For a while I’ve been encountering a bug on Ubuntu where gdm fails to start. After starting up the PC, right where I expect to see gdm’s list of login users, the whole screen is black with a GUI cursor that I can control with the mouse, but there is nothing to click. The fix is Ctrl+Alt+F2 and continue from the console.

The annoying thing about this bug is that it happens sporadically, so it’s difficult to debug. I’ve tried various fixes over the last couple months but nothing seems to work permanently.

I know the quickest fix is to just stop using gdm, or try another display manager, but since I have time on my hands right now, I thought it would be fun to try installing a brand new Linux distribution. I went with Debian.

pkgsel

I opted for the minimal Debian image, the one which requires a working internet connection during the installation phase. At some point during the install, it prompts you for which subset of software to install. I selected none of those (I even unchecked “Standard system utilities”) and I ended up with a working Debian installation.

picom

After installing X and AwesomeWM, the window opacity setting was not cooperating. Translucent windows such as my terminal emulator were rendering as fully opaque. Picom was misbehaving. I even resorted to compiling picom on my machine to get the latest version.

Nothing I tried worked in the evening yesterday, but this morning I opened a terminal window, ran picom --backend xrender, and opened another terminal window. That other terminal window was rendered properly. And that was all I needed to see. I integrated this into my AwesomeWM config, and all was well.

In particular, here is my .xinitrc (as of 2026-05-11):

xset r rate 200 40

picom --frame-opacity=1.0 --backend xrender &
feh --bg-scale ~/.local/share/wall.jpg &
exec /usr/local/bin/dwm

N***** drivers

I have a N***** GeForce RTX 5050. And so after keying that in to their website’s driver search (a painfully slow process, since almost the whole page reloads for each field you enter), and I get a link to download a shell script. The url looks something like https://us.download.n*****.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/595.71.05/N*****-Linux-x86_64-595.71.05.run. As far as I can tell, they specifically chose not to pass the parameters from the search query to the download page in the url, so the user is forced to interface with that terrible GPU picker. Classic.

Once I have that shell script downloaded, I ran it with sh and elevated permissions. It gives two choices: either N***** Proprietary or MIT/GPL. For some reason the proprietary one didn’t work at all—it didn’t even detect my GPU after installing. So I uninstalled that and went with the MIT/GPL version. That worked fine. I also proceeded to disable nouveau from loading at startup by creating a /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau-blacklist.conf containing

blacklist nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0

and then updating initramfs with update-initramfs -u, and finally rebooting.

Emoji Support

I followed this GitHub gist and installed Noto Color Emoji.

Audio

I installed ALSA and PulseAudio with apt install alsa-utils pulseaudio. To be honest I’m unsure which one is responsible for the audio eventually working. Do note that I use a Focusrite Scarlett.

Conclusion

That was pretty fun. Bye Ubuntu.