commit 7bd47ec9de2badcee3c485857b0f3f27aa80cc0a
Author: Fabio Fantoni <fantonifabio@tiscali.it>
Date: Sun Sep 13 16:29:24 2026 +0200
d/control: recommend xwayland for the Wayland session
cinnamon-common ships the "Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental)" session
(/usr/share/wayland-sessions/cinnamon-wayland.desktop and the matching
cinnamon-wayland.session), but nothing in the Cinnamon packaging pulls
xwayland in: it only appears in the build dependencies of muffin, where
it is needed by the test suite. Installing cinnamon,
cinnamon-desktop-environment or task-cinnamon-desktop, recommends
included, never installs it, on unstable as well as on stable.
Without XWayland that session comes up with a black desktop: DISPLAY is
exported all the same, so nemo-desktop starts and immediately dies with
"Cannot open display", and with it go the wallpaper, the desktop icons
and the desktop context menu. Installing the package makes it behave
normally again. This is what Debian bug #1113913 ran into, where it was
mistaken for a side effect of turning the on-screen keyboard on.
GNOME handles it the same way and in the same place: gnome-session, the
architecture-independent package shipping
/usr/share/wayland-sessions/gnome.desktop, has a plain Depends on
xwayland. kwin-wayland depends on it too, and weston recommends it;
libmutter only carries a Breaks for the version. A Recommends is enough
here, since the Wayland session is still experimental and the X11 one
has no use for XWayland.
Closes: #1147594
Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5
commit 6481cf634dcdcfc01a1ff04dcb9dd424aa304f91
Author: Fabio Fantoni <fantonifabio@tiscali.it>
Date: Fri Aug 28 20:12:54 2026 +0200
d/control: recommend metacity and tint2 for the fallback session
When Cinnamon crashes, cinnamon-launcher starts metacity as the fallback
window manager and the first panel it finds among mate-panel,
gnome-panel and tint2. None of them was installed on Debian:
metacity-common is recommended only for its window border themes and
ships no binary, so the forked child died with a FileNotFoundError
traceback in ~/.xsession-errors and the user was left with a bare
desktop, without window manager and without panel.
Verified in a sid VM with 6.6.9-2: with these two packages installed the
fallback session comes up complete, with the crash dialog decorated and
a panel with task list, tray and clock, and restarting Cinnamon from it
works and cleans up both processes. The cost is 4 packages and about 2.5
MB installed.
tint2 is recommended instead of mate-panel, which upstream lists first,
because apt installs the first alternative of a Recommends and
mate-panel would pull in 16 packages. Upstream Mint has metacity and
mate-panel | gnome-panel | tint2 in Depends.
Closes: #810911
Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5
Among the 8 debian patches available in version 6.6.9-2 of the package, we noticed the following issues:
![[bug history graph]](https://qa.debian.org/data/bts/graphs/c/cinnamon.png){kind=link}