I switched from xfce4 to i3 a while ago. The first go through, everything worked fine. I then had to reinstall i3 for some reason, and I can no longer enter i3 through lightdm-gtk-greeter. I have to drop into tty2 and manually startx.
The greeter launches fine, but then I have a black screen with just a mouse and none of the i3 commands work. Notably, if I uncomment the autologin lines in lightdm.conf, I can boot straight to i3. I do want to have my computer password protected, though.
.bash_profile
#
# ~/.bash_profile
#
[[ -f ~/.bashrc ]] && . ~/.bashrc
if [[ ! $DISPLAY && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 ]]; then
exec startx
fi
/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
#
# General configuration
#
[LightDM]
run-directory=/run/lightdm
[Seat:*]
greeter-session=lightdm-gtk-greeter
user-session=i3
session-wrapper=/etc/lightdm/Xsession
[XDMCPServer]
[VNCServer]
