Comment 6 for bug 2036764

Upon investigation, we have determined the rdepends in question:

cinnamon-core
 +-- Depends: lightdm
 ..+-- Depends: unity-greeter
 ....+-- Depends: indicator-applet
 ......+-- Recommends: indicator-keyboard

Unfortunately, this means it cannot be removed from the seed/meta, and therefore, the meta is not a factor. The problem lies in the indicator, which appears abandoned upstream and needs to be patched for this to work without crashing. This is, of course, assuming the autopkgtests are correct because, as you said, Tim, you couldn't reproduce in a lxd vm.