On Sun, 1 Nov 2026 23:25:25 -0800
Donald MacDougall <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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,
What "apps list"?
If you right click on the desktop, you should get a popup menu. The
bottom entry of that is "Applications". Hover the pointer over that,
and you should get another popup menu, the bottom entry of which is
"Log Out". Select that, and you should get a popup menu in the center
of the screen with several drastic options. One of those is "Shut
Down". Is that what you see?
> so I opened a command line window and used
> the command "systemctl power off"and this worked fine.
I think you ran "systemctl poweroff".
^^
I take it that you got a normal power up and were able to log in to
XFCE.
> 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',
Wait, logged in again to what? In a normal Debian XFCE installation you
log in to lightdm, which means you are already running X. So why did
you type "startx"? And into what? Did you change from lightdm (on
console 7) to a non-graphical console (1-6)? If so why?
> 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.
Or, more likely, you did something you haven't told us about because
you didn't think it was significant. Which is why giving what you think
are unnecessary details is sometimes very important.
>
> I'm on Wayland obviously with lightdm
It is not obvious to me that you are on Wayland. How do you know you
are on Wayland? Don't tell us that you are on Wayland (obvious or not).
Show us you are on Wayland.
>
> 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.
--
Does anybody read signatures any more?
https://charlescurley.com
https://charlescurley.com/blog/
