Arch Linux

mcloaked

Member

From: Yorkshire, UK

Registered: 2012-02-02

Posts: 1,307

plasma desktop with no xorg, including the display manager?

I have been running the plasma desktop as a Wayland session, with no xorg applications at all for almost a year, and that is now problem free and is my daily desktop now.  However sddm does use xorg, and I was wondering if anyone knows a replacement display manager that can run with no xorg packages at all, instead of sddm, that will still start the plasma desktop in Wayland properly. The plasma desktop is now a pretty polished set of packages for running pure Wayland (and I also run Thunderbird, Firefox and Chrome without xwayland inside the plasma desktop), so it would be really nice to be completely free of any xorg dependencies, since xorg is largely now a dead project. sddm in git in principle can be run in Wayland alone, but when I tried that some months ago there were bugs, and I had to revert to the relased version of sddm in the normal arch repos.  Any input on this would be valuable, and I wonder if there is any work currently going on to release a Wayland only display manager (but not gdm with its huge number of dependencies on gnome packages)

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Mike C

arojas

Developer

From: Spain

Registered: 2011-10-09

Posts: 2,236

Re: plasma desktop with no xorg, including the display manager?

Regardless of the display manager, Plasma itself doesn't support running without Xorg yet

WorMzy

Administrator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 12,993

Website

Re: plasma desktop with no xorg, including the display manager?

Not sure what bugs you encountered, but sddm-git works fine for me as a wayland-based display manager. I had some initial teething issues since I use a dvorak-uk keyboard layout, and sddm defaults to qwerty-us, but I managed to resolve that by setting `GreeterEnvironment=QT_WAYLAND_SHELL_INTEGRATION=layer-shell,XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=gb,XKB_DEFAULT_VARIANT=dvorak` in my /etc/sddm.conf.d/10-wayland.conf config file.

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mcloaked

Member

From: Yorkshire, UK

Registered: 2012-02-02

Posts: 1,307

Re: plasma desktop with no xorg, including the display manager?

I also had problems initially with a UK keyboard but resolved that - but there were other issues - such as https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/1537. I could not get past the issue of the sddm greeter not going into power save if nobody was logged in.

I had a lot of trouble trying to get the laptop touchpad to get tapping to work - in the end I switched from kwin to weston as the compositor and had a weston config that enabled touchpad tapping.

This was achieved by in sddm config:
CompositorCommand=/usr/bin/weston --config /etc/weston/weston.ini

and

/etc/weston/weston.ini
[libinput]
enable-tap=true
middle-button-emulation=true

[keyboard]
keymap_layout=gb

[shell]
locking=false

But I still could not get around the issues of the sddm greeter not going into power save - though once in plasma desktop Wayland session the lockscreen worked fine.

I ended up with a line in the [General] section of sddm.conf having:
GreeterEnvironment=QT_WAYLAND_SHELL_INTEGRATION=layer-shell,KWIN_XKB_DEFAULT_KEYMAP=gb

So I did get the touchpad to work eventually but then having got sddm greeter to accept the password correctly with the gb keyboard, I tried to logout so see if I could log back in under sddm wayland - however the greeter was no longer visible in VT1 which then showed only a blinking cursor and nothing else.

I also saw that Fedora is planning to have sddm Wayland by default for their next release (37) later this year: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ … ultForSDDM

Last edited by mcloaked (2022-08-07 17:56:55)

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Mike C