> I donʼt remember seeing: was your emacs built with cairo or with xft?
> With or without HarfBuzz? Because I canʼt get an xft+hb build to
> crash when switching the font-backend to 'xft'.
The line below in my ~/.emacs was crashing emacs at start time.
(push '(font-backend xft x) default-frame-alist)
Without the line above, all works right.
If emacs is started with -Q and then loading ~/.emacs with the line above also works right, the problem is at starting time with that line.
The libharfbuzz* packages are installed in my GNU Debian.