

Imagine your password is:

Password!!

Pressing Shift(and hold it) for both !, this password becomes:

Password!1

So to make it work, I needed to hold & release the Shift key for each symbol/letter again.

Hope this helps :)

[mjschlot]

This solved it for me. If I lifted the shift between each character requiring shift, then I could login.

[AV3RG]

The caps lock or shift key is not the issue, my purely alphanumeric passwords are also failing

[kgn]

Update: running faillock --user $USER --reset fixed this me. The other issue I ran into is that I must have messed up my sudo password when I first setup Omarchy, I reset it and now my login and sudo passwords are different. My login password works on the login screen (after reset), but my sudo password works on the lock screen. So if anyone else has accidentally set their sudo password to something different than their login password they will not be able to "login" on the lock screen because it expects the sudo password.

---

I am running into this too. If I leave my computer and it gets to the password screen there is nothing I can do except restart, and then the same password works on that login screen.

For me, it is 100% failure, I cannot log back in with out rebooting.

[czlowiek488]

Omarchy 3.2.2 issue still exists.
Pressing Ctrl+alt+F2 and then Ctrl+alt+F1 works for temporary workaround.

[karatekaneen]

Are you using some other than the default keyboard layout? If so, take a look at my other reply in the main thread

[tighthead3]

I ran into this issue today (happened in past as well) - correct password rejected on hyprlock, had to reboot to fix it. I had CC review and fix it

Root cause: PAM faillock. I saw 8-9 failed attempts before my correct password stopped working. My habit is to hit spacebar to wake the screen, then backspace to clear any input before typing my password. Without ignore_empty_input = true, those spacebar presses were being submitted as empty password attempts. Once I hit 10 failures, faillock kicked in and locked me out.

Fix (by Claude AI):
Added ignore_empty_input = true to the input-field section in ~/.config/hypr/hyprlock.conf:

input-field {
...
ignore_empty_input = true
}

This prevents empty/accidental key presses from counting as failed password attempts.

Also added a recovery alias in case it happens again:
alias unlock-reset='faillock --user $(whoami) --reset'
If locked out, switch to TTY (Ctrl+Alt+F2), log in, run unlock-reset, then return to the graphical session without rebooting.

[AV3RG]

This AI slop is not the reason why the bug is happening, please stop posting anything that an LLM provided you!

[avelkov]

The ignore empty field solution is valid, whether provided by ai or the manual reading of hyprland docs. Since implementing this a few weeks back I have not had the issue repeat itself.

On December 8, 2025, Muhammad Haroon Arshad ***@***.***> wrote: This AI slop is not the reason why the bug is happening, please stop posting anything that an LLM provided you!

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1469 (comment) 15199822>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe- auth/AHF3V3KOOFREHZUUKGCKNSD4AWSTTAVCNFSM6AAAAACFX6T7KWVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTKMJZHE4DEMQ>. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[a-monteiro]

I just ran into this (but when trying to sudo) on a brand new install

[dhh]

Did you think you had any bad password entries? Or it was just bust from the first sudo?

[a-monteiro]

I definitely had bad password entries before running faillock --user $USER --reset but I can't be absolutely sure they were just consequences of not being able to sudo.

[goviedodev]

The first install, Ive installed with root prompt, failed misserably, my password were just fine, because ive checked via terminal, with sudo su and sudo

[OldJobobo]

Yeah I get this most often now when trying to sudo. Constantly have to open a new term and su the reset the fail lock. Really frustrating. John S. Brown, LMT Body Legend Massage - 15315 1st Ave. NE, Duvall, WA 98019

…

On Wed, Dec 10, 2025 at 8:44 AM André ***@***.***> wrote: I just ran into this (but when trying to sudo) on a brand new install — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1469 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABT2KQ6YDKK4VXM7AMK6R34BBEWNAVCNFSM6AAAAACFX6T7KWVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTKMRSGIYTIMA> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[DarioHefti]

same issue here. login in initially no problem. lock screen login does not work and i also have capital letters in the password.
reboot and everything works again. happened to me on a couple of occasions.

[DarioHefti]

i have just updated today and now the issue does not arise anymore. seems to be resolved in my case.

[shojib116]

was having the same problem and the added this line at the top of /etc/pam.d/hyprlock

#%PAM-1.0

all seems to be working now!

[adeleyemosh]

I’m experiencing the same issue. I’ve tried everything I can think of, but the problem is still there.

