I decided to try a less aggressive uninstall and used YaST2. It uninstalled plymouth and plymouth-dracut. The first two boots have loaded lightdm. I get the following from journald: Sep 03 20:51:28 systemd[1]: Starting Show Plymouth Boot Screen... Sep 03 20:51:28 systemd[1]: Received SIGRTMIN+20 from PID 341 (plymouthd). Sep 03 20:51:28 systemd[1]: Started Show Plymouth Boot Screen. Sep 03 20:51:28 systemd[1]: Started Forward Password Requests to Plymouth Directory Watch. Sep 03 20:51:29 systemd[1]: Starting Plymouth switch root service... Sep 03 20:51:29 systemd[1]: plymouth-switch-root.service: Succeeded. Sep 03 20:51:29 systemd[1]: Started Plymouth switch root service. The system sure does (or tries to do) a lot with something that is supposed to be uninstalled.