TLDR: I tried to install updates yesterday and now I can’t get past the login screen.

Linux Mint 21.3 on a Lenovo Yoga 370. I’m able to boot to live USB. I never got around to setting up Timeshift.

I was running the update manager yesterday, but admittedly just blindly clicking okay. Eventually the process completed and I rebooted, then went to check for updates again. This time, it was giving me an error message telling me to use the “Broken” filter. Reading some forum posts on the topic didn’t help me find this, so I tried again to install a few remaining updates, those failed, so I tried rebooting again. Now it boots up normally until an error saying, “unable to launch “cinnamon-session-cinnamon” X session — “cinnamon-session-cinnamon” not found; falling back to default session.” I click “okay”, then it brings up the log in screen. When I enter my password, it just goes back to the “unable to launch…” error message.

I’ve done some digging through forum results for similar issues, but haven’t found anything that works, just lots of dead ends and/or things that are well over my head.

  • daggermoon@piefed.worldEnglish
    31·
    6 days ago

    How committed are you to Mint? I generally have fewer issues with CachyOS and other Arch based distros. Fedora, and Debian are also worth checking out. As for the desktop environment; KDE is definitely worth trying.

    • QualifiedKitten@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      Long term? I’m open to checking out others, but I fear that reinstalling Mint or switching to a different distro without actually fixing the problem first would be taking the easy way out and passing up a learning experience.

      • daggermoon@piefed.worldEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        I understand and respect that. In that case X11 is kind of dated. I believe Wayland on Mint is in a pretty good state now. Are you able to select a Wayland session on the lock screen? A Wayland session might bypass this issue altogether.

        • QualifiedKitten@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          I’ve heard those words before, and that’s about as far as my experience with them goes. From the lock screen, I found options for

          • Cinnamon (Default)
          • Cinnamon (Software Rendering)
          • Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental)

          I got everything working again, so it’s too late to find out if one of those would’ve worked, but thanks for teaching me something new!

          Edit: Oh shit! Selecting a different DE from the list brings me back to the same session? All my apps are still open when switching DEs under the same user! New rabbithole to explore! Any beginner friendly links to share?