I am using Awesome WM and I am starting DE session to get more useful desktop experience. I used to start mate-session manually, but I've decided to spawn mate-session on awesome WM startup.

.config/awesome/rc.lua

-- Autostart
awful.spawn.with_shell("~/.config/awesome/autorun.sh")

.config/awesome/autorun.sh

#!/bin/sh

run() {
  if ! pgrep -f "$1" ; then
    "$@" &
  fi
}

run mate-session

This works fine, but some things seem to break. I've got orca installed, at some point, which tries to autostart itself:

$ dpkg -S /etc/xdg/autostart/orca-autostart.desktop 
orca: /etc/xdg/autostart/orca-autostart.desktop

However, probably due to some race condition with pipewire, the orca starts, but does not work. If I start the session manually, the speech dispatcher is working correctly. Running a `killall -9 orca` fixes the mate-terminal freezing issue.

I guess I will switch to manual startup of the mate-session, because something gets broken, when starting it up like that.

[    15.421] (II) LoadModule: "amdgpu"
[    15.422] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/amdgpu_drv.so
[    15.426] (II) Module amdgpu: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[    15.426]    compiled for 1.21.1.7, module version = 23.0.0
[    15.426]    Module class: X.Org Video Driver
[    15.426]    ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 25.2
[    15.426] (II) AMDGPU: Driver for AMD Radeon:
        All GPUs supported by the amdgpu kernel driver
... <truncated for brevity> ...
[    15.694] (II) LoadModule: "glamoregl"
[    15.694] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so
[    15.699] (II) Module glamoregl: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[    15.699]    compiled for 1.21.1.7, module version = 1.0.1
[    15.699]    ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4
[    15.719] (II) AMDGPU(0): glamor X acceleration enabled on AMD Radeon Graphics (renoir, LLVM 15.0.6, DRM 3.57, 6.9.7+bpo-amd64)
[    15.719] (II) AMDGPU(0): glamor detected, initialising EGL layer.
[    15.719] (**) AMDGPU(0): TearFree property default: on

Linux 6.9.7+bpo-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.9.7-1~bpo12+1 (2024-07-03) x86_64 GNU/Linux

Which amdgpu driver do you use?

Debug symbols: have a look into Synaptics, mostly what Debian has is also present in Devuan (as long as it does not depend on systemd).

However, I doubt that this causes the issue. If I kill the mate-session it gets fixed and if I restart the mate-session, the issue does not reappear. It is also limited to mate-terminal and xfce4-terminal, the browser is playing videos while the terminal is hanging/freezing.

I've been given hints to look into gvfs and gio. I will try to strace it using uxterm or even debug it, if I can get the gdb to follow the detached child of /usr/bin/mate-terminal.

Do you know if Devuan has debug symbols of the compiled packages?

The Problem:
After some updates or something, the mate-terminal started. I've also tried the XFCE4's terminal emulator and it had the same issue. However, the uxterm works just fine without any hanging.

Solution:
Killing and restarting the mate-session fixes the problem.

Thoughts:
I have the same configuration on a different machine, but I don't face the issue. The difference is that there I start the mate-session manually, after awesome WM is loaded. Here on this machine I have it spawned in the awesome WM configuration on startup. I don't see anything suspicious in .xsession-errors.

Question:
Any ideas how to troubleshoot this?

UPDATE:
The on-screen reader (orca) is causing the freezing. If kill it the terminal emulator no longer freezes. Orca is autostarted by mate-session, but it seems to fail if mate-session is spawned by awesome WM on startup. If I run mate-session manually, the screen reader works fine and synthesises speech. However if it's started by the awesome WM, the orca does not seem to work. I assume that there is a startup race between pipewire and mate-session + orca.

The simplest solution is to run mate-sessoin manually, remove the orca package or remove it from /etc/xdg/autostart.