Background: I have an old desktop computer running Fedora 36 + Gnome Shell desktop environment and upgraded to 38 recently. It was used as an archive so I left it in garage and only connect to it vis SSH or VNC. Now I moved it into my home office because I think it can act as a secondary test machine, also it is a heat source for this winter 🙂

After I connected the desktop to keyboard and monitor and turned it on, everything seems good, until I logged in – nothing showing on the screen! A blank screen is all I got. Troubleshooting time!

First, the hardware issue can be ruled out because I saw the POST and Gnome Shell login screen and was able to type my password to login.

I hit Ctrl + Alt + F3 to switch to a terminal, in which I can see all the processes are running fine so the system didn’t get stuck or crash. System issue has been ruled out as well.

At last, I wondered if this has anything to do with the VNC server because it use a virtual display after all. So I use the terminal activated in last step and run the following commands:

systemctl stop vncserver@\:1.service
systemctl disable vncserver@\:1.service

And then I switched back to the GUI with Ctrl + Alt + F1 and login again, and it worked 🙂