My sddm display manager and all the user sessions as well runs on tty2
When the display server fails to start - like in your case - a restart will be attempted at the next tty → tty3
This fails for you for probably the same reason it wouldn’t run on tty2.
How to find the reason - I currently have no idea except looking through the logs in more detail.
I think you are misinterpreting what happens. While the Plasma lock screen and login screen look very similar, they are two very different processes.
The lock screen is handled by kscreenlocker, which is a process running on top of the Plasma desktop, while the login screen is sddm, which is a process running outside of the Plasma desktop.
As such, the lock screen also inherits all of the logged-in user’s environment variables, whereas the login screen runs with root privileges.
Yes that’s the idea I had. That’s why I believe it’s linked to wayland / X11 issues. After all, this only happens when I log into wayland after boot. If I start an X11 session, user switching works fine. It seems like the system is failing to start an x11 session once wayland is started. In fact SDDM seems completely unable to start once I get into wayland. I can’t log out either. The screen turns black and throws me into raw terminal tty
I cannot use X11 since I need variable resolution scaling on my display setup which wayland supports better. X11 only has that as an experimental option which caused bugs for me before
Well, that pretty much tells me that it’s an Nvidia issue. As you may or may not know, Nvidia does not support Wayland with all of its drivers. The newest proprietary drivers do, but they may have issues on older hardware, and the older Nvidia drivers simply won’t work with Wayland.
So basically, you’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Either you opt for the scaling support of Wayland — in which case you’ll have to use the Open-Source nouveau driver, which does not support 3D acceleration — or you’re stuck with X11, which does not support the scaling you require.
Yay! I managed to fix the issue on my end by configuring sddm to use wayland.
In /etc/sddm.conf.d/01_wayland.conf (I created this file)
[General]
DisplayServer=wayland
The one other snag I caught is that the weston package isn’t preinstalled, which is the default wayland compositor used by sddm. If it doesn’t exist you simply get a black screen.
Is there something here that manjaro could configure better to avoid this problem in the future? I noticed that the default session in the manjaro kde installation was X11 but Wayland is still selectable. I don’t know who / what would change here but it’d be great if sddm could one day be configured to also start in wayland if the user starts their sessions in wayland. If switching between X11 and wayland isn’t smooth (or simply doesn’t work at all), then X11 or Wayland should perhaps be a system-wide global setting instead of one selection in the login screen. Perhaps the installer could ask if you want to pre-configure the system with wayland or X11?
But anyway, I can now switch user! I guess that’s that issue solved but no idea why switching between wayland and x11 is so horribly broken on my system. If a 4080 is already considered an “old card” that’s out of support then that’s very sad indeed
Actually, no, that’s not true. The default Wayland compositor in KDE Plasma (and for sddm) is kwin. weston is an alternative compositor provided by the waylanddevelopers upstream, but it’s not a requirement.
No, because it’s an Nvidia problem, and their drivers are proprietary — even the so-called open ones, because the only thing about them that’s Open-Source is their kernel interface.
This is the default behavior as of Plasma 6.4, and if you then still want to use X11, then you’ll have to install some extra packages.
Is the archlinux wiki wrong then? wiki archlinux org/title/SDDM#Wayland (why can’t i send links??)
Also the greeter didn’t start until I installed weston, then it worked. I had to manually configure it to use kwin according to the wiki now my plasma monitor settings actually apply properly
I would say that it’s incomplete. Several sections of it still pertain to Plasma 5.
Because you are still only at Trust Level 0. Your Trust Level will go up as you become more active on the forum.
One way of adding links is to enclose them in code tags, i.e. put them on a separate line between two lines with three backticks each… 
link goes here
Well, this should be the default behavior as of Plasma 6.4. In Plasma 6.3 it may still require manual intervention.
No, it’s not…
Hint: You already have kwin installed. 
Yes, Wayland will be the default session in the future.
That makes sense.
There is also a setting in the GUI, albeit for automatic login, which I presume defines a similar setting:
In System Settings search for “login screen” and the Login Screen (SDDM) section appears – at the top of that window is a Behaviour button, when clicked it reveals:
Automatically log in: as user: with session: …
here Plasma (Wayland) or Plasma (X11) can be selected.
As said, it’s part of the automatic login dialog, which is why I didn’t mention it earlier.
In any case, good to know the issue is resolved – marking your own post as the topic solution should be fine, in this instance.
Regards.
I find it astonishing that nobody seems to be reading what I write. I was just parrotting the arch wiki. If it’s wrong then don’t shame me for it. And if you’re going to claim against it then also explain why I couldn’t start sddm until I installed weston. If sddm doesn’t use weston, why didn’t it work until I installed it? You’re just counterclaiming without evidence. I provided two pieces of evidence: arch wiki and my own experience of it not working until weston is installed. You just say I’m wrong in a demeaning tone without explaining either. Same way you “hint” that kwin is already installed as if I didn’t know that. This entire thread had a pretty disrespectful tone, same with the other person who just trying to help. If this is how the manjaro community responds to questions and troubleshooting help then I and future users will become weary of interacting. 30 posts yet hardly any of them actually helped to address the issue and just went about shaming / correcting other people.
If you have nothing helpful to say in a help forum then maybe don’t say anything at all
Indeed, but you could’ve put it a little better. For instance you didn’t have to install weston.
Perhaps a quote might’ve helped.
As of SDDM version 0.20, Wayland sessions are listed and can be started from SDDM, but the SDDM greeter itself still runs in X11 mode by default, although an experimental Wayland greeter can be enabled.
- SDDM considers its Wayland support experimental.
- By default
DisplayServer=waylandattempts to use the weston compositor, even if it’s not installed, to use a different Wayland compositor, enter the program and relevant arguments to theCompositorCommandoption as described in #KDE Plasma / KWin, see also sddm.conf(5) for more.
Sometimes threads take a winding route, especially when multiple people have different approaches/opinions, or when information is in doubt.
Correcting isn’t about shaming, it’s about having correct information. Sometimes people get things wrong, sometimes they get corrections wrong too. That’s life.
When communicating over the internet we lose tone-of-voice and body-language. Please try to remain neutral when reading things, it’s easy to insert a negative tone-of-voice that wasn’t in the head of the author.
Everyone here is a volunteer, they want to provide the benefit of their knowledge and experience to help others. They’re not here to make people feel bad.
Hopefully we’re now all on the same page, and can agree to respect each other.
Ah, I see. Sorry, I didn’t see that bit earlier.
Either way, weston is not required by anything and would not be installed by default on a KDE Plasma installation.
❯ pacman -Sii weston | grep 'Required By\|Optional For'
Required By : None
Optional For : None