No nvidia, no proprietary drivers, but also no kde either (unless xfce is somehow kde in disguise).
echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP
XFCE
So that’s not what I was expecting (neither Gnome nor KDE), but several utilites say “gnome” this or that, and one or two sites I’ve visited suggested just to see if all your apps start with K* that will tell you if you’re running KDE or not ;).
having installed plasma-session-wayland I saw the option to change to “plasma 25th anniversary edition” with either wayland/xorg, also the original xfce offering. Either plasma session resulted in a nearly black screen, with a small gear icon in the middle, very little else.
Since all flavors of ubuntu seem to be shipping “wayland native” these days, wondering if I just need to wait a while and Manjaro will follow suit?
Here’s my screenfetch, I am running the linux-surface kernel as you see:
Thank you @anon59284200! I did as you suggested, and am now wading the murky waters of DE, DM, WM, Compositor, etc., etc., to up my status to “apprentice noob” from “Shameless N00b”! Can you explain where to change my DM (hopefully a GUI) and where to determine which DM comes with the KDE Manjaro installation? I have seen the non-graphical version, when installing e.g., LightDM, but I have also seen screen captures of a GUI (not in Manjaro) that will let you switch between installed DMs. I am looking to install a “slick-greeter” because the print is too small for my old tired eyes. I believe SDDM is the default, correct?
Problem is the touch screen of my surface only works correctly (pinch zoom, drag, etc.) using the arch kernel found here, the detailed directions for which say:
You should make sure that you are running a Wayland desktop session, instead of an X11 / Xorg session. Wayland has native support for touch inputs, while Xorg essentially emulates a mouse pointer when you touch the screen. You can select the session type at your system’s login screen.
Also, Wayland seems to be the ‘Way’ forward, if I am correct about the ‘Way of the Land’ for desktop environments. Xorg is okay, but starting to show its age. Manjaro and Debian are derivatives that are starting to drift toward Wayland and its compositors, IMO Debian a bit faster drift than Manjaro. But Manjaro is pretty popular, gaining on *Ubuntu/Debian every day in terms of user base, so would not surprise me to see future LTS versions be ‘wayland-OTB’.
X11 seems to currently be the DM for KDE Plasma, but haven’t found any apps that appear wonky after installing plasma-wayland-session and logging on with that DM.
As far as I know, XFCE does not support Wayland yet. So if you want to use wayland, it’s best to switch to a desktop that has it available, like Gnome, Plasma or Sway.