I have to make a STIG compliant virtual machine and to help me with that i use openSCAP Workbench, however, when running the openscap mitigation with the “DISA STIG Almalinux with GUI“ option, it always breaks the desktop, this has consistently only happened with GNOME and XFCE.
I figure it might be an X11 issue since the KDE desktop doesn’t have this issue (despite it being ever so tiresome in virtual machines)
Here is the link for the documentation
Thanks for the screenshot.
From the image, it looks like the system is reaching a text console login on tty1, rather than the graphical login screen. So this may be a display-manager / graphical.target issue, or an authentication-related remediation affecting graphical login.
Could you check these after the remediation and reboot?
systemctl get-default
systemctl status display-manager --no-pager
systemctl status gdm --no-pager
journalctl -b -u display-manager --no-pager
journalctl -b -u gdm --no-pager
journalctl -b -p warning..alert --no-pager
authselect current
authselect check
I also noticed that the generated STIG GUI remediation includes PAM/authselect changes, smart card related changes, and SSSD smart card authentication changes. So I think we should check not only X11/GNOME, but also PAM/authselect/SSSD.