Wayland session does not start any more when bash is the default shell

[Owais Lone]

It appears the wayland session does not start on my XPS 13 on Ubuntu 17.10 and 18.04 if I use bash as my default shell. It only works if I switch my default shell to fish.

How I discovered the issue:

I've used fish for a few years now. Recently I realized that snap apps don't show up in Gnome shell dash. Turns out `/var/lib/snapd/desktop/` was not part of `$XDG_DATA_DIRS`. Turns out it is set by one of the scripts in `/etc/profile.d/` and since I've set fish as my default shell, this never runs. I solved this by adding this manually in my fish configuration. That solved the issue.

However, I was worried that /etc/profile.d might contain more important scripts and new apps might add more scrpts there that I don't want to miss out on, so I switched back to bash to try it out. To my surprise the wayland session stopped working. GDM logged me in to a black screen with white cursor in the center. The cursor does not move and nothing happens.

I thought this might be because one of the scripts in /etc/profile.d/ so I removed them all. Also removed /etc/bash.bashrc. However this did not fix the issue at all. I removed the bashrc related files in my home directory as well.

So for me, wayland session does not start when bash is my default shell. Only works with fish.

It might be related to this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1739019

However, I cannot prove that X11 fails because of the same reason because it never runs irrespective of whether I use bash or fish as my default shell.
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ApportVersion: 2.20.8-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
DisplayManager: gdm3
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-11-19 (30 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" - Release amd64 (20171018)
Package: gnome-shell 3.26.2-0ubuntu2
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-17.20-generic 4.13.8
Tags: third-party-packages wayland-session bionic
Uname: Linux 4.13.0-17-generic x86_64
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2017-12-01 (18 days ago)
UserGroups: adm cdrom dip docker lpadmin plugdev sambashare sudo
_MarkForUpload: True

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please execute the following command only once, as it will automatically gather debugging information, in a terminal:

apport-collect 1739022

When reporting bugs in the future please use apport by using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Owais Lone (loneowais)]

apport information

[Owais Lone (loneowais)]

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[Owais Lone (loneowais)]

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[Owais Lone (loneowais)]

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[Owais Lone (loneowais)]

apport information

[Owais Lone (loneowais)]

Uploaded the information. Thanks.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

I'm not sure how to reproduce this easily. It seems related to snaps and other system changes. Certainly the rest of us have bash as our default shells and it's not a problem for other people. So setting low priority for now.

[Ken (kkinder)]

I would like to opine specifically that if $XDG_DATA_DIRS is specifically not what the shell expects -- for example it might contain a corrupted character from translating between fish arrays and bash arrays -- Gnome Shell on Wayland will not start.

On X11, Gnome Shell will start.

This is concerning because, by default, when I took a fresh 17.10 install and installed fish, then changed my shell to it, it did not have the correct value for XDG_DATA_DIRS and I wasn't able to start a wayland session at all.