I installed GNOME on my Pocket just to give it a try and it replaced greetd with GDM which is really not what I wanted.
I already tried sudo dpkg-reconfigure greetd to change it back, but that didn’t do anything.
Can someone help me out?
Ok, so apparently GNOME also pulls in a thing called plymouth which seems to have messed up a lot of things.
The trackball and keyboard became unusable after booting into GDM. I had to SSH into my Pocket in order to revert this back to normal by uninstalling GNOME, GDM3 and this plymouth thing.
I learned that sudo dpkg-reconfigure greetd isn’t enough (or doesn’t do anything? I remember it used to bring up an interactive dialog to pick the display manager?).
You have to sudo systemctl enable greetd.service (possibly with --force) in order to replace GDM as the display manager.
I’m sorry. I had thought that my post on this change made it clear that installing it would switch the greeter to gdm.
I tested upgrading a system image with greetd to gnome+gdm and did not experience any problems. I would be very interested in finding out what happened on your system.
In addition to enabling greetd.service you probably also want to disable gdm3.service.
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The main issues were:
- display rotated by 90° (easily fixed but only if you know how)
- no keyboard or trackball response in the GUI (although OLED menu still works)
- Some additional output during boot (didn’t take a photo, sorry): blue text in between the regular boot output
- Overlay menus in GNOME don’t go away when they should, if an app is in fullscreen
- Random UI freezes under GNOME
In the state that I found it, I’d say GNOME is unusable.
And the GDM issue wasn’t obvious because your post was about the reform-desktop-full package, which I have not installed on my system.
I wasn’t aware that just sudo install gnome would change my display manager. That’s not the fault of anyone here of course. And I get why the gnome package is set up like that, so that users who install gnome get a consistent experience right away. But to me it’s overly invasive to just do that without asking.
Oh but you are on kernel 6.12, right? minute (and myself) only tested gnome with kernel 6.14. If the issue is the kernel version, then this is valuable input and we now learned that users of Debian Trixie should not be installing gnome. I will have to test this once Trixie is released…
The last time I tried out greetd+tuigreet and gnome it didn’t work. gnome would just not start and i would be thrown back to tuigreet. Maybe that’s a me issue or gnome really requires gdm to work?
Yes, the experience is certainly suboptimal… 
I vaguely remember similar issues on my desktop PC where GNOME would only work with GDM but I wanted to stick with SDDM.
I’m generally not a big GNOME fan. Just wanted to give it a try on the small screen, but it’s not an improvement over Sway for me anyway on the Pocket because it uses more vertical screen space.
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Indeed. I’m also staying with sway on the pocket.
Also, the rotation issue was indeed only fixed in 6.14: pocket-panel: experimental orientation callback; sleep/wake fix (!108) · Merge requests · Reform / reform-debian-packages · GitLab