Troubleshooting & How-Tos šŸ“” šŸ” Linux

GNOME/Wayland Fails to Log In (Solved)

OK, this has got to be the most ridiculous Linux bug Iā€™ve encountered in a long time.

Installing XFCE/X11 on my Fedora system made it impossible to log into GNOME/Wayland. I finally tracked down what was causing it through an Arch forum thread pointing to a Debian bug report.

And the problem was that XFCE set the GNOME mouse cursor size to zero.

Solution:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size

Wait, What Is All This?

  • X11 is an older display system designed for old-style computer lab scenarios, thatā€™s been tweaked and layered and otherwise finagled into mostly working on personal desktops.
  • Xorg is the project that most Linux systems use for their X11 layer.
  • Wayland is a newer display system designed for personal computers, but itā€™s taken years to add back some of the features people relied on. Older programs that are designed only for X11 can run through a compatibility layer called XWayland.
  • GNOME, XFCE, and LXQt are desktop environments that handle windowing, docks, menus and a set of standard tools for things like file management.

Why Wayland? Why X11?

As of mid-2025, anything that runs directly on Wayland works better on my desktop than it does on an X session, and most programs that use the XWayland compatibility layer work fine. Plus Waydroid is useful for running the occasional Android app on my Linux desktop.

But there are a few games that still have trouble. No Manā€™s Sky, for instance, usually starts out OK but slows to an unplayable crawl after a few minutes when I run it on Wayland, but not when I run it on X11. (I assume itā€™s a lingering Wayland/NVidia bug.)

So I run GNOME/Wayland most of the time, but switch over to GNOME/X11 for some games. Which would be fine except that GNOME is dropping X11 support soon.

OK, So What Happened?

I installed XFCE, which is keeping their X11 support. I logged in. I ran Steam. I logged back out and tried to log into GNOME/Wayland againā€¦

ā€¦and got sent back to the login screen with an ā€œauthentication errorā€ and a password field that wouldnā€™t accept input. I had to switch to a text console and restart GDM (the program that handles the login screen).

systemctl restart gdm

I could log into GNOME/X11. I could log into XFCE. I reinstalled LXQt (which I use on a low-spec portable and on VMs) and was able to log into it with both Wayland or X11, but GNOME applications wouldnā€™t run on the Wayland session. But even after a reboot, any attempt to log into GNOME/Wayland locked up the login screen the same way.

A couple of hours and a literal migraine later, I found the Arch thread where someone had exactly the same experience: They installed XFCE, after which launching GNOME/Wayland would always lock up the login screen. And it was eventually traced to that bug with the cursor size.

I had to look up the syntax for gsettings (which I found on a Mint forum thread), and confirmed that yes, it was set to zero:

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size

0

and reset it to the default:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size

And, surprise, GNOME/Wayland worked again!

Unanswered Questions

  1. Why is XFCE changing the mouse cursor size for GNOME?
  2. Why is it setting it to zero???
  3. Why does it crash GNOME under Wayland, but not under X11?

Update 1: Jeff Fortin found the GNOME bug report for the crash and reminded me I should report the cursor setting to XFCE.

Update 2: Hereā€™s the XFCE bug report for the cursor setting.

Amusement

I had to teach the spell checker some new words. Some of the suggestions it had:

Wayland -> Waylaid
XFCE -> FACE
systemctl -> systemic