I randomly began having this issue on my Fedora 41 install and switching to spinner via sudo plymouth-set-default-theme -R spinner seemed to fix it.
Today, after running a standard update on the system, the random dots are back and I can’t power-down the machine; that is, neither using the “Power off” option from the GUI nor running sudo shutdown -h now works. Instead, the machine reboots. Uh, wut?
Any help would be greatly appreciated…
EDIT 1
Checking the journals shows nothing out of the ordinary occurring as far as I can tell…
EDIT 2
After doing absolutely nothing at all, both the GUI “Power off” and the CLI sudo shutdown -h now work again. The “three dots problem” persists, though. Perhaps I need to try one of the other suggested workarounds, despite being leery to do so because the first one seemed to have borked something.