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I cannot login with GNOME session.

My default Ubuntu is Kubuntu with Plasma, and in the past I have been able to use both Kubuntu and the default GNOME sessions, even with the latest 21.04 release.

I proceeded to update Plasma and that's where things went South. Now I can login to Plasma session, but if I try any of GNOME (X11, Wayland, classic) the session won't start and I will keep seeing the SDDM splash screen.

One thing I can do is open another TTYL, and xstart a session which does go into Ubuntu GNOME; and that works alright except it is not so cool to have to open that in a ttyl to use GNOME.

I also tried to uninstall and reinstall ubuntu-gnome-desktop and gnome-shell, but that didn't solve it.

Thus my questions:

  • Why could my GNOME sessions be broken?
  • How can I debug or fix them?

Edit: I included the fingerprint-reader tag, since that's what the answer was about. Although didn't remember about it when posting the question.

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  • Probably some broken user configuration. To check that, temporarily make a new account: you probably will be able to log in to Gnome.
    – vanadium
    May 21, 2021 at 9:56
  • Yes, I mentioned I can log in to Gnome. I just wouldn't know what to look for.
    – Diego-MX
    May 21, 2021 at 20:12

1 Answer 1

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Don't know if an answer per se, or just an explanation.

The frozen splash screen at login happened because of the fingerprint authentication method.

Basically, fingerprint auth was setup with GNOME, but Desktop Manager is SDDM which hadn't setup the fingerprint authentication.

The solution is to login via the startx command, and disable fingerprint authentication in GNOME session, and then login with password as usual.

For further configuration, I'd expect the fingerprint setup in Plasma will help for GNOME session as well.

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