Upgrade to Alma 8.6 breaks xfce4 launch

Support
1

Hi folks,
Did an upgrade to 8.6 earlier this month and found that I need to go to init 3 and manually run startx in order to successfully launch xfce4, When system loads normally to graphics state (init 5), gdm is launched but selecting any session under window manager login fails to launch and returns to greeter screen. I have not changed any hardware, GPUs etc. I can provide lots of details. Anyone else get this? Using nvida driver under dkms.
Thanks,
Henry

2

bug introduced in 8.6 breaks qt and related packages including sddm/gdm. I think someone over at rocky moved to lightdm to to get around the issue when using xfce.

3

Thanks for the tip. I can get around it with my workaround. Will see if lightdm can overcome this as the rockylinux forum did not cite lightdm.

4

From the linked post:

We didn’t release a KDE live image (again) because sddm and the kernel in 8.6 had issues with one another (as far as I’ve understood it). For XFCE, we were able to move back to lightdm.

I took that to mean lightdm addressed the issue in 8.6 and allowed him to use xfce.

5

Is SDDM based on Qt, like KDE? Lightdm has greeters with both Qt5 and other frameworks, so lightdm you can get without Qt5. I gathered that the kernel in 8.6 and Qt5 had issues too.

6

Good question… doesn’t appear to be… maybe it tries using the same broken API qt does…

I imagine anything using that API will have issues.

… in any case rocky have an (unsupported) xfce iso for reference/tests/config.

7

Thanks, but I will wait for a concrete fix on alma. I can live with this workaround for now.