Login loop

[mungy]

Hi, since applying the latest updates on MX21 about a week ago, I am stuck in a login loop - password accepted, screen darkens briefly, then returned to login prompt.

I have booted from a live distro, and seem to have plenty of disk space.

Can anyone point me at a troubleshooting sequence for this?

[Eadwine Rose]

Can you check if this might be the culprit?

--If in starting your system it boots to an unwanted Desktop, right click desktop, then select leave and logout. At the login screen there is a session chooser at the top of the screen.

[korilius]

I just ran into this problem, seemingly out of the blue last night. After breaking into the system via GRUB (networking wasn't started), a fair bit of searching with little luck and a fair bit of cursing to boot. I fixed the problem by deleting my .Xauthority. ->

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rm ~/.Xauthority

Notes:
I did forget and re-remembered that I could Ctrl-Alt-Esc-F1 into the shell and then Alt-arrowkeyleft back when finished.
The only thing I did before all this started happening was installing Proton versions on Steam and enabling Vulkan shader caching.
I tried other things although it only started working after deleting .Xauthority. Other things I attempted:
Reconfiguring lightdm (sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm)
switching to sddm - I got a black screen and was stuck after logging in
Reapplying ownership and fiddling with .Xauthority permissions.

I have yet to look around if there's a stickied page for dealing with tips / tricks / nuances / rare bugs and the like. Maybe we should start one if there is and put this there.

Long story short: delete .Xauthority in your home directory.

[CharlesV]

@korilius +1

[crackbarrel]

I also had this problem on a virtual machine. Everytime I try to install a vnc server, it happened.

Was able to fix with the rm command above. Thanks

Edit:

For people who aren't familiar with linux, basically switch to terminal session with

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ctrl + alt + F#

(F1 for instance). Then enter your login name and password. Then type the rm command

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rm ~/.Xauthority

to remove the file from your home folder. If it didn't work, perhaps

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sudo rm ~/.Xauthority

will work.