Bug#801749: gdm3: Starting only with wayland (I guess)

[Simon McVittie]

On Thu, 16 Aug 2018 at 13:46:38 +0200, Moritz wrote:
> I have a similar problem: Starting Gnome was no problem, while every
> time I tried to use a "classical" window manager the login would not
> succeed, instead, the login screen would reappear.

The symptom is the same, but it seems unlikely that you are getting
this symptom for the same reason as people who reported a bug in 2015
before GNOME supported Wayland. Please open a separate bug. You should
be able to find useful information in the system log (/var/log/syslog
or the systemd Journal) which would narrow down what isn't working.

> Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)

This is suspicious: you seem to have configured a non-UTF-8 locale for
LC_CTYPE (character type classification), which results in errors whenever
programs try to display characters outside the ASCII range. GNOME does not
really support non-UTF-8 locales. In Debian, there is a C.UTF-8 locale
which can be used as a UTF-8-capable replacement for the traditional
C locale.

    smcv