Dear Maintainer,
*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where
appropriate ***
* What led up to the situation?
Upgrading from gnome 48 to gnome 49?
* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
ineffective)?
Uncommenting "WaylandEnable=false" in /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf allowed at
least to switch to a text console with ctrl-alt-fn (before this change,
I could not even switch to a text console).
Then I was able to look at journalctl wich displays a lot of copies of:
nov. 07 16:47:38 lehrin gdm3[2442]: Gdm: GdmSession: no session desktop
files installed, aborting...
nov. 07 16:47:38 lehrin systemd[1]: gdm.service: Main process exited,
code=killed, status=5/TRAP
nov. 07 16:47:38 lehrin systemd[1]: gdm.service: Failed with result
'signal'.
nov. 07 16:47:38 lehrin systemd[1]: gdm.service: Triggering OnFailure=
dependencies.
nov. 07 16:47:39 lehrin systemd[1]: gdm.service: Scheduled restart job,
restart counter is at 2.
nov. 07 16:47:39 lehrin systemd[1]: Starting gdm.service - GNOME Display
Manager...
nov. 07 16:47:40 lehrin systemd[1]: Started gdm.service - GNOME Display
Manager.
nov. 07 16:47:40 lehrin gdm-launch-environment][2502]:
pam_unix(gdm-launch-environment:session): session opened for user
gdm-greeter(uid=605)
I checked the sessions folders, they are here:
(lehrin) luc% ls -l /usr/share/wayland-sessions/
total 56
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8240 31 oct. 13:34 gnome-classic.desktop
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8364 31 oct. 13:34 gnome-classic-wayland.desktop
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8014 31 oct. 14:23 gnome.desktop
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8570 31 oct. 14:23 gnome-wayland.desktop
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9175 22 août 17:07 xfce-wayland.desktop
(lehrin) luc% ls -l /usr/share/xsessions/
total 16
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 86 21 juin 2024 lightdm-xsession.desktop
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10257 22 août 17:07 xfce.desktop
(lehrin) luc%
The only thing that worked was to install task-xfce-desktop, i.e. to not
use gdm3 at all.
This seems very close to bug #1119809, but the differences are that I
was *not* able to switch console,
and that I encountered that on 49.1-6, i.e. after the fix for #1119809.
*** End of the template - remove these template lines ***
Control: severity -1 important Please provide details of your graphics hardware and the drivers you use. Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
The graphic card is :
VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation TU117 [GeForce GTX
1650] (rev a1)
I use the nvidia drivers:
root@lehrin:~# lsmod | grep nvi
nvidia_drm 126976 12
drm_ttm_helper 16384 1 nvidia_drm
drm_client_lib 12288 1 nvidia_drm
drm_kms_helper 258048 3 drm_ttm_helper,nvidia_drm,drm_client_lib
nvidia_modeset 1605632 12 nvidia_drm
nvidia 60710912 219 nvidia_drm,nvidia_modeset
video 81920 2 asus_wmi,nvidia_modeset
drm 835584 19
drm_kms_helper,nvidia,drm_ttm_helper,nvidia_drm,drm_client_lib,ttm
root@lehrin:~#
I don't have Nvidia hardware so I don't think I can solve this, but let's get some more information. What specific version of the Nvidia drivers do you have installed? You provided an excerpt of your systemd journal, but perhaps the error happens earlier. I suggest restarting your computer and then run something like journalctl -b > 1120326-journal.txt and reply to this bug with that file attached. Do you know if your system was able to run GNOME with Wayland before? I think that is a hard requirement to use GDM 49 and it will be enforced even stronger with GNOME 50. Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
Le 2025-11-07 20:14, Jeremy Bícha a écrit : I have nvidia-driver 550.163.01-3 I did try to remove completely the nvidia drivers during my tests this afternoon, but it did not help. I don't know it it is because the problem is not related to these drivers or if it is because I did something wrong when attempting to remove them, so we cannot rule out anything with these attempts. In order to achive this, I had to run "dpkg-reconfigure gdm3" to reset the manager from lightdm to gdm3 and then reboot. As expected, gdm failed to start after that and I was stuck with a black screen and no way to switch to a console. The system was up, though, so I was able to log in remotely from another computer using ssh, and I could run the journalctl -b command and save the file somewhere before rebooting again and resetting lightdm up. The error I see in the journal output are different for the one I reported earlier! Maybe it is because here I got the error prior to go back to xfce. So I guess the errors here will be more helpful to undestand what happened. I have used gnome since years on this machine and in fact never looked what it used under the hood. I just used the default dependencies and settings. It ran fine until this morning. When did gnome switch to wayland? Well, it is the downside of using debian testing; sometimes it falls apart, I know that. best regards, Luc
Control: block -1 by 1081302 Debian's packaged Nvidia drivers are outdated. See https://bugs.debian.org/1081302 I think this may be a blocking issue for you to use Nvidia graphics with GNOME on Wayland. GNOME on Wayland is the only way to use GNOME after Debian 13. https://wiki.debian.org/Wayland says that Debian GNOME has used Wayland by default since Debian 10. That's only half true; I believe at least some hardware still defaulted to Xorg even for Debian 13. Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
Le 2025-11-07 21:42, Jeremy Bícha a écrit : OK, I have uninstalled the debian packaged drivers and installed the latest proprietary nvidia drivers (580.105.08), and booted again. I still get a black screen. I have attached the new output of journalctl -b with these drivers. best regards, Luc
I don't know how to help further. In my last email, I meant to highlight these lines which are in this journal and the previous journal: gnome-shell: Thread 'KMS thread' will be using high priority scheduling gnome-shell: Failed to open gpu '/dev/dri/card0': DRM_CLIENT_CAP_UNIVERSAL_PLANES not supported gnome-shell: Failed to setup: No GPUs found Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
I had the same problem. I fixed it by updating the nvidia drivers to 555.58.02-1 from experimental and following the Wayland instructions from the Debian Nvidia wiki https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Wayland hope this helps John On Fri, 7 Nov 2025 17:51:36 -0500 =?UTF-8?Q?Jeremy_B=C3=ADcha?= < jbicha@debian.org> wrote: