Cinnamon Crashed, would you like to restart?

Cinnamon Crashed, would you like to restart?

I have been a fan of the Cinnamon DE for years. I like the way it looks and stays out of my way when I am not admiring it and actually doing something useful! But it is somewhat buggy.

This is a quick post about the cinnamon crashes, basically a new reason for it to crash. I was faced with a common issue of cinnamon crashes, suggesting me to restart cinnamon, which when clicked yes resulted in another crash and popup.

Google searches resulted in many solutions, starting with updating cinnamon, resetting the config by deleting the .cinnamon and .local/share/cinnamon directories and verifying if the correct video driver is in use. There was nothing obvious in the syslog, or xsession errors. Nothing helped.

Tired, I reinstalled mint but issue persisted. This was rather peculiar. I mount my home separately, and that of course survives the installs and OSes. This was the first hint at the problem, issue was configuration of something, not necessarily of cinnamon. So I created a new user and tried to login with the user, and voila, cinnamon worked without a crash. So certainly the issue was config for my regular user.

I decided to go about removing related config folders, and the first ones I chose was the gtk-3.0, gtk-2.0 and cinnamon-session directory inside .config directory. And to my luck, cinnamon is working just fine since then.

Probably, I should spend some time to check what exactly from these config was the issue. But at least I now know one more reason why this error might occur and one more way to fix it. And now, you too..!

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