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RJVB

Member

Registered: 2020-07-24

Posts: 10  

Devuan Chimaera: switch back to good ole X11?

I just upgraded a rarely used laptop from Beowulf to Chimaera, and after that my main account's KF5 desktop was badly broken.

I figured that this had something to to with the Radeon discrete GPU being used but when I started looking into switching back to the embedded Intel GPU I found out that the login manager was in fact using Wayland.

I'm not comfortable with that option just yet (and from the looks of it Xwayland doesn't work as well as one might hope), so I'd like to switch back to using X11.

I've found very little information for now on how to do that. I did find a setting in `/etc/gdm3/daemon.conf` where I could tell gdm not to use Wayland itself. Changing this requires a reboot (why?!) but then I did have gdm under X11. Except now none of my accounts log in.

And I no longer have virtual consoles (Ctrl-Alt-F2 etc) so have to ssh in from another machine.

It looks a bit as if the DEs are not informed that they should use X instead of Wayland, and remain stuck until finally something times out.

Can anyone here help? I could try to uninstall all Wayland-related packages but that's a bit blunt and bound to break something else (and tricky to reverse).

andyp67

Member

Registered: 2022-10-30

Posts: 228  

Re: Devuan Chimaera: switch back to good ole X11?

What I do, maybe useful.
Twenty-five years of using computers, I do not trust Government Corporation thieving my privacy.
I don't use Windows online.
I only do X online in a live distro.
Knoppix, SysRescCd, Damn Small Linux, TinyCoreLinux, Sidux|Aptosid, Puppy, EasyOS, etc.
Of course now I do a bespoke not kitchen sink fsmithred snapshot, marvellous!
Display Managers have their uses but generally are problematic.
apt-get --no-install-recommends prevents headaches.
How I startx without fail.
I do a very frowned upon 'hairy shirt' technique in my always pristine boot=live toram.
apt-get install xserver-xorg-legacy
/etc/X11/Xwrapper.config
allowed_users=anybody
needs_root_rights=yes

xinit is happy and perhaps a Display Manager also.
Bring on the flames!
Also xserver-xorg-input-evdev (terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp) xserver-xorg-input-libinput (Synaptics is shady.)

RJVB

Member

Registered: 2020-07-24

Posts: 10  

Re: Devuan Chimaera: switch back to good ole X11?

It seems the main issue may have been that I had un-blacklisted the amdgpu driver which for some reason caused `XOrg` to start in a mode that doesn't support compositing. Which is crazy but could still be related to how it is being started by `gdm3`.

I'll dig (and ask) around a bit more and revisit this thread in due time.