Intermittent Desktop Rendering (Conky/GLava/bibisco) & X11 Login Loop After Upgrading 24.04 to 26.04

[mwilliams1220]

System Environment

• OS: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (recently upgraded from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)

• Hardware: Dell OptiPlex 3070 (Intel Integrated Graphics / i915)

• Display Server: Wayland (echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE reports wayland)

• Display Manager: GDM3

• Affected Applications: Conky, GLava, bibisco (Electron)

Description of the Issue

Prior to upgrading from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to 26.04 LTS, desktop widgets and applications loaded and rendered reliably. Since the upgrade to 26.04, transparency and window rendering intermittently fail on cold boot for Conky, GLava, and bibisco.

1. The processes launch and run in the background (confirmed via ps aux and terminal PIDs).

2. No graphical windows map or render onto the screen—they remain completely invisible.

3. Relaunching the commands manually from an active terminal session does not force them to appear.

4. It frequently requires two or three system reboots before the desktop compositor renders them correctly.

Troubleshooting & Investigations Undertaken

1. Display Server Context

Checking the active session yields wayland. Because GLava relies on X11 root-window docking and Conky uses transparent window layers, running under Wayland via XWayland appears to encounter a race condition during boot where window buffers fail to map.

2. Attempting to Force an X11 (Xorg) Session

We attempted to force an X11 session by editing /etc/gdm3/custom.conf and setting:

Ini, TOML

WaylandEnable=false

Observed Behavior:

• Xorg Login Loop: An “Ubuntu on Xorg” option appeared in GDM. However, attempting to log in fails immediately and returns straight to the GDM login prompt.

• GNOME Session Lockup: Selecting standard GNOME from GDM results in a total desktop freeze upon login, requiring a hard power reset.

• Missing Session Files: Inspecting /usr/share/xsessions/ revealed that standard ubuntu-xorg.desktop session files were missing post-upgrade (only lightdm-xsession.desktop and openbox.desktop were present).

• Manual .desktop Creation: After manually defining an ubuntu-xorg.desktop entry in /usr/share/xsessions/, GDM still fails to initialize the Xorg session and kicks back to the login screen.

Questions for the Community

1. Xorg Fallback Debugging: Which specific GDM3 or Xorg log paths are most relevant on 26.04 to diagnose why the X11 session immediately drops back to GDM on an Intel OptiPlex 3070?

2. Post-Upgrade Artifacts: Are there known configuration drifts, stale X11 configs, or driver package mismatches resulting from a 24.04 $\rightarrow$ 26.04 upgrade that cause XWayland / Xorg session initialization to fail?

3. Wayland Overlay Workarounds: Is there a recommended Wayland/Mutter configuration or wlr-layer-shell wrapper to prevent desktop overlay tools like GLava and Conky from becoming invisible background processes under Wayland?

[ogra]

I doubt you will be able to convince GNOME to make any use of X11 for its session nowadays…https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/08/the-x11-session-removal/

[guiverc]

Ubuntu 26.04 supports Xorg/X11, however the GNOME Desktop does not.

Kubuntu also dropped support for Xorg/X11, but the code supported those sessions hasn’t been removed yet, so you can add packages to get it functioning, even if the Kubuntu team won’t support you.

There are other desktops that do still provide Xorg/X11 support, in fact still had Xorg/X11 as default for 26.04.

My install here is a multi-desktop install, and I use Wayland only when logged into a GNOME session (Ubuntu Desktop which I’m using now), but use Xorg/X11 if I choose to login to a Lubuntu/LXQt, Xubuntu/Xfce or other sessions I have installed.

This change was documented in the prior Ubuntu 25.10 Release Notes

Wayland

• The Ubuntu Desktop session now runs only on the Wayland back end. The Ubuntu on X.org session is no longer available because GNOME Shell can no longer run as an X.org session.

with this not changing between Ubuntu 25.10 (GNOME 49) & 26.04 (GNOME 50).

[guiverc]

Question also asked at https://askubuntu.com/questions/1568768/intermittent-desktop-rendering-conky-glava-bibisco-x11-login-loop-after-upgr

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[mwilliams1220]

Thank you all for your input. Short term solution is to adjust to live without x11, leaving Conky, and GLava behind. I let the Bibsco developers know about this issue and in the meantime, I will have to migrate my work to another format.

Thanks again for the information!