I’ve had this happen twice since upgrading from 24.04 to 26.04. To be clear, the symptoms were as described by Mihail in comment #12 above (and not whatever the OP reported): <\/p>\n
loka 25 17:39:30 saegusa systemd[1]: Starting user@60579.service – User Manager for UID 60579…
\nloka 25 17:39:30 saegusa (systemd)[2446]: user@60579.service: Failed to determine credentials for user ’60579’: Unknown user
\nloka 25 17:39:30 saegusa (systemd)[2446]: user@60579.service: Failed at step USER spawning \/usr\/lib\/systemd\/systemd: Invalid argument
\nloka 25 17:39:30 saegusa systemd[1]: user@60579.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=217\/USER
\nloka 25 17:39:30 saegusa systemd[1]: user@60579.service: Failed with result ’exit-code’.
\nloka 25 17:39:30 saegusa systemd[1]: Failed to start user@60579.service – User Manager for UID 60579.
\nloka 25 17:39:30 saegusa systemd[1]: Started session-c1.scope – Session c1 of User gdm-greeter.
\nloka 25 17:39:30 saegusa systemd[1]: Started apache2.service – The Apache HTTP Server.
\nloka 25 17:39:30 saegusa \/usr\/libexec\/gdm-wayland-session[2491]: dbus[2491]: Unable to set up transient service directory: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR ”\/run\/user\/60579” is owned by uid 60579, not our uid 60578
\nloka 25 17:39:30 saegusa \/usr\/libexec\/gdm-wayland-session[2491]: dbus-daemon[2491]: [session uid=60578 pid=2491 pidfd=5] Cannot set up inotify for ’\/run\/gdm3\/home\/gdm-greeter\/.local\/share\/dbus-1\/services’: Permission denied<\/p>\n
The first time it happened during a normal reboot, and resolved itself after I rebooted again (using ssh to log in from another system). The second time (last night, as logged above) it happened after a reboot due to VLC causing an unrelated Xwayland crash, and no amount of rebooting ever fixed it.<\/p>\n
I stopped nscd (`systemctl stop nscd; nscd -i passwd; nscd -i group`), after which restarting GDM (`systemctl restart gdm`) finally brought the login screen back. I then disabled nscd (`systemctl disable nscd`) to make sure it won’t mess things up again on the next reboot.<\/p>\n
The suggestion to stop nscd came from ChatGPT, which apparently based it on a reply to an Ask Ubuntu thread about the same issue [1]. I don’t know what unwanted consequences disabling nscd potentially has, but at least I have a working desktop for now.<\/p>\n
* [1] https:\/\/askubuntu.com\/a\/1570171<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I stopped nscd (`systemctl stop nscd; nscd -i passwd; nscd -i group`), after which restarting GDM finally brought the login screen back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8860],"tags":[10851,3406,12646,2679,14093],"class_list":["post-8014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vianhallintajarjestelmat","tag-gdm","tag-gnome","tag-systemd","tag-ubuntu","tag-wayland","sijainti-launchpad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kommentit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kommentit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kommentit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kommentit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kommentit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kommentit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8015,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kommentit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8014\/revisions\/8015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kommentit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kommentit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/kommentit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}