My journalctl reports: “dbus-broker-launch[…]: Policy to allow eavesdropping in /usr/share/dbus-1/session.conf +31: Eavesdropping is deprecated and ignored”, and the same for (line) +33 in the same DBus configuration file.
Upon removing these “deprecated and ignored” lines, startx suddenly failed to start the X11 server, reporting “Unable to load failsafe session”. I reinserted the lines, and the startx failure disappeared.
This situation is unsatisfactory and should be remedied. Eavesdropping may be “deprecated”, but it was obviously not “ignored”, at least in this case.
I use XFCE, and Release Note 2.3.2 says that, for XFCE, Wayland is available as an “experimental option”. I do not take that to mean that X11 is “not supported” or that I “should” run Wayland, and I do not currently feel like experimenting.
It is true that Release Note 3.1.7.1. for openSUSE Leap states: “Xorg server has been removed. Only Wayland is supported for graphical display.” And: “YaST has been removed.” But from my own experience, these statements are inaccurate, and I even welcome that: not because I like inaccuracy, but because I prefer the ability to continue using X11 and YaST. Luckily, X11 and YaST (both ncurses “yast” and graphical “yast2”) are still running on all of my current 16.0 installations, after “zypper dup" from 15.6.
I suspect that the DBus “eavesdropping” issue may not be limited to DBus interaction with X11.
What duplicate: removing and re-adding the lines in /usr/share/dbus-1/session.conf and observing whether they make a difference with respect to the startx failure ?
After re-adding the 2 ‘allow eavesdrop=“true”’ lines in /usr/share/dbus-1/session.conf, the “Unable to load failsafe session” message accompanying the startx failure disappeared completely, and X11 again starts flawlessly. I tested it with 2 non-privileged users and with root (who had also received that warning before).
To make sure (or somewhat surer), I just removed the 2 lines once again, to see if the startx failure re-occurred. As expected, it did: after rebooting the computer and logging into a tty, all 3 users again failed to start X11 with startx. Strangely, the message they received this time read somewhat differently: its title was “Unable to contact settings server”, and its text was “GDBus.Error:orgfreedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: Sender is not authorized to send message”.
In all cases (including the previous ones), these startx failure messages seemed to be genuinely graphical windows, no ncurses boxes, and I could close them by pressing ESC, returning to the non-graphical tty prompt. To reproduce the changes in startx behavior, it seemed to be necessary to reboot after every change in the session.conf file.
I have no “orphaned” (unmaintained) packages. I use the standard repos for 16.0, e.g., https://cdn.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/16.0/repo/oss. It contains 16.0 (“160000”) versions of X11 and YaST: “xorg-x11-server 21.1.15-160000.4.1” and “YaST Main Package 5.0.13-160000.2.2”. I have been working with them since “zypper dup” from 15.6 to 16.0.
By the way: Release Note “3.1.7.1” was a typo; the correct number is “3.17.1”. But the content of that Release Note is the same and remains inaccurate: the Xorg server and YaST have NOT been removed in Leap 16.0, and (in my opinion) for good reason.