Jacob | Five Eye TeaJun 10, 2024

Booted up my one laptop running #Linux Mint after about a week of not touching it... to my surprise, it booted into GNOME when I have Cinnamon installed. No reason, just randomly did it.

Not only this, but the installation of GNOME appears to be borked, with light-and-dark options doing absolutely nothing, certain theme options from the Cinnamon installation are still present but completely unchangeable, my wallpapers (including the login screen one) were all reset, tap-to-click being disabled and so forth.

I haven't installed anything new, I haven't done anything unusual in system settings, it just decided it wanted to casually boot into an entirely different desktop environment.

I tried searching for anyone else having this issue but couldn't find anything. It looks like I might just have to spin up Timeshift and run it back a bit to see if that fixes the issue.

Bizarre. Absolutely bizarre. 🤷‍♂️

Show threadCorb_The_Lesser

@ChallengeApathy Packages can have several pieces of the Gnome desktop as dependencies. Installing one *should not* touch anything to do with what the systems boots into. Serious packager error if it does.

If it boots into Gnome Display Manager instead of Cinnamon's, something really broke. I've never had anything in the Debian family do that without forcing a prior yes/no choice as the packages installed.

Is Cinnamon still shown as an option in the display manager at boot?

Jun 10, 2024 at 1:09pmWeb
Show threadJacob | Five Eye TeaJun 10, 2024

@Corb_The_Lesser That's what I'm thinking. Somewhere, something really went wrong, but I can't place it. I haven't installed anything new for a while now.

That said, yes, I was able to get it to switch into Cinnamon at the login screen. Nonetheless, I'm curious where things went wrong because I'd hate for it to cause issues down the road and be even more difficult to troubleshoot.

Show threadCorb_The_LesserJun 10, 2024
@ChallengeApathy@infosec. If you know the last package installed, you might try to remove it and see what dependencies it wants to take with it. If it's an Ubuntu package, you can chase down a list of dependencies at packages.ubuntu.com. The Mint repo is packages.linuxmint.com.