Scenario
- I have mostly been using my Laptop the past several months.
- After a few months I attempted to boot my Desktop which has Ubuntu 18.04.
- It would hang on boot with the following message.
[Done] Started hold until boot process finishes up
Attempted fix
I booted into Ubuntu recovery mode successfully via the boot option: advanced
options. I enabled networking and then connected to a root terminal.
First, upgraded packages.
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install <held back packages>
Second, I removed some snaps which appeared to be giving me trouble.
snap list
snap remove <package>
I also refreshed the core snaps which basically upgraded them to latest.
snap refresh
None of it seemed to fix the issue.
Permanent Fix
After web searching, I realized Wayland may be loaded by GDM. I found a good
stack overflow post which addressed fixing the issue. Edit the file
/etc/gdm3/custom.conf and uncomment the following line.
[daemon]
WaylandEnable=false
This forced GNOME Desktop Manager 3 to use Xorg instead of Wayland.
Conclusion
This isn’t the first time Wayland has caused me issues. My opinion is not very high of it. I like to play steam games through Proton and other games through WINE. However, I seem to always have issues with Wayland even when using XWayland.
I’ve been avoiding Ubuntu 20.04 because of Wayland… When Ubuntu 18.04 loses upgrade support may be the day I stop using Ubuntu unless I can verify gaming on Linux is stable when I’m ready for the next edition. I’ll probably hold out for Ubuntu 22.04 and evaluate it for gaming when the time comes.