The file .xsession-errors ends with the error from the x-window-manager ... 'SESSION_MANAGER environment variable not defined'
If it was defined before, why not now? Could it be related? What should it be defined as? Nov 1, 2026 11:25:29 PM Donald MacDougall <[email protected]>: > I have an Acer Aspire laptop. I hadn't upgraded it in a long time. It was > still on bullseye which recently stopped receiving security updates, so I > decided it was time to do it. I upgraded to bookworm which went swimmingly. > Then I upgraded to Trixie which went even better. I have been using xfce for > many many years and it seemed to work splendidly till I went to shut it down > and found that the "Reboot" option which had always been the last option on > the Apps list was no longer there, so I opened a command line window and used > the command "systemctl power off"and this worked fine. I had also noticed > the "halt" option in the systemctl man page and remembered decades ago using > the halt command to power down computers and wondered what the difference is > between that and poweroff, so I tried it. After that when I started it up > again, logged in and typed 'startx', instead of seeing the normal desktop, > all I see is a black screen with a mouse cursor in the middle which I can > move around at will but it does nothing. Apparently halt has changed meaning > since way back when. > > I'm on Wayland obviously with lightdm > > I had a similar thing happen several years ago on a desktop computer and I > never figured it out, but I created a new user which worked fine so I never > bothered to spend the time to trouble shoot, but this time that isn't > working. The new user gets the same black screen. > > I'd really appreciate suggestions. > > I don't have my email set up to be used from the command line so I'm sending > this from my phone, which makes it difficult to cut and paste, but if more > information is needed I'll do my best to supply it.
