Gnome shell and other WMs do not work

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Hello there,

I have been happily and effectively using fedora for years :wink: today, I cannot get window managers to start properly. No idea why. So, I just created a new user identity for this post, as I cannot access my normal account :wink:

I am on Kernel 5.3.6-200.fc30.x86_64

this is what happens: if I log in & select gnome on wayland, the session starts and immediately crashes, getting me back to the login screen.

if I use gnome on Xorg, the session starts I am shown the windows of the software that is automatically started (like the zeitgeist interface, which then allows me to open, say, a libreoffice file and that software then gets started). I can move windows, a mouse pointer is shown; but no context menu provided; but windows cannot be minimised, etc. otherwise the shell is not visible… No menu, dock, etc. so, cannot start software from there.

my suspicion is that this error offers an indicator of the problem:

I get an systemctl entry for

gnome-session-binary: Unrecoverable failure in required component org.gnome.Shell.desktop.
checking before what happened I find an error on the x server: fatal IO error 11 as well as 4. Then the connection to waylaid is lost.

Then I am killing the gnome session to get back to the login manager (which works). I select the deepen / lightdm window manager. It starts up but also does not allow any interaction.

checking systemctl again, I find the same series of errors.

I also get a nouveau error 0000:01:00.0: bus: MMIO read of 00000000 FAULT at 619444 [IBUS]

when I reboot with an older kernel, the same behaviour appears.

the system is up to date; no new software installed these days.

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https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/cant-login-to-f30/64064/18
provided a working solution. I will start moving contents from old .local to new and figure out where the problem started…

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And the solution in my case was the file

 .local/share/gnome-shell/notifications

if you read this, I am curious about what this file does. I could not find a documentation easily. cheers

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I believe this file stores the notifications that were sent from various applications and show up in the notification section when you click on the clock.

If you have the broken file and it doesn’t contain anything private, I would guess that if you upload it on a bug report, it’d be possible to get it fixed.

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Thank you. I guess I am fine with this for now. If it happens again, I will start investigating :wink:
Cheers

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