The default behavior of Crostini’s Debian Stretch container is to use a curses-based pinentry. This behaves strangely, in two different ways:

  1. Inherently, it shows the semi-graphical pinentry dialog in the terminal that has last called gpg-connect-agent updatestartuptty /bye. You can do this in .bashrc or similar, but if your habit is (like mine) to run many different terminals at once, you would need to call this whenever focus changes — otherwise the pinentry dialog will invariably co …