In the Installation wiki, (https://wiki.obarun.org/doku.php?id=installation) it says:

"You can choose between a base Obarun system without a graphical environment, JWM or Openbox window managers, and xfce4 or KDE-plasma desktops. You can choose and try something different after installation, pretty much anything that is available through the Arch repositories is available for Obarun. Gnome and Cinnamon are possibly not going to be fully functional without systemd, but the rest are manageable choices..."

Without systemd and the other problematic packages, does KDE Plasma have any issues? If so, I would probably just go for JWM.

But if the Plasma experience on Obarun is near-flawless, I might see if the Obarun KDE flavour is the saving grace of Plasma.
Plasma should works out of the box on Obarun. The packages that require systemd are rebuilt on our repo.
Welcome friend, I am not a fan of kde, but it works.
Do a search on the forum you may find an interesting thread on how to use seatd to run wayland and sway if you want to try.
I don't know much more than I made it work just to be able to tell off all those people who say wayland will not work without systemd/elogind. Is plasma running on top of sway on wayland or openbox?

Except for the power options (I am not sure if they all work) like suspend and hybernate, I don't think there is anything on Plasma that doesn't work.

JWM is tiny and needs tiny bit of services to run, so it is not much of a problem to install plasma and just add jwm. You can copy the settings that you see on the live desktop from obarun-install-themes (use pacman -Ql to see where all the plasma related files are and copy what you need from them to the corresponding home configuration. Obarun's JWM is about the nicest setup I have found.

I run jwm or o-box without dbus or consolekit, without any issues (except rare use of CUPS/printing).
Plasma would not boot. Reached login screen, ensured session was set to Plasma, entered password, and had blank black screen with mouse cursor and nothing else.

Installed XFCE, then Yaourt and Pamac and find that the only package in any Category I'm able to install is Links, the text based browser

What has gone wrong that I do not have access to other packages?

Any idea why Plasma wouldn't run?
Please provide your pacman.conf and the output of 
% 66-intree -g
# 66-intree -g
Also, this is not a good place to talk about installation problem. Please start a new thread at https://forum.obarun.org/viewforum.php?id=6. Thanks in advance.
I don't use any of this, I've tried it in the past, usually on a plasma installation there is an option on the DM which session to start. Openbox or openbox-kde may be an option and for some odd reason it may be defaulting to it. When you get that (beautiful) black screen and a cursor, have you tried to right click? Is there a menu opening with basic stuff like filemanager terminal system settings exit? If so, you are on openbox not plasma.

Sddm screen should have a little drop-menu to select session/DE/WM make sure you have selected the right one.

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