On Tue, Jun 18, 2019 at 07:21:35PM -0400, Felix Miata wrote: > The gods of security have decreed that instead of startx you must use a > display > manager to login and start your X session.
Utter nonsense. startx works in every release of Debian. Every single one. I use it myself. Be aware that under *current* Debian releases (stretch and buster), an attempt is made to run the X server as your own user instead of setuid to root. In order for that to work, your user must be able to login successfully with a full systemd login session. If your user account is defined locally in /etc/passwd, and if you haven't done anything unusual to your init system or kernel boot parameters, and if you have all of the required firmware, it should just work. This also means your X log file may be in ~/.local/share/xorg/ instead of in /var/log/. See <https://wiki.debian.org/NewInStretch>. (Under buster, if your users are defined in a network service like NIS or possibly LDAP, you may have to take special steps to allow systemd to retrieve your account credentials. See bug #878625. We can worry about that if it becomes relevant.)
