[SOLVED] display-manager shows as started, but no GUI shown

[mdoko]

I'm having a mind-boggling problem, and I hope someone will have an idea to at least get me looking in the right direction.

Since today, I'm unable to get my desktop environment running. More precisely display-manager seems to fail to start lightdm (or sddm, I tried switching to it), even though rc-service display-manager status claims the service is started.

I can get the desktop environment to show up via startx, but the mouse and keyboard stop working.

The most infuriating thing is that everything was working smoothly for over a year now, and I have not done any major upgrade lately (apart from the switch to python 3.12, but I've done that several weeks ago and had no issues). Everything was fine all yesterday, and I get no display manager today.

The X server does not get started, as evidence by the lack of any kind of logs.

Syslog is not mentioning display-manager at all until I stop the service with rc-service display-manager stop, when it neatly states that the service has been stopped. No mention of it being started after rc-service display-manager start.


SOLVED! The issue was not with display-manager, but with lightdm. I managed to dig up a solution on ArchWiki.

In short, I had to set

[netfab]

Hi,

For sddm I don't know, but for lightdm there is a warning after installation :

[mdoko]

My graphics is AMD, not Nvidia ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[netfab]

Nevertheless probably that the root problem is the same.

Here, with a nvidia GPU, with logind-check-graphical=true I had to manually load the nvidia driver with modprobe after xorg was started by the display-manager service, and then, lightdm is automagically appearing without restarting anything.