I commented out the pam_faillock lines in /etc/pam.d/system-auth using the GNOME text editor. When saving, I was prompted for my password, which worked, and I was able to save the file and reboot the system.

After logging back in, I can now log in again whenever the system gets locked, but I still can’t run any sudo commands.

At this point, I’m stuck between two options:

• Commenting out the pam_faillock lines lets me log in after lockouts, but sudo still doesn’t work.
• Leaving the lines uncommented means I have to restart the system to log in, and sudo still doesn’t work anyway.

So either way, I’m unable to use sudo.

[kgn]

I haven't tested this yet, but I have a theory about what might be happening.

When you go through the Omarchy setup steps, I believe it only sets up the login credentials. It doesn't set the sudo password. Then the sudo password is set the first time you use sudo.

The lock screen uses the sudo password, not the login password.

So I think if you enter your password incorrectly the first time you're at the lock screen, it then actually sets that password as the sudo password. So then if you enter your login password correctly, it doesn't let you back in because it's now different than the sudo password.

Again, I haven't tested this theory fully, but based on what I'm seeing, I think this might be what's happening to people (including myself).

[ryanrhughes]

We see the user, sudo, and LUKS password during install. The hyprlock screen should be looking for the user password.

In the most recent update, we added a couple of things that should help to alleviate this issue by blocking null submissions and increasing the failure count to lockout.

[elynch303]

i recently starting having this issue for the last 2 days happens on lock screen and with sudo i know the password is correct but will fail multiple times before taking it. i have tried resetting my user password and encryption password no luck the only one that seams to have go a bit better was my ssh passphrase i do have special chars and uppercase chars so do use shift key but even if i go really slow and confirm i am not holding the shift key the issue still persists hope we can find a solution to this.

[OldJobobo]

I nomlogger get the lock screen issue but I constantly get sudompassword fails. Have to go in as root do faillock reset and then good. I am not failing login attempts. There is no open ports and no ssh attempts.

…

On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 7:08 AM Evan Lynch ***@***.***> wrote: i recently starting having this issue for the last 2 days happens on lock screen and with sudo i know the password is correct but will fail multiple times before taking it. i have tried resetting my user password and encryption password no luck the only one that seams to have go a bit better was my ssh passphrase i do have special chars and uppercase chars so do use shift key but even if i go really slow and confirm i am not holding the shift key the issue still persists hope we can find a solution to this. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1469 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABT2KVB2L2TOLCCYYKQORT4KNMHHAVCNFSM6AAAAACFX6T7KWVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTKNZQG42DAMY> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[elynch303]

this is not fixing the issue for me

[mlabbe]

This happened to me. I suspect that kb_options = compose:caps is the culprit, possibly while using non-US keyboard layout. I use dvorak. I disabled this kb_options line.

I believe this is hyprland issue, as I was able to reproduce it partially after a reboot on the normal desktop. In that environment, changing the active window twice allowed me to type again until I pressed a modifier key.

[erkanokyay]

Interesting, I had this issue in the past but it was solved for me, i believe by an omarchy update sometime in 2025.

I just started getting the Issue again a few days ago and i also changed my hyprland config a few days ago to include kb_options = caps:super. So i can correlate it with that option as well. I use a US (qwerty) Layout.

I will remove this option now, to see if the issue will disappear.

Note: I do not use Caps when entering the password. Always L&R Shift.

[isolonenko]

Started experiencing this issue too after updating to 3.5.1. Not sure which one was before, but I suppose ~3.2.

Sudo is not working unless I unblock it via faillock --user $USER --reset but it is required every time I need to use sudo.

Also, if I don't turn off auto lock when idle, PC can be only rebooted as lock screen has the same issue, not accepting pwd

Is there any workaround?

[isolonenko]

Update on my case: seems I had some of the widgets in the waybar triggering faillock as they were trying to access sudo with interval of 5s. I fixed those and now the issue is gone

[GorlikItsMe]

I found I installed custom waybar scripts and they was using sudo inside. I fixed that custom scripts (removed sudo) and now all works! THanks! @isolonenko

[Douk1NG]

Still happening.., solution? Just press shit for mayus, 😴 at least a small badge to guide people no? Anyways...

[matiasbarbosa]

I'm having this same issue.
My system was originally on the Edge Channel, and I switched it to Stable as it finished, I rebooted the computer and was unable to log in again.. using the same password I had on the Edge channel.

My password is just a bunch of numbers, so I don't think it's a keyboard layout issue

Well, im here on snapshot that was took an hour before