Lately I decided to try Podman Quadlets. It seemed to be really interesting way to achieve similar results as with Docker and Compose, but it have nicer integration with the system (i.e. ability to see container in Cockpit along with other systemd services, or triggering container by socket, so less frequently used containers won’t be running all the time).
Everything went fine except for unavailability of buildah package in Debian stable apt channel (or the version that were needed for podman at least). Quick search on the internet and I found the answer is to reference this specific package from the testing channel of apt.
At this time I knew that I am going into problems willingly.
I was able to install buildah package and install podman and in few minutes have running container. Put my laptop to hibernation and went to sleep.
Next day however I was unable to boot my laptop correctly. Or it was booting but only to text mode, without Gnome Display Manager.
Starting display manager manually systemctl start gdm3, or gdmflexiserver or gdm3 were not doing any good. Also systemctl status display-manager was not helpful. All Gnome related services were dead, closed soon after the system started without any meaningful errors. journalctl also did not show any critical errors like missing GPU drivers or similar issues, but startx was working just fine by showing terminal emulator by using desktop application – so driver were fine.
In attempt to fix that by updating entirely to testing Debian, or Trixie i followed this article. But it updated several packages more and beside that did not help.
I thought that maybe changing to alternative Display Manager should fix that. Another web search showed that doing dpkg-reconfigure gdm3 should show configuration for choosing/changing display manager. But instead resulted in similar error (I am typing from memory).
gdm3 package was not installed correctly or some dependencies are missing.
At this point fix seemed straightforward: reinstall Gnome.
apt reinstall gdm3
proved to be successful by installing few Gnome packages like i.e. gnone-shell, after that desktop automatically were started and Debian switched from text based terminal to Gnome login screen.
PS: strangely I was able to install podman on another machine running also Debian bookwork without a problem.