[LAPTOP] Login loop

[Beerislife]

I've installed Kubuntu twice now and every couple of days the same thing happens; it gets stuck at the login screen. I enter my password and it tries to start X but falls back to login again. Hardware is a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge with onboard Intel graphics. This is the first version of Linux to do this. System is fully updated. I find it quicker and easier to reinstall than to troubleshoot!

[GreyGeek]

The next time you re-install use Btrfs as the root file system. When you partition your drive use the whole drive and assign it to "/". For the FS use Btrfs.
With Btrfs you can take a snapshot of / (@) and /home (/@home) any time you want. It takes just seconds. Reverting to a previous snapshot takes less than 5 minutes.
See oshunluver's posts on Btrfs.

About your problem. Do you get as far as the login screen and the black screen appears after you log in with your password? .If so, more than likely something is reassigning your ~/.Xauthority file to root. At the login screen you can use Ctl+Alt+F2 to get a terminal. Log in as your self. Check the ~/.Xauthority file's ownership. If it is not you, then issue
sudo chown yourname:yourname ~/.Xauthority

[Beerislife]

Cheers, my /home and /var have always been on separate ext4 partitions but I may try Btrfs on the root, unless I go back to 17.10 first...

[Beerislife]

I *believe* I've narrowed it down to Google's Chrome Remote Desktop. After the last reinstall of Kubuntu I didn't install Google's app and it now seems to be stable. I'll see how it goes over the next few days to be sure.

[Beerislife]

That was obviously the culprit. No problems without it installed.

[GreyGeek]

If you ever try Btrfs don’t attempt to mix it up with EXT4 in any partition scheme. Btrfs subvolumes are like partitions. During installation it is usual to create one partition with the label “/l and Btrfs as the filesystem. The installer creates the @ and @home partitions, which are bound to / and /home in fstab. During install you could create partitions for /var but that would be unnecessary and waste HD space, since you could create a @var subvolume after installation and bind it to /var in fstab. It would use space out of the FS_ROOT pool only as needed, and setting aside a fixed amount of space would be unnecessary.

OpenSUSE uses Btrfs as the default fs during install, and creates about a dozen subvolumes. Ubuntu’s method of creating just two is, IMO, a superior approach. There are tools, like snapper and btrfsbk that automatically create pre & post snapshots when you do stuff like update or install or remove, making rollback a snap (“snapper”! ) but snapshotting and rolling back is so easy I prefer to do it manually

[GreyGeek]

That was obviously the culprit. No problems without it installed.

Did you attempt to analyze what it was trying to do that made your desktop so unstable?

[Beerislife]

No, it wasn't worth the effort. I only installed Remote Desktop to see what it could do.

[GreyGeek]

Been there, done that. Some things aren't worth knowing.