#1142338 gnome-shell: after upgrade from trixie to forky, gnome-shell reports Failed to start X Wayland

Package:
gnome-shell
Source:
gnome-shell
Description:
graphical shell for the GNOME desktop
Submitter:
Jon Mansey
Date:
2026-07-17 23:41:01 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1142338#5
Date:
2026-07-17 22:48:57 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?
upgraded from trixie to forky
   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
after apt full-upgrade I rebooted. Then I was not able to log in. I would select user, enter password, it would appear to work, then the login screen would re-appear.
I found following error in journal
Jul 17 17:24:42 debian gnome-shell[4442]: Failed to start X Wayland: Wrong ownership for directory "/tmp/.X11-unix", owned by 60578 but should be same as /tmp (owned by (0)) or 1000

so I did chown root:root /tmp/.X11-unix and then chmod 777 and then chmod +t and then it worked ok

   * What was the outcome of this action?
   * What outcome did you expect instead?

*** End of the template - remove these template lines ***
#1142338#10
Date:
2026-07-17 23:38:18 UTC
From:
To:
After setting the ownership to root and logging in successfully, then restarting the machine, Ive found the ownership gets reset back to gdm-greeter:Debian-gdm and gnome-session fails again.

Setting the owner to debian:debian (ie user 1000) also fails.

Only setting owner to root:root and chmod 777 and +t allows gdm to start after every OS restart.