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 ESC 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.