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Writing this question as a resource for future readers.

Environment: Ubuntu 22.04, Wayland
Hardware: Nvidia GeForce MX550

I have an issue where my computer freezes after the login screen. After waiting a few minutes, it eventually loops back to the login screen. And turning off the computer, for some reason, takes 5+ minutes to finish.

What I tried:
Pressing escape during the shutdown screen toggles the Ubuntu shutdown screen to explicit shutdown logs, which reveal that gdm (gnome display manager) is taking the full timeout of 5 minutes to shut down properly.

Following this lead, journalctl --since 2023-08-27 -u gdm.service prints all of gdm's logs today, showing this log (not this exact log, I copy-pasted it from a similar thread:

Jan 15 08:57:37 KTM65sx gdm[491]: Failed to contact accountsservice: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.Accounts: Refusing activation, D-Bus is shutting down.

With gdm as a lead, I tried a few things:

  • This archlinux thread suggesting I install intel-media-driver. Did not resolve the issue.
  • This archlinux thread suggested disabling Wayland to resolve the issue. This only changed the behavior of the bug from "login loop" to simple freezing.
  • This ticket suggests installing havaged (didn't try this in the end)
  • This article recommends adding nomodeset to disable graphics drivers. Did not change the system behavior.
  • Lastly, this article suggests checking directory permissions and reinstalling ubuntu-desktop. Did not resolve the issue.

1 Answer 1

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The ultimate answer that resolved my issue was to install official NVIDIA drivers: see here or here. I was unaware of this, but Ubuntu 22.04 by default uses open source Nouveau drivers rather than NVIDIA's proprietary drivers. For whatever reason, these drivers suddenly stopped working over the weekend, causing havoc with GDM, no matter which windowing system I tried. I don't know the exact interaction between the two honestly, but installing the NVIDIA drivers and restarting resolved both the login loop issue and the long GDM timeout upon shutdown.

# Check your recommended driver before installing
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-535 

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