HowTo: Install OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll with KDE Plasma 6 Wayland only

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Goal: Install a wayland-only Tumbleweed/Slowroll.

This is very nontrivial and several package groups seem broken. I will show the steps I took, some may be redundant.

1. Install

I used the Tumbleweed netinstall. Without selecting the package group “X11” there was no working SDDM, so after rebooting I got into a TTY.

It seems that the group “Plasma 6” does install SDDM and all the needed packages, but no SDDM configuration, and also a broken systemd service.

This displaymanager service was active and is still haunting me in the process, no idea what it is: display-manager-legacy.service.

So after several tries, only installing X11 and then removing it afterwards gives the desired result.

If the sddm service and config can be installed another way, please correct me.

2. Change Plasma to Wayland

To this day, KDE Plasma defaults to X11 for some reason. Upstream is already separating kwin-x11 from the Wayland kwin, Wayland is default upstream and on other distros.

So select Wayland in the bottom left, done.

3. Fix SDDM

SDDM works fine in Wayland and there is absolutely no reason to not support it.

There are several things needed, it looks semi-broken too.

# disable sddm
systemctl disable --now sddm

# disable weird legacy displaymanager
systemctl disable --now display-manager-legacy

# change the SDDM config to support Wayland
run0 cat > /etc/sddm/sddm.conf.d/99-wayland.conf <<EOF
[General]
DisplayServer=wayland

[Wayland]
CompositorCommand=kwin_wayland --no-lockscreen --no-global-shortcuts --locale1
EOF

# restart sddm
systemctl enable --now sddm

If you dont change the SDDM config (which is default on Fedora since 2 years), removing the packages in step 4 will break SDDM and you will get to a TTY login…

4. Remove X11 packages

run0 zypper rm patterns-base-x11 kmag kmousetool vlc xterm xscreensaver

TW doesnt preinstall useful tools like filelight, kfind or kdeconnect, but X11-only tools like kmag and kmousetool. Also VLC for some reason, even if no multimedia packages are selected.

VLC is on version 3.x since forever, with no wayland support. Version 4 has Wayland support afaik, but players like Haruna & Celluloid (MPV frontends) or Showtime are better anyways.

Also no idea why old stuff like XTerm is installed.

Once these packages are removed, you should have a wayland-only displaymanager and desktop. XWayland should still work, allowing to run legacy apps inside a wayland session.

@moderators please add the tags #wayland #sddm

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And what problem does it solve?

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Remove additional packages, reduce attack surface. SDDM Wayland works just fine since forever, Wayland is installed and the current display stack so there is no reason not to use it.

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Plasma/Wayland Known Significant Issues:
https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues

Plasma is not available without X11:

SDDM can be installed as a separate package.

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Server + plasma6-desktop + plasma6-session = Wayland only.

I don’t use SDDM, i am a single user, why do i need a login manager?
i just run startplasma-wayland from TTY.

I’ve been using Wayland standalone for about three years on my Tumbleweed, Got it rid X11 faster than Fedora. There are some leftovers like xwayland xsettingsd xsetroot xrdb xprop until they become unnecessary time later.

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@woozy create a script called say “startplasma-wayland.sh” with;

if [ -z "${DISPLAY}" ] && [ "${XDG_VTNR}" == 1 ]; then
  exec startplasma-wayland > /dev/null 2>&1
fi

install -m 0644 startplasma-wayland.sh /etc/profile.d/startplasma-wayland.sh

When you login on VT 1 (XDG_VTNR variable) with your user, that script should run and start your Plasma session…

2 Likes
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Nice malcolmlewis, similar launch script i used when started a WM from .xinitrc, but haven’t on KDE. I will definitely try and use it. Thank you.

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Pretty neat for a slim system! I like the fancy UI but tbh this could speedup the login

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