On Sun, Nov 01, 2026 at 23:25:25 -0800, Donald MacDougall wrote:
> After that when I started it up again, logged in and typed 'startx',
> instead of seeing the normal desktop, all I see is a black screen with a mouse
> cursor in the middle which I can move around at will but it does nothing.
> I'm on Wayland obviously with lightdm
If you run startx, you are starting an X session, not a Wayland
session. It sounds like your X session isn't starting your window
manager, or else your window manager isn't configured to show anything
by default.
Also, if you ran startx, your session is *not* under the control of
lightdm. startx is an alternative way of starting an X session.
I don't even know whether lightdm can start a Wayland session, or if
it's only capable of starting X sessions.
So, we have two (or more) different ways we can approach this. My
first inclination would be to see whether startx can be made to work
at all. Try running:
startx startxfce4
If that works, then we know X sessions work, and that XFCE works if
invoked as the X session manager. You can make this your default
session manager by editing or creating the ~/.xsession file and
putting:
exec startxfce4
inside it. Also, if you happen to have a ~/.xinitrc file, you should
probably rename that (or merge its contents into ~/.xsession) so that
it doesn't interfere.
In theory, lightdm should also respect the ~/.xsession file, and launch
XFCE for you after you login, assuming lightdm is configured to start
an X session.
If you expected lightdm to run at boot time, then we might also want
to check on that service. I would start with something like:
systemctl status lightdm
and see if that has any error messages that you can work on. If it
got disabled somehow, then maybe this would work:
systemctl enable lightdm
systemctl start lightdm
Although I don't understand why it would have been disabled, unless
you typed or pasted something as root by accident.
