I switched to lightdm because sddm became unreliable for me. After installing lgihtdm, X failed to start. Teasing error messages out of it via ktrace/kdump, I noticed: "[+0.01s] DEBUG: Adding default seat "[+0.01s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Loading properties from config section Seat:* "[+0.01s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Starting "[+0.01s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Creating greeter session "[+0.01s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Failed to find session configuration default "[+0.01s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Failed to create greeter session It seems like we should either require lightdm-gtk-greeter be installed with lightdm, or change the config in some way so that login works with just lightdm.
I meant to say that installing lightdm-gtk-greeter "fixes" the issue for me, and makes lightdm work
LightDM needs a greeter, for example x11/slick-greeter or x11/lightdm-gtk-greeter. If you don't change anything, default value is lightdm-gtk-greeter, but slick-greeter works fine too.
A commit in branch main references this bug: URL: https://cgit.FreeBSD.org/ports/commit/?id=e88937b01dd40125def95dd3279a88c21f8d70dd commit e88937b01dd40125def95dd3279a88c21f8d70dd Author: Adriaan de Groot <adridg@FreeBSD.org> AuthorDate: 2023-09-02 21:26:43 +0000 Commit: Adriaan de Groot <adridg@FreeBSD.org> CommitDate: 2023-09-09 21:37:01 +0000 x11/lightdm: improve description of necessary greeters There are fewer LightDM greeters in the ports tree than the pkg-message suggests. List them both. Do not bump PORTREVISION because this isn't worth making people rebuild things. PR: 271628 x11/lightdm/pkg-message | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
There's not much to do except make it really obvious in the pkg-message that something extra needs to be installed.