I've been using Ubuntu 20.04 for several days and then at one point when I tried to login I was met with a "Oh No! Something has gone wrong and the system can't recover. Please log out and try again." message and if I clicked it, it sent me back to the login screen. In addition to this screen I also had access to my terminal, I think because I have it setup to open on login. Rebooting did not help.
I'm a noob to linux so I'm going to list everything I tried even if some of it isn't relevant. Sorry for the long post.
The only "big" thing I remember doing before I logged out/ shutdown my computer before I started getting these messages was I installed this vim plugin to enable opencl syntax highlighting by git cloning it in ~/.vim/pack/plugins/start the syntax highlighting was working fine before I logged out. I was able to remove the ~/.vim/ and ~/.vimrc files from my home directory but it did not help.
Then I tried this solution by doing
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo apt clean && sudo apt autoremove && sudo reboot
It worked without any problems but I still could not login.
I had installed rocm opencl previously by following this installation guide, and it was working fine, but I thought maybe this could be causing some problems for some reason, so I uninstalled it from the same guide. Some of the directories weren't removed because they had stuff in them so i manually removed the last few directories in /opt/rocm so now my /opt directory is empty. This still did not fix my problem.
From this post I found out that maybe logging in as a different user could work. So I created a new test user and logged in and it worked! I think this means that my problem is with my main user configuration and not with my system but idk. From this test user I su - main to my main account and tried to reinstall gnome following this post, because I read somewhere that this might help so first I did:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-shell
which still gave me the error message on my main user account when I tried logging in, so then I tried:
sudo apt remove gnome-shell
sudo apt install gnome-shell
This still did not fix my issue when I tried logging in with my main account but now when I log in with my test account the dock on the left side is hidden by default, and I can only access it with the windows key or by pressing activities in the top left. I made a test2 account to see what would happen and again the dock was hidden. I am currently writing this from my test2 account.
The next thing I was going to try was to remove configuration files in my main account and see what happens but I'm not sure what I should remove and how to do this safely and if this is even a good idea at all.
I am not opposed to backing up my files and reinstalling ubuntu because I have only been using it for a few days and I need to reinstall rocm opencl again either way. However, I would still like to know what happened and if there is a way to fix it so that this doesn't happen again (and if it does so I know how to fix it) when I would be more opposed to reinstalling ubuntu in the future.
Sorry for the long post, I really appreciate you taking the time to read it.
Edit: I decided to just create a new admin account and remove my old one and reconfigure everything. So far there have been no login issues or anything. I was also able to get the dock to appear again by doing: sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-ubuntu-dock
Thanks for all your help everyone I couldn't have done it without you!
