Gnome Frozen on Startup in Fedora 40

When I boot up Fedora 40, I’m able to log in, but then gnome immediately becomes unresponsive. I can see the taskbar. I can even see notifications. I can see my mouse move. But nothing reacts to clicks or keyboard input.

I’ve found two ways to fix it:

The first only sometimes works. If I ctrl-alt-F3 to the terminal and then ctrl-alt-F2 back to the desktop, then sometimes it will let me ctrl-F2 and run the “r” command which fixes the problems.

But sometimes, it ignores ctrl-F2 as well, at which point I have to kill the gnome-shell from the terminal, which resolves the problem.

In either case, once gnome is restarted, it pops up in moments, working perfectly.

So, something must be gumming it up during startup, but I can’t figure out what. Any ideas?

Might your issue be connected to the bug described below too? Pls see also workaround.

I don’t think so… that describes a crash after opening the program. Mine doesn’t crash, it just freezes, and it’s immediately after logging in, before I’ve opened any programs.

True. Downgrading mesa might be worth a shot though. Easy to upgrade again if not the culprit.

It happens to me from time to time as well since F38, more often when the kernel was recently updated. I still haven’t find the reason why. The logs are useless since I usually reboot before they get a chance being written to. It’s usually ok after a soft (preferably) or hard reboot.

Good luck!

Please give the needed hardware info.

  • Hardware or what VM
  • GPU
  • Kernel
  • mesa version
  • PC / Laptop / MoBo manifacturer

Custom hardware (assembled myself)
-Motherboard Gigabyte Z590 AORUS ELITE AX
-64GB RAM
-Intel i7-11700K x16
-Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080

-Fedora version: 40
-Gnome version: 46
-Kernel version: Linux 6.8.11-300.fc40.x86_64
-Nvidia driver version: 550.78

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Added f40, nvidia, rpmfusion, workstation

You are using both an older version of the kernel and an older version of the nvidia drivers.

Please update to the latest version of everything so we are not trying to fix an issue that may have already been resolved with updated software.
sudo dnf update --refresh or sudo dnf distro-sync --refresh is the recommended way.

The info requested by @boredsquirrel above is better provided by using inxi -Fzxx as we usually ask for.

Just did. It seems to have made the problem worse. Now it won’t even load into wayland at all. When I try to log in, it just goes to a black screen for a second and then boots me back to the login screen. I had to switch to X11 just to get to my desktop, at which point I still had the freezing error described above.

Poorly inxi is not preinstalled, and fpaste is unusable without major reduction

True, but usually the first time the user tries to use inxi the system suggests installing it IME. That is not usually a deal breaker.

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After sideloading PopOS with a shared home directory, this problem vanished. So, it must have been some kind of configuration issue in the home directory somewhere that got overwritten by the PopOS installation.