Change Fedora 43 user avatar

Ask Fedora
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1

I go into settings, system, users, unlock, click on edit avitar, select photo from Pictures, tried both jpg and png formats, but never changes it - just has my two initials picture… what am I doing wrong? worked in ubuntu…

2

Which desktop environment?

Unlocking isn’t required to update your own avatar in GNOME, so I’m guessing it’s a different DE.

4

seems to let me edit it w/o unlocking - just trying everything just in case - and I guess I’m using gnome desktop… Fedora Linux 43 (Workstation Edition), and it keeps asking me to donate to gnome, so…

5

Try this command as is:

busctl call org.freedesktop.Accounts \
    /org/freedesktop/Accounts/User${UID} \
    org.freedesktop.Accounts.User SetIconFile s \
    /usr/share/pixmaps/system-logo-white.png
7

change my initials to ‘Fed’

8

OK, so I was able to use terminal sudo cp filename.jpg /usr/share/pixmaps/faces, which put it into the ‘list’ of settings, system, users, click on edit avitar and finally got it changed!

but boy was that convoluted… not as easy as with ubuntu 24.04…

9

That’s not at all normal… /usr/share/pixmaps/faces is the global storage area for avatars available to all users. Out-of-the-box non-root users can change their own avatars without sudo, etc.

10

… so something screwy going on with this, eh?

11

Yup, that would be the technical term for it. :grin:

I’d only recently installed Fedora 43 (Workstation) on a new laptop, and hadn’t set an avatar yet, so I just did. Settings ➛ System ➛ Users ➛ (pencil icon next to avatar) ➛ Select a File… ➛ Open was all that was required.

On your system, there might be some useful errors in the systemd log:

journalctl --identifier gnome-control-center --since=today
12

This got repeated several times, over and over:
Mar 29 10:31:52 batgirl-E-475M gnome-control-center[17369]: Couldn’t realize GL renderer: Unable to create a GL context
Mar 29 10:31:52 batgirl-E-475M gnome-control-center[17369]: Crop operation failed

13

Interesting… I’ve been using Fedora + GNOME for years and hadn’t run across the error above. The “GL renderer” is either a GPU driver issue or perhaps an issue with the graphics setup.

Is your Fedora 43 a bare-metal install or an upgrade?

15

I also changed right not my Avatar and I had no issue picking it from an external HD.
What I made is just clicking on “unlock” before picking the picture. @firebat could it be that you forgot to do that?

16

This issue only happened to me once on a very old laptop. The behavior was like this: I’d managed to pick a stock image proposed by GNOME, but choosing a picture from the drive got ignored. I didn’t bother troubleshooting, as I presumed it was connected to the rather old Nvidia graphics running only with nouveau.