On Thu, Aug 28 2025 at 14:39:44 +02:00:00, mike.looijmans@topic.nl wrote:
I now just end up with an image that has tons of "gnome" things installed, but nothing really gets started and there's no clue as to what should be running...

gdm should be started automatically using systemd service:
flk@intel-corei7-64:~$ sudo systemctl status gdm
Password: 
* gdm.service - GNOME Display Manager
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/gdm.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2025-08-28 15:01:08 CEST; 51s ago
 Invocation: fb3be9d01865490aa251ee2393f6d5b4
   Main PID: 1111 (gdm)
      Tasks: 4 (limit: 154363)
     Memory: 5.5M (peak: 9.8M)
        CPU: 40ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/gdm.service
             `-1111 /usr/sbin/gdm


Which OpenEmbedded branch are you on? I remember sending corrections for starting gdm some time ago:
https://git.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded/commit/?h=master-next&id=d4ac4dcb70faeed3e3a933c378bfbcbe25a1f260

I also build for gnome but that is far from being a tiny image:
https://codeberg.org/flk/meta-image/src/commit/8ab5f7a156e44e30dd637361e0b9c1474537af4a/recipes-core/images/image.inc
https://codeberg.org/flk/meta-gnome-image/src/branch/master/recipes-core/images/gnome-image.bb