Gnome sometimes doesn't start up

Bluefin and Aurora
1

I am on the latest Bluefin image:

● ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin:latest
                   Digest: sha256:1c211f0bf13c0fc4dc2585cc6d074d2b233e2d228c240e16f0ab758350f25169
                  Version: 40.20240504.0 (2024-05-04T16:49:53Z)

I booted my system up today on several occasions, and Gnome did not load. All I got was a grey screen. No menus, no context menus, no key combinations, but I have a working mouse pointer. Maybe this is a raw Wayland screen?

To move forward, I force-reboot the system (by holding down the power button) and fortunately Gnome comes up again despite me booting the same image again. So there is some randomness involved.

I can’t even switch to a tty by pressing ctrl+alt+F1 (or any of the other F-keys), which makes diagnosing the cause hard.

This happened to me twice today. 4 boots in total, 2 of them with no Gnome.

Anyone else experiencing this?

2

I did a bit more rebooting just for testing and I also encountered the same problem with the previous image:

● ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin:latest
                   Digest: sha256:be6ec9f7b9940fdd1ecdb9c15a35fc2b67a61b60995c794c47ae7aab11c0a220
                  Version: 40.20240503.0 (2024-05-03T16:50:25Z)

So it’s not a completely fresh problem.

Edit: I disabled autologin and the login prompt from GDM shows up. Everything looks fine. I can even switch to a TTY via ctrl+alt+F3. But after I enter the right credentials, Gnome sometimes doesn’t start up. I’m using the zsh at the moment and I wonder if this has something to do with this: Double-extra s*rewed: Can't login with GUI or TTY, can't rebase, can't change shell

3

I changed my shell to bash, but Gnome still has these occasional failures to start. This is probably a different problem, even though there is still some similarity.

4

Just for completeness: The problem has not reappeared in the last few months. I assume it is completely gone now. No idea what the issue was.