Bug#941908: gnome: unable to start gnome-shell, cursor only with no login

[Simon McVittie]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo

On Mon, 07 Oct 2019 at 08:55:14 -0500, william l-k wrote:
> Problem: Instead of getting the authentication screen, the system has the
> cursor appear (which moves around just fine so the system isn't frozen), but
> never reaches a working gnome session.

This looks like #941782. Please upgrade gnome-shell to version 3.34.x
(which was only in unstable until recently, but has just migrated into
testing, so it might not be available on your mirror yet), and see
whether this resolves the bug.

If you cannot upgrade to gnome-shell 3.34 yet, downgrading the
gir1.2-gnomedesktop-3.0 package to the version from Debian 10 'buster'
is thought to work around this bug.

> We are all on Debian testing. We also all had unattended upgrades running.

The testing/unstable suites sometimes break, despite our best efforts;
this is particularly true shortly after a stable release, as disruptive
changes that were queued up during the freeze get uploaded. If you run
testing/unstable, I would recommend using apt-listbugs to avoid upgrading
to a version with known release-critical bugs.

On critical or remote systems, I would recommend using the latest
Debian stable release, currently Debian 10 'buster', rather than
testing/unstable.

I would not recommend using unattended-upgrades with testing/unstable.
It's usually OK as a way to install security updates on a stable system,
but testing/unstable has too many transitions between incompatible versions
for unattended-upgrades to do the right thing in all cases.

    smcv