Frozen Gray screen after successful boot and login AFTER upgrading to Fedora 38

Ask Fedora
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1

The Laptop is an Asus Expertbook with an Intel CPU & GPU.
When prompted by the “Software” GUI tool I opted to update to Fedora 38.
There was a restart and the update did not take place.
After another try the update seemed to go smoothly.

The laptop is rebooting itself (so it does not seem to be a GRUB problem), I am prompted with a login screen, and after successful login the screen goes grey and freezes.
I have tried logging in with xorg / classic gnome and nothing seems to work.
I have renamed the user gnome-extensions folder (after botting with a live USB), no change.

I have been researching for hours and after going down many rabbit holes, I have found nothing that seems to help.

I am asking here before going forward with the only PAINFUL option I can see - re-installing from a USB drive that is booting OK on the same machine).

Thank you in advance to anyone who may be able to offer any guidance.

2

In case others also arrive at this error, my search eventually led me to this:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_partitioning_custom_btrfs_preserve_home

Although the instruction are for Fedora 39 they do work on 38.
It is basically a recipe for a recovery installation that doesn’t touch user data stored in /home folders.
It works and was a great relief to find.
After the installation, I had to recreate the two users on my machine (using identical usernames so that they map onto the existing user folders).

These instructions and the underlying capabilities feel like the Fedora installer has everything needed to implement an (at least in many typical cases?) effective installation recovery mode (without a user having to wade through the above-mentioned instructions).