I enter my password, hit Enter, the screen transitions to the usual blank screen, the cursor is a X, and from there sometimes it’ll just stop right there, and others it’ll go to GNOME overview no problem. Hot-plugging my headphone jack and locking the session sometimes recovers it on GNOME on X, but on GNOME on Wayland that doesn’t work but usually the first half of REISUB takes me back to log-in to let me reboot and try again.
This has been happening to me since mid or late F38 into F39 so far, and seemingly only happens on Workstation (GNOME 46 on openSUSE Tumbleweed and GNOME on Ubuntu 23.10 both on Wayland sessions are fine).
I suspect it’s something with audio or PipeWire since I hear my speakers pop right before that screen transition, but I’m not sure what else to check for sure. dmesg didn’t show anything obvious.
You certainly also will need to mention your hardware specifications. As this occurs now and then, the cause of the problem also could be some failing piece of hardware.
You probably do not see the blank screen with X when on Wayland?
Problem persists in F40, have the same issue here.
sometimes flawless login Gnome (on X11)
sometimes gray + x-cursor
all with the same configuration
Workarounds for me:
Ctr+Alt+F4 (or other tty), wait for about 10 secs, Ctr-Alt+F2 back:
an Authenticate Window is presented when returned, with Gnome Desktop grayed out/blurred that my user should give password again → cancel will be enough (no password needed) → issue gone
or, sometimes a switch to F1 and login again with same user will work too or, just reboot (1x is mostly enough, sometimes more)
No errors in log (sometimes complaining about “offered two different identities”, not related to the ‘F1 switch and 2nd login’ workaround)
Issue occurs rather random to me. It just happens sometimes (when i test it by booting 10 times, about 3 times the issue occurs). Doesn’t seem hardware related -issue is on my laptop and also on my PC with totally diff hardware, esp videocard- so won’t bother you with specs.