Hello,

I'm new here, please excuse my mistake if I chose the wrong forum.
After days of desperation, I did not manage to solve this on my own, so I'm turning to you for help.

Recently, did an update of my base distribution (fedora 32, after EOL -> fedora 34), which ofc included an update of plasma (5.18.3 -> 5.22.4) and everything KDE related. Unfortunately, the update messed something up, so suddenly my old xsession with i3 is not starting i3 as wm, but KWin instead.

For a year I used a setup Plasma with i3 as WM as my DE, which I had created according to: https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Managers_with_Plasma I.e. I'm starting an xsession with a following script

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
export KDEWM=/usr/bin/i3
/usr/bin/startplasma-x11


The single-user variant (having a script in ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/) behaves exactly same.

Running the following in the session gives the expected output:

Code: Select all

$> echo $KDEWM
/usr/bin/i3


I tried all sorts of tricks, reinstalled i3, even compiled it from sources, everything. The last thing I did was, that I tried completely different wms as well. Nothing I did
changed the fact, that KWin was run as the wm of choice which should (looking at the sources https://github.com/KDE/plasma-workspace/blob/v5.22.4/startkde/plasma-session/startup.cpp) automaticaly only happen if KDEWM is not set at all.

Please do you have any idea what could have caused this, what to do with this, or at the very least any idea how to debug this properly? Hopefully without going all gdb on startplasma-x11 ...

Same issue here, seems specific to Fedora.

Updated from Fedora 33 (running KDE Plasma 5.20.5) -> Fedora 34 (running KDE Plasma 5.22.3) a bit ago, with no issues. Today, after updating to KDE Plasma 5.22.4, KDE no longer uses i3 as my WM. My Arch machine (running with all the same versions), does not have this problem.

I tried uninstalling/reinstalling both i3 & plasma to no effect. Both appear to run fine on their own, the only problem is getting KDE to recognize i3 as the desired WM.

Since this has only been seen on Fedora so far, I also started a thread on their forums: https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthre ... ost1851918

Hopefully someone can get to the bottom of this soon

Ok, I'm happy it is not just my mistake somewhere. Thanks for starting the thread on fedora, hopefully, someone will know. It is really bugging my productivity.

Ad to you using i3 under Arch without problem: you can run it on fedora as well, just i3 without KDE, that is why I came to the conclusion that this is a KDE problem.
I might look into the Xsession difference as well, if I get the time.