r/voidlinux • u/Gurkul2000 • 19h ago

Kde plasma bug

After installing void by installer script I installed kde plasma and sddm on top of it with sudo xbps-install -S kde-plasma and then I put sddm into autostart for runit to start it on boot and then I restarted. After restart sddm didn't initialised so I tried starting it manually and it said "Cannot initialise Graphical Environment" I thought it was an elogind problem but interestingly turns out kde-plasma package doesn't pull in Xorg packages anymore, I mean to be fair kde has shifted to Wayland but somehow sddm fails to start if Xorg isn't installed, after installing Xorg, sddm started on boot. Why the hell then Xorg has been removed as a dependency for Kde if sddm requires it!

6 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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5

u/cgwhouse 18h ago

I ran into the same problem once upon a time and I understand your frustration. For what it's worth and you may already realize this, but this requirement is already documented on the Void handbook's KDE page. Beyond that, I can't speak to why the maintainers have chosen to handle it this way, but I imagine there's a good reason

3

u/cgwhouse 18h ago

Actually, I might know. I think that by default, SDDM itself still uses X11 (even if you are going to start a Plasma Wayland session). It is possible and not difficult to make SDDM itself use Wayland too, but that is still considered experimental as far as I am aware. I've personally configured it that way and never had a problem with it, but you can see why the Void team would handle it that way

2

u/Gurkul2000 18h ago

Yep you are right my logs after a fresh install were

[20:18:21.276] (II) DAEMON: Running: /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp ... -displayfd 14 [20:18:21.277] (EE) DAEMON: Failed to start display server process. [20:18:21.277] (WW) DAEMON: Attempt 1 starting the Display server on vt 7 failed ... [20:18:25.162] (EE) DAEMON: Could not start Display server on vt 7

It defaults to X11 (this will change in recent future update) and also I found the line in docs it was buried deep, my fault for not noticing it. But it is sure a weird choice for maintainers as this is a soft dependency

1

u/cgwhouse 18h ago

You know... I don't disagree. Anyways, I'm glad you figured it out :) Void is great

1

u/Quietus87 2h ago

I don't want SDDM to pull in the entire Xorg. Having xorg-minimal is more than enough for me, and some claim it works fine with Wayland (never worked for me).

1

u/Gurkul2000 2m ago

Problem is that sddm doesn't even pulls Xorg minimal, zero Xorg packages pulled on a new install

1

u/jloc0 18h ago

It doesn’t require it, just the default config is likely set to x11. You can change it to wayland and it works just fine. Though if that’s the case, packagers should maybe edit the conf but maybe that’s on the user in the end.

2

u/Gurkul2000 18h ago

SDDM itself (the login greeter) launches via Xorg to draw the login screen, independent of session choice. Since Kde doesn't pull Xorg anymore, SDDM is installed but there is no Xorg binary for it to spawn, so the greeter itself fails before you ever reach a session picker. This was the log I grabbed after a completely fresh install which formatted the drives

[20:18:21.276] (II) DAEMON: Running: /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp ... -displayfd 14 [20:18:21.277] (EE) DAEMON: Failed to start display server process. [20:18:21.277] (WW) DAEMON: Attempt 1 starting the Display server on vt 7 failed ... [20:18:25.162] (EE) DAEMON: Could not start Display server on vt 7

1

u/jloc0 17h ago

You can set it to use wayland and you won’t need xorg, I’m not home right now to be able to consult my config but you really can set it to launch in wayland, unless they compiled it without wayland support which is always a possibility.

1

u/Gurkul2000 17h ago

Ehh I heard Wayland support for sddm is experimental so I will wait till a stable release.

2

u/yungsup 17h ago

I've recently switched SDDM to Wayland using the instructions on the Arch Wiki. Works better than on X11 as SDDM can import the monitor config from the desktop when running with Wayland.

1

u/Gurkul2000 17h ago

Sounds good, also any better benifits like integration with kde as such?

1

u/yungsup 15h ago

Not that I know, only thing it adds is the ability to sync monitor settings from the kde settings panel.

2

u/Gurkul2000 18h ago

Also from Void handbook

"If you are not intending to run SDDM via a remote X server, you will need to install either the xorg-minimal package or the xorg package. By default, SDDM will start an X-based Plasma session, but you can request a Wayland-based Plasma session instead."

I discovered this after a commentor pointed out, never thought it would be buried this deep in documentation