My Fedora workstation developed a nasty habit recently: after issuing a shutdown command, the workstation doesn’t turn off. All I get is a blinking cursor at the top left, hanging there forever. First time this happens I thought I’ll just press the power button for a manual override, but of course I paid the hefty price for that by having to re-install the OS just to make it work again. Not recommended.
Turns out this is actually a “feature” and has been around for many versions of Fedora, probably unsolvable for people like me. Annoying as it is, I’ve found a workaround that works for me:
- at the flashing cursor, press CTRL+C and you’re back at the login screen
- shutdown from there without logging on works fine (which suggests some desktop configuration issue)
Alternatively we can try CTRL+ALT+F7 (or ALT+TAB) to get back to the command line, where the following may reveal what’s causing the problem specifically:
journalctl -p 3 -b -1According to totemo on Reddit, this will show logs with priority 3 (errors) pertaining to boot that is one before the current.
Also: it’s KDE related
I’ve noticed that my workstation only has trouble shutting down when I do so from KDE Plasma. Turns out that when I log out first and then shutdown from the login screen, Fedora shuts down fine. This is also true when I shut off my system when I’m logged in to GNOME.
I’ve used the stock Fedora Workstation version for my installation and have installed KDE after the fact. I’m wondering now if these shutdown troubles would also happen had I used the KDE Spin?
It’s just always a surprise with Linux, isn’t it?