Iv’e been upgrading my desktop fairly successfully for awhile now & have even upgraded the kernel a number of times as well along the way. Somewhere I seem to have messed up kdm so that it doesn’t start normally but I have to start it from command line. This seems to of happened when updating configuration files with etc-proposals it seems.
I have DISPLAYMANAGER=“kdm” in my /etc/conf.d/xdm file so I amk not sure what could be stopping it from starting after booting.
Try to add dbus to default runlevel.
rc-update add dbus default