I am having weird problem, but I want to start by telling you what happened.
Yesterday when waking up the laptop, the screen started to flicker, first slowly, but got faster, and then the screen just became black, with four white stripes up and down (sounds like a hardware problem, I know).
I naturally restarted the computer by holding down the power button. Up on turning it on again, the computer works fine, except most of my gnome extensions have stopped working. What bugs me the most is that the Dash To Dock extension is not working.
I have found few reddid threads that suggest restarting the extension. I have tried restarting the dock through terminal, which told me it was not installed. I have tried to use dconf, which does not work.
The extension program (don’t remember what it is called in English) does not show up anymore, and I can’t install/delete extensions through Firefox anymore.
I am a bit lost at the moment, so if someone has a good idea what to do, I am all ears.
I would say some configuration file got corrupted when you restarted the PC, either before because of the said issue or because the restarting did not properly flush some data on the disk. Sometimes all you have to do is to delete the needed files so they are recreated upon next restart, sometimes they are created once for all upon installing stuff, so I don’t know. Maybe you could copy the files from one user profile to the other but then I don’t even know which those files may be.
All this does not mean there can’t be issues with the hardware.
Exactly, I have twice had this flickering after waking the computer up. But I have only experienced it on this particular OS.
Maybe if I manage to purge the extensions and install them again things could work again.
I installed Fedora on a new laptop (Thinkpad E14 Gen 5, AMD) yesterday. This is a dual boot with Windows. All works fine.
But then I updated Fedora to the latest kernel. And what is happening is, when I am putting the laptop to sleep/suspend and when it wakes up, after logging in, the screen flickers immediately. 3-4 times and then goes completely off. I have to restart it via the power button.
Since it is a new laptop, I thought this is a hardware issue. But this does not happen in Windows. And then I tried using the older kernel and it works fine there too. So I am thinking that this issue sounds very similar to what you have mentioned.
As of now there is no resolution that I have for this. I am simply using the older kernel and this problem does not happen.
When GNOME shell crashes (due to extensions), it usually just disables all extensions. This is a safety feature to prevent you from breaking GNOME shell with extensions so hard that you could not log in any more.
If this happens again, one of your extensions is breaking GNOME shell. In this case, you might want to report back or note down the date and time of the crash and scroll through your syslog from that date/time and see whether you can find anything related there.
Christian, thanks for this comment,
I was thinking of something like that but I wasn’t sure so I did not mention it.
There is an issue with this “failsafe” feature, it should be MUCH more obvious to the user.
Once upon a time I would have disabled all the extensions to enable one by one and find the point where it breaks. But nowadays I am too old and tired so I would repeat the obvious, extensions are one of the worst ideas ever.
Not only because they break at any major upgrade but because to be sure they don’t harm the system they should be inspected and verified before publishing, that pretty much negates the idea of third party addons.
So I would say “if it happensa again, get used to Gnome without extensions” that is the only real solution. Because, even if the bug is reported and fixed, tomorrow it is going to happen again.
Aditya, nope, it is not related.
When something goes wrong with Gnome extensions it is annoying but it isn’t anything major, it is just the extension that has some bug or it is not compatible with latest Gnome changes.
In your case there I am sure you can find some already reported bug/regression with kernel - GPU drivers - energy management that is related to some hardware combination and it is both much more difficult to diagnose/fix and with many more moving parts.
If you meant the rebooting before disabled extensions, who knows, it could be only something really really wrong with some extension or anything else but in my experience reboots are some hardware failure not bug/regressions with kernel drivers and such.
