Cinnamon not starting

[gothicVI]

Hi all,

I’ve noticed on two laptops that after login cinnamon is no longer starting.
After typing the password, I can see my background shortly which then turns black and the folders on the desktop show up.
Using right-click, I can open a terminal, and using cinnamon --replace & I can get cinnamon to start properly.

Why is this all of a sudden no longer worling?

[Shirshendu]

Could you create a new user and see if cinnamon starts properly there?

[gothicVI]

Thanks for that hint!
With a new user, it works flawlessly - is there any config file I could diff in order to understand what’s going wrong?
Or can I “just” reset some setting - I’m not even sure if it’s cinnamon-related or due to the display manager?

[Shirshendu]

@gothicVI

Or can I “just” reset some setting

Might be something in ~/.config (more probable) or ~/.local/share or maybe the ~/.xinitrc file, but not sure.

[gothicVI]

Even though that wasn’t the solution, looking at dot-files was a great point in the right direction! Thanks for your replies!

Looking at .xsession-errors told me the following:

[cinnamon-settings-daemon-smartcard] Failed to start: no suitable smartcard driver could be found
[cinnamon-settings-daemon-smartcard] Failed to start: no suitable smartcard driver could be found
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/cinnamon-launcher", line 13, in <module>
    import gi
  File "/home/${whoami}/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/gi/__init__.py", line 40, in <module>
    from . import _gi 
ImportError: libffi.so.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

and so on…

Deleting /home/${whoami}/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/gi which I can’t recall “updating” manually did the trick.

Later on, checking for missing dependencies among my python package base revealed no issues so deleting that package should have done no harm.