Hello,
I’d like to report a solution to an issue I stumbled into in the last days.
Recently, I updated my ancient Manjaro XFCE Thinkpad (now almost 4 years since install).
This resulted in being unable to log-in to the XFCE desktop.
Luckily vconsole (CTRL + ALT + F3 etc.) still worked.
Lightdm-gtk-greeter shows up as usual, after entering the password the screen would go black.
When this happened, I wasn’t able to access any of the vconsoles any more and had to reboot, luckily with SysRq keys enabled REISUB was an option over hard power-off.
pacdiff revealed nothing of use.
I tried to rm -rf ~/.cache/xfce4, nothing changed.
Tried to rm ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/displays.xml as described in Black screen after login, now when trying to log in I didn’t get the black screen of death and xfce still refused to start but lightdm-gtk-greeter reappeared.
Searching for xfce’s log files I found ~/.xsession-errors, which revealed it unable to load libxfce4windowing-0.so.0!
pacman -F libxfce4windowing-0.so revealed that indeed, libxfce4windowing was not installed.
After a quick sudo pacman -S libxfce4windowing, I was able to log in, even without rebooting.
pacman -Qi libxfce4windowing reveals it being a dependency for xfce4-panel xfce4-session xfdesktop but somehow it wasn’t installed.
Thought I’d share, maybe it could save someone some sanity somewhere.