Login screen displays unknown user when coming back from blank screen

[Ellis Michael]

After updating to Ubuntu 21.04, sometimes after my screen is blanked and locked automatically and I wake it up, the login screen doesn't show my name or picture. It just shows a generic new user photo. If I enter my password, the spinning circle appears next to the password text box and gets stuck that way indefinitely. If instead I press Esc twice, I get back to a login screen with my name and picture and am able to unlock normally.

The issue doesn't happen all of the time; I think that the longer I leave my machine idle, the more likely I am to run into it, though.

Here's the issue in the GNOME bug tracker, which advised me to file here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdm/-/issues/709

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 21.04
Package: gdm3 3.38.2.1-2ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.11.0-22.23-generic 5.11.21
Uname: Linux 5.11.0-22-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu65.1
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Mon Jun 28 16:45:40 2021
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-01-18 (1988 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Beta amd64 (20150805)
SourcePackage: gdm3
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to hirsute on 2021-06-07 (21 days ago)
mtime.conffile..etc.gdm3.custom.conf: 2020-09-09T20:54:43.309931

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for opening the bug on gitlab and sorry that you got a negative upstream experience, Andre who replied to you is a bug triager who is more concerned by seeing numbers going down and tickets closed than by having issues resolved.

Could you provide a 'journalctl -b 0' log after seeing the issue and indicate the time where you saw the bug (to help matching log errors)?

[Ellis Michael (emichael)]

Sure thing, these are all of the entries that happened during a bad screen wakeup/login interaction. The only things I removed were irrelevant Slack messages and a random string in the NetworkManager message I didn't understand.

I'm just now noticing the gdm-password error. It does seem like that was introduced since my upgrade to 21.04, but it doesn't seem like others with that error are seeing the same behavior as me?