MX Linux Forum

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?

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.

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. -> 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.

@korilius +1

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 (F1 for instance). Then enter your login name and password. Then type the rm command to remove the file from your home folder. If it didn't work, perhaps will work.