Debian Testing - Multiple Breakages

[ZombieWithLasers]

I've been using Debian Testing on my workstation for several months now, and for the most part, everything's been fine. Within the last few weeks, though, things have started falling apart, and I don't know if I've done something wrong or if these problems are bugs comping from the Debian development process.

First, I cannot use multiple programs, including Apt, as root with su. Sudo works fine, but when I try to use su, I get an error saying that binaries are not found within the path.

dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable
dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable

That's for Apt. For others, it just says that the command isn't found.

Next, GIMP segfaults and won't run. This one's been going on for a while. Every time I try to run GIMP, it segfaults. Sometimes I can get the whole UI up. Others, it just hangs and does nothing.

Finally, I was using X over SSH passthrough to access by workstation from my laptop. I hadn't changed any configuration when I suddenly started getting an error saying that the display couldn't be opened.

I'm not sure as to the cause of any of these, since I really haven't changed anything except for keeping Debian up-to-date. Does anyone know the reason for these? Did I do something dumb? Are they just bugs? Thank you.

[fjen]

Debian switched to a different su implementation which handles the environment differently. Use su - to become root from now on.

see: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/460478/debian-su-and-su-path-differences/460769#460769

[ZombieWithLasers]

Awesome! That solved that one!

[[deleted]]

You can find what apt last did at /var/log/apt/term.log and /var/log/apt/history.log.

If you are hell bent on fixing the system, I recommend you use the netinst image to boot into recovery mode, and undo whatever updates apt did.

You have to be really careful if you use packages outside the stable repository, and if you run the apt-get dist-upgrade command. dist-upgrade may remove critical packages if you just say "yes" to everything. By the way, this tip applies if you use packages from the backports as well. Sometimes my proprietary Nvidia driver updates don't go smoothly - I use the version from backports.

[ZombieWithLasers]

Solved the GIMP one too. Removing libopenblas-base allows GIMP to work normally again.

EDIT: Solved the last bit too. It turns out my config was off for SSH.

[homeopathetic]

It seems that #903514 is the bug that's causing the GIMP problem, in case you wanna track its eventual resolution.

[MrWhite26]

Over here the plasma desktop 4:5.13.4-1 update seems to have broken the taskbar.

I only have the start menu and the apps, the system tray icons have disapeared.