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After upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 featuring Gnome 3.36, the lock screen displays a solid purple color, instead of the blur-over-wallpaper effect. How can I fix this?

Gnome 3.36 removes the separate configuration for lock screen wallpaper / background, and replaces it with a feature that uses the existing desktop background and applies a blur effect on top, as discussed and as seen here. However, this is not the case on my instance.

My instance shows a solid purple background on the lock screen, while the system settings app correctly removes the option for two wallpapers and only allows the user to select one. Opening up Gnome Tweaks, however, shows two wallpaper settings (desktop, lockscreen), but the lockscreen setting is ignored.

Attempted Steps

  • After the upgrade to 20.04 I re-enabled a repo that I thought was for the PopOS icon package and updated accordingly. However, looking through my installed packages I saw there were a number that were forked from Ubuntu and versioned like *ubuntu1pop0. This may (or may not) be the cause of the problem, I'm unsure. I downgraded all the packages I could find back to Ubuntu versions, and disabled the repo.
  • I purged and reinstalled gnome-shell and gdm3
  • I tried using update-alternatives --auto gdm3 and other update-alternatives commands, but no luck and I don't exactly know what I'm doing with that.
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2 Answers 2

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Any chance you're using a NVidia GPU? If yes, open nvidia-settings and try test between the 3 profiles.

I lose the blur (and usually all dialogs shading) when I try the "NVIDIA On-Demand" profile.

Later I realized this was happening because the NVidia drivers were not properly updated (I was facing an apt divert error like described on this answer.

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  • Yes, I was using the on-demand profile. I would have never figured this out, ever. Thanks! Not sure why this is a problem, but I'm not going to poke the bear anymore.
    – Dev Ten
    May 10, 2020 at 0:54
  • Not sure if this is related, but after employing this solution, I no longer get 'nightlight' functionality. The toggle is in settings, but the screen doesn't change. Thoughts?
    – Dev Ten
    May 17, 2020 at 18:13
  • Mine still works, but I'm under the Intel profile. I didn't test under NVidia "full".
    – Rael Gugelmin Cunha
    May 17, 2020 at 22:41
  • Turns out it was unrelated. I switched to intel profile and nvidia with restarts in between and the functionality returned. Must've been something else.
    – Dev Ten
    May 22, 2020 at 15:56
  • And how about "NVIDIA On-Demand"?
    – Rael Gugelmin Cunha
    May 22, 2020 at 19:07
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For me I had to enable gdm3 and disable lightdm. Run sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm3 and select gdm3 then sudo reboot. Initial lock screen appears purple but when locking after login the blur effect is active.

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