Howdy, Thanks for your input.
I am not completely sure, but I know that sddm uses logind for session management, may be you can check making systemd-logind the dependency?
I tried systemd-logind - no change in behavior.
you could try nodm (in [community]),
Wow, great idea. I'll sure use it. However, now I'm trying to find the root cause of the problem with sddm, I'd rather report the real problem to Arch/upstream (depending on who's to blame) and have it fixed for everyone.
I had to change/set my sddm theme to Breeze... maybe this will work for you too.
Changing the theme doesn't change anything. Are you really sure about this changing *anything*? Do you have *the same* problem as I do with other themes? To recap, my problem is the autologin will fail with a weird D-Bus message on *initial* boot. Any subsequent systemctl restart sddm will start my session. I've just found that my ~/.xinitrc has this: nowaker@nwkr-desktop ~ % cat .xinitrc exec dbus-launch --exit-with-session startkde Just to make sure my xinitrc doesn't cause anything wrong I deleted it. But doing this made things even worse - without a ~/.xinitrc or with "startkde" only, my Plasma didn't start at all. Same problem with nodm. (It's also worth noting nodm requires chmod +x ~/.xinitrc but I figured it out.) However, slim from [extra] works for me just fine when "exec startkde" is in my ~/.xinitrc. (It won't start with "exec dbus-launch ..." - empty desktop, or without an xinitrc - error message about not being able to execute login command). It sounds really weird only one DM works for me. I'm almost sure it's not how it works on a freshly installed Arch. Any suggestions what makes my setup so broken? Thank y'all, -Damian Nowak