My laptop, which usually boasts a twelve hour battery life, was reporting that it would only last for a few hours on a fresh charge. Something was obviously wrong. Checking the output of htop, it became clear that journald was the culprit.

It seemed that journald was simply writing log messages over and over and over again, and running journalctl -xe revealed the culprit. I recently updated my system, which included new updates to Xrandr and many other packages. SLiM, my beloved simple and clean display manager, was no longer compatible.

Consulting the ArchWiki page for SLiM, it is made immediately clear that the display manager has been out of service for some time. Thus, in order to save battery life and keep my system up-to-date, I have chosen to replace it with SDDM. The transition is clean, simple, and SDDM is just as nice, so I urge anyone still using SLiM to do the same.

All that needs to be done is a SLiM disable, a SLiM uninstall, a SDDM install, a SDDM theming, and an SDDM enable, not necessarily in that order. Here is the raw list of commands:

sudo pacman -S sddm
sddm --example-config | sudo tee /etc/sddm.conf
sudo systemctl disable slim
sudo systemctl enable sddm
sudo systemctl stop slim
# You should now be logged out of your XSession. Log in to the tty and do the following:
sudo pacman -R slim
sudo systemctl start sddm

Everything should now be good! Of course, if you’d like to make your SDDM pretty, you’ll have to change the theme (There are two ArchLinux based themes in the AUR)

There are some caveats, however. For one, I was a heavy user of slimlock. Obviously, this is not available with SDDM. I remedied the situation by switching to i3lock.