I just installed a cisco vpn. And after installing some required libraries I got the option to get rid of “unused” libraries. So I did ‘sudo apt autoremove’ as suggested. After I rebooted I no longer have a either x11 or wayland in the drop down menu. I can no longer login via the GUI.
Running latest Debian.
Where did I go wrong? Any immediate help appreciated 🙏
Edit: The Cisco VPN required me to download libkit2gtk-4.0-dev if that has anything to do with it?
Edit2: Thanks for all the tips and help. Won’t happen again 😅
Though to late to help you, when you get it working again, install Timeshift, so that instead of faffing around to try and suss out what went wrong, you just start timeshift – restore from the console and a couple of minutes later you’ll have your working setup back. It’s saved my bacon quite a few times in the last couple of years, especially when you can’t login to your DE.
Try to switch to console (ctr alt f2) and run xsession via
startx
. Or just try to install some meta package from console, like gnome-desktop (likesudo apt install gnome-desktop
)Anyway console (tty) is all what you have now and it should be rnough for restoring the system.
Whenever you install or remove software, be sure to read through what’s being removed. You don’t want to accidentally uninstall something important. This is very unlikely to happen with official Debian packages, but you should be especially careful when installing packages outside of Debian’s repo, as they may not be fully compatible with your version of Debian.
In any case, I’d log in to a tty (ctrl-alt-any function key) and install whichever desktop environment you had before using apt.
See if you can just re-install a desktop environment. Try
sudo apt-get install --reinstall gnome
(or maybecinnamon-desktop-environment
, whichever you prefer). Then reboot, see if that does anything.I recommend checking out Fedora Silverblue and other immutable distros, or, at least, use more containerization like Flatpak and Distrobox.
When the programs are all in their own small environment, they at least don’t affect the base system like deleting the DE or other important packages when something goes wrong or changes dependencies.
But, in your case, try switching to tty (CTRL + ALT + F2) and installing the DE base (e.g. gnome-desktop). This will co-install all other dependencies, like X11.
Remember to always backup everything and reading thoroughly when using sudo in the future. And, maybe, check out the tips from my first paragraph :)