cheese depends on: libclutter-gst-2.0-0 gstreamer1.0-clutter
totem (and totem-plugins) depends on: libclutter-gst-3.0-0 gstreamer1.0-clutter-3.0 Debian allows both of these libraries to be installed at the same time. However, if libclutter-gst-3.0-0 and gstreamer1.0-clutter-3.0 are installed, then Cheese will fail with the message in the original bug report. So there is an undocumented conflict here. This is a problem because, currently, removing libclutter-gst-3.0-0 and gstreamer1.0-clutter-3.0 causes the removal of totem and totem-plugins, which in turn causes the removal of gnome and gnome-core. I do not understand why totem is a dependency of gnome-core, because Gnome strictly speaking does not depend on Totem; it works fine if Totem is removed. It seems that it should be a recommended package instead. Personally, I never use Totem and have VLC selected as the default video player, and everything in Gnome works fine. A long-term solution to the problem is to reconcile all apps to use one of the two gstreamer clutter libraries and remove the other. A work-around, for people who want Cheese to work now, is to use equivs to generate fake totem and totem-plugins packages that contain nothing and depend on nothing. These fake packages will need a high version number, like 99.0. Use dpkg to install the fake packages over the real ones, and then use `apt-get purge libclutter-gst-3.0-0 gstreamer1.0-clutter-3.0`, which at this point should remove cleanly without taking all of gnome-core with it. Once these libraries have been removed, you need to do one more thing to make Cheese work: rm -f ${HOME}/.cache/gstreamer-1.0/registry.x86_64.bin After removing the bad cache file, Cheese should work.