Comment # 38 on bug 1020283 from Thiago Macieira

After the upgrade to 4.9.8: I am still dropped to a text mode screen with no
password prompt. But this time, Alt+F7 did switch to a VT with plymouth's
graphical password prompt.

I need a couple more boots to confirm that this is the new normal behaviour. 

As I previously noted, I had tried this before and it had not worked. And
before this problem had happened, the graphical password prompt only appeared
once every couple of boots. Most of the time, I used to get a full-screen text
mode password prompt (that is not the one you get when you boot in "single").
So it's possible that the text mode password prompt is still failing, but I was
lucky on this boot that the graphical one was available.

I have another laptop that hasn't been updated since this problem began (4.9.0
kernel) and I can perform debugging in it, if necessary. It does have the
problem of the password prompt being full-screen text instead of graphical,
which is why I can confidently say that the text-mode password problem has been
affecting OpenSUSE for at least 3 years.