Unable to start Xmonad nor bspwm via sddm

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1

By default I have my system with Xfce ; OpenBox ; I3 and Awesome.
Nonetheless I wished to try xmonad and | or Bspwm.
I installed the expected Manjaro meta packages without any issues.
Both WMs appeared in the sddm list ( as expected) but when selected and after inserting the user password the screen simply screen froze . The mouse was still active though but no interaction with sddm . Had to access another TTY in order to reboot …
Although it happened in both Xmonad and Bspwm with the same behaviour …

Am I missing any configuration for both Xmonad or bspwm ?

2

Do you have some special reason to use sddm? Try with lightdm. Also share the desktop enteries you have made

3

Originallly had lightdm but it started to crash the system from time to time …
Since I changed to sddm no more crashes …

Although I startup my machine in shell only ( old init 3 mode ) and only after login call init 5 manually if needed …
Nonetheless all the other WMs work flawlessy …

4

Hi. I use xmonad on a daily basis. Install xterm, go into xmonad and press Alt+Shift+enter. If a terminal comes up, then you’re running the default config file and it’s normal that you think the screen is frozen, because xmonad doesn’t draw a wallpaper by default. In that case, your xmonad build is completely functional.

Otherwise, go into your regular DE and check the output of xmonad --recompile. It will show you all the errors in your config file.

5

Okay so i researched a bit and it turns out that by default bspwm is just a blank black screen.

Do the following steps for basic setup:

The example configuration is located in /usr/share/doc/bspwm/examples/.Copy bspwmrc from there into ~/.config/bspwm/ and sxhkdrc into ~/.config/sxhkd/.

mkdir ~/config/bspwm/ ~/.config/sxhkd/ 
cp /usr/share/doc/bspwm/examples/bspwmrc ~/.config/bspwm/
cp /usr/share/doc/bspwm/examples/sxhkd ~/.config/sxhkd/

The file bspwmrc needs to be executable since the default example is simply a shell script:

chmod +x  ~/.config/bspwm/ ~/.config/sxhkd/

Now I hope that you are not just “wm hopping” and know the fact that shortcuts are different in every wm. Follow this guide for learning some:

https://man.archlinux.org/man/bspwm.1

https://man.archlinux.org/man/sxhkd.1

For starting you can configure the terminal command and change terminal from urxvt to xfce4-terminal:

vim .config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc #change urxvt to xfce4-terminal

I suggest you to follow this tutorial too:

6

You could be missing a desktop file in /usr/share/xsessions.

Some window managers needs to be configured ground-up as they come with no defaults at all.

7

It seems that I need to configure manually both Xmonad and bspwm , before calling them via sddm …
Thanks all for the fast replies …

8

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