On Thu 24 Jul 2014 at 08:50:49 -0400, Steve Litt wrote: > I can't help you with the root cause, because I know less about > systemd than I know of the plant life at the North Pole, but if it > were me, for the time being, I'd just do the workaround and use > startx. You put your window manager in .xinitrc, and then from the > command prompt, as a normal user, type "startx". It is much wiser to use ~/.xsession on Debian.