Firefox won't open without a display manager on awesomewm

This is on Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster. I disabled gdm and use .xinitrc to start awesomewm on tty1

here's my .xinitrc

#! /bin/sh

export DESKTOP_SESSION=awesome
dbus-launch --exit-with-session $DESKTOP_SESSION

opening firefox gives some snap related error in the terminal. other gnome apps take a long time to start as well (like nautilus)

Since there hasn't been an answer posted yet, does it otherwise work correctly when GDM or some other DM is enabled? Maybe run dpkg-reconfigure gdm3 to reconfigure / enable again. Maybe select AwesomeWM from the login screen menu. If for no other reason but to verify if it makes any difference with the application launch issues.

Otherwise ...

Have a look at your ~/.xinit-errors file for possible clues. tail -f ~/.xinit-errors in a terminal window might prove helpful prior to launching the application.

Try replacing existing entries with exec awesome in your ~/.xinitrc (starting Awesome via startx) or to ~/.xsession (to start Awesome using your display manager). In other words:

#!/bin/sh
exec awesome

Not sure what the difference is here compared to your ~/.xinitrc file, except the Awesome documentation specifically says to use exec awesome. Wouldn't be surprised if it ends up launching Awesome via dbus-launch anyway, but might be worth a try for the sake of completeness.