Pete's Log: Meh
Entry #2096, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 43 years old.)
This is entirely my own fault for running Debian testing instead of stable. But here we go:
After updating and rebooting recently, I logged into Esgerbeastie and was quite disconcerted to find myself in GNOME instead of Sway. Apparently GDM had decided Wayland wasn't working and was falling back to X11. And Sway doesn't work under X11. The last time I had to deal with this, it was because of video card driver issues, but that was not the case today. Rebooting into an older kernel didn't help either.
There were no obvious errors in the logs so I resorted to actually reading the logs in detail. I still did not find anything useful. There are a bunch of non-error log entries from gdm-wayland-session doing a bunch of things, followed finally by
systemd[1894]: org.gnome.Shell@wayland.service: Skipped due to 'exec-condition'.
Searching for that error only found people having issues with nvidia cards, but since I have an AMD Radeon, I don't think that applies to me. Since there were no graphic card errors in the logs, I decided to see if I can start wayland manually. So after a quick
sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target
and a reboot, I found myself at the nostalgically comfortable console login prompt instead of the GDM login prompt. Upon signing in, I ran sway and it started up just fine.
Since I don't feel like I have the time or the patience right now to properly troubleshoot, I've decided instead to just enjoy the feeling of logging into a text console instead. Feels nostalgiariffic anyway. Maybe I'll just leave it this way indefinitely. Doesn't take terribly long to log in and then just type sway.
What I did find interesting was just how jarring I found the experience of not being in Sway. I've only been using it for four-ish months, but it's become quite comfortable. So I guess I learned from this experience that Sway is indeed for me.