On Sat July 14 2018 15:03:46 William Morder wrote:
> From these details, I assume that you are running Devuan. I was just about
> to write something about similar problems that I have had over the past
> week or ten days. When I run apt-get dist-upgrade (running Devuan), it
> installs slim and xfce (neither of which I want), as well as libreoffice
> packages (which I also don't want, as I prefer OpenOffice).

After your unwanted slim, xfce, and libreoffice are installed what are
the results of running "apt-cache rdepends slim", "aptitude why slim" etc.

OpenOffice appears to be obsolete.  I'm not sure what source of OpenOffice
packages you are using but they may not satisfy today's dependencies.  What
does "apt-cache policy openoffice" (or whatever your primary openoffice
package is called) report?

> When I tried to 
> get rid of these items and reinstall only OpenOffice and tdm-trinity as my
> default dm, I ended up with a system that booted, then halted at a login
> prompt; I tried to login, but neither user nor root logins worked, and I
> couldn't boot into failsafe or anything else that worked.

Possibly a long time known slim bug that it stays on as default display
manager even after uninstalling.

Aside #1:  We don't have these problems but we use LibreOffice.  The
           messy interface of LibreOffice 5 is a distinct downgrade
           from earlier versions but at least we get security updates.

Aside #2:  I'm struggling to see how this has any relevance to Trinity.

--Mike