Issues Switching from Xfce to i3wm

Hi all, long time fedora/xfce user here who recently switched to i3wm. I’m having some issues such as apps taking quite a while to start (ex. thunar) which I fixed by adding a few lines to the ~/.xinitrc file (see below). My issue now is trying to run containers using podman-compose. I run into

Error: unable to create pod: unable to create pod cgroup for pod 46ccd4325d1c2ff61c40afdadeb0520a41ae77e5479064c4bbe6ba94301ad4cb: error creating cgroup user.slice/user-libpod\_pod\_46ccd4325d1c2ff61c40afdadeb0520a41ae77e5479064c4bbe6ba94301ad4cb.slice: The name org.freedesktop.systemd1 was not provided by any .service files

This is being run from xfce4-terminal in i3. When it’s run within xfce it runs without issue, leading me to believe it’s something to do with the way I’m starting i3.

My question is what am I missing to properly switch from xfce to i3?

My ~/.xinitrc file is

# Without this block the apps like thunar take forever to start
for file in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/* ; do                                     
    . $file                                                                 
done                                                                            
                                                                                      
exec i3

Edit: Forgot to add I just switch to another tty, login, then run startx to get into i3.