Lightdm wont start at boot

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Moved both my macbook pro m1 to Asahi. I tried it before but several bluetooth devices kept reconnecting and disconnecting. Keyboard and mouse were unusable.

This time, pretty much everything worked out of the box, so I reinstalled minimal install.

Installed xfce desktop, the plugins, couple of other things. Enabled and started lightdm and I was in business :stuck_out_tongue:

After a reboot though, lightdm does not start. It says its enabled, but its not active (inactive: dead). In the logs I see this:

Nov 24 21:10:50 elysium systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Deactivated successfully.
Nov 24 21:10:50 elysium systemd[1]: Stopped lightdm.service - Light Display Manager.
Nov 24 21:10:50 elysium systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Consumed 2.290s CPU time.

When I restart lightdm, it just works :confused: .

Edit: I installed sddm, enabled it and disabled lightdm. It behaves exactly the same. I think its just missing a package.

Love to hear it if you have any ideas.
Thx!

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I doubt it’s missing a package otherwise I would it expect to be as broken on manual start. This is possibly a timing issue with the display driver and xorg-server (used through lightdm / sddm) on startup. lightdm starts with the boot framebuffer and is terminated when that goes away in favour of the display driver. It’s not restarted then. More verbose logs could confirm this. If this is the case it should be something xorg-server / lightdm / sddm need to handle better but xorg-server is dead.

A possible workaround could be to to copy the lightdm service file to /etc/systemd/system and delay its start. I woiuld start with adding ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/sleep 5s.

just as a warning: do not upgrade to fedora 41 until 2326701 – 21.1.13 broke Apple Silicon systems due to mistakenly dropped patch is resolved

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I didn’t realize xfce isn’t using wayland yet. I sort of assumed it was but its scheduled for 4.20, I am on 4.18 :frowning_face:

Thanks for the heads up on the upgrade, I’ll keep an eye on that.

The delay didn’t work unfortunately.

Below [LightDM] I enabled:

logind-check-graphical=true

That didn’t help.

I enabled debug logging and cleared out /var/log/lightdm.

After reboot, the dir remains empty. It seems the service never starts.

I wouldn’t give up on this so easily, but given the fact that I run into multiple other issues with Xfce that weren’t immediately obvious, I decided to go with Gnome, given the fact that its Fedora’s default and probably best supported, and running on Wayland.

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check with “systemctl get-default” if “graphical.target” is your default target.
Otherwise try “systemctl enable graphical.target” and reboot to check if lightdm then comes up automatically.