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Shortwave7000

Member

Registered: 2026-02-10

Posts: 1

[SOLVED] Missing services after switching display managers

Edit: classic, a reboot fixed all of my issues. I believe that using niri-session as my launch command rather than niri fixed my issue, probably by configuring the environment for me. Turns out you need to reboot to make greetd changes stick, simply exiting my current niri session to get back to the greeter wasn't enough. I guess I'll leave this post up in case anyone has a similar issue.

Original post:

Hello, I was using LightDM (greeter: lightdm-gtk-greeter) to start Niri, and decided to switch to greetd (greeter: tuigreet) for something more lightweight. I'm now missing some functionality and trying to figure out what LightDM did that was load bearing and how can I replicate that functionality without switching back to LightDM?

Core issues:
1. My notification daemon, mako, is no longer running at startup. This "just worked" before when I installed Niri and booted into it via LightDM. Some output:

> systemctl --user status mako

○ mako.service - Lightweight Wayland notification daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/mako.service; disabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: inactive (dead)
       Docs: man:mako(1)

Feb 09 20:50:43 caspian systemd[3069]: Condition check resulted in Lightweight Wayland notification daemon being skipped.
Feb 09 20:50:43 caspian systemd[3069]: Starting Lightweight Wayland notification daemon...
Feb 09 20:50:43 caspian systemd[3069]: mako.service: Skipped due to 'exec-condition'.

I know I can manually start mako from my Niri config, but I shouldn't need to -- I want to figure out why it worked automatically before. Searched and couldn't figure out what "exec-condition" is mentioned above.

2. Clicking links in Discord doesn't do anything. This also "just worked" before when I was using LightDM. I surmised this has something to do with "XDG Desktop Portal" and got some output immediately after clicking a link in Discord:

> systemctl --user status xdg-desktop-portal

Feb 09 21:39:40 caspian /usr/lib/xdg-desktop-portal[4701]: A backend call failed: Could not activate remote peer 'org.freedesktop.impl.portal.desktop.gtk': startup job f>
Feb 09 21:39:40 caspian /usr/lib/xdg-desktop-portal[4701]: A backend call failed: Could not activate remote peer 'org.freedesktop.impl.portal.desktop.gtk': startup job f>
Feb 09 21:41:38 caspian /usr/lib/xdg-desktop-portal[4701]: Backend call failed: Could not activate remote peer 'org.freedesktop.impl.portal.desktop.gtk': startup job fai>
Feb 09 21:51:03 caspian /usr/lib/xdg-desktop-portal[4701]: Failed to ReadAll() from Settings implementation: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Could>
Feb 09 21:51:03 caspian /usr/lib/xdg-desktop-portal[4701]: A backend call failed: Could not activate remote peer 'org.freedesktop.impl.portal.desktop.gtk': startup job f>
Feb 09 21:51:03 caspian /usr/lib/xdg-desktop-portal[4701]: Failed to close session implementation: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Could not activ>
Feb 09 21:52:58 caspian chromium.desktop[23254]: [23254:23254:0209/215258.609405:ERROR:ui/ozone/platform/x11/ozone_platform_x11.cc:256] Missing X server or $DISPLAY
Feb 09 21:52:58 caspian chromium.desktop[23254]: [23254:23254:0209/215258.609432:ERROR:ui/aura/env.cc:257] The platform failed to initialize.  Exiting.
Feb 09 21:52:59 caspian chromium.desktop[23287]: [23287:23287:0209/215259.058183:ERROR:ui/ozone/platform/x11/ozone_platform_x11.cc:256] Missing X server or $DISPLAY
Feb 09 21:52:59 caspian chromium.desktop[23287]: [23287:23287:0209/215259.058212:ERROR:ui/aura/env.cc:257] The platform failed to initialize.  Exiting.
lines 1-21/21 (END)

Lastly here is my entire greetd config:

[terminal]
vt = 1

[default_session]
command = "tuigreet --time --remember --cmd niri-session"

# The user to run the command as. The privileges this user must have depends
# on the greeter. A graphical greeter may for example require the user to be
# in the `video` group.
user = "greeter"

Thanks in advance!

Last edited by Shortwave7000 (2026-02-11 02:17:51)

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 73,153

Re: [SOLVED] Missing services after switching display managers

Edit: classic, a reboot fixed all of my issues.

\o/
Please always remember to mark resolved threads by editing your initial posts subject - so others will know that there's no task left, but maybe a solution to find.
Thanks.

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