gnome shell crashes after ~1m

[Thomas Danckaert]

Dear mailing list,

after 5 months without updating my system (I know!), I just ran guix 
pull and reconfigured my system with the latest gnome desktop. 
Unfortunately, when I start this latest system generation, gnome 
shell crashes after about 1 minute (I get the “oops, something went 
wrong” grey screen of death).

Looking in the logs (/var/log/messages and ~/.cache/gdm/session.log), 
I find the messages involving 
org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.UsbProtection.desktop that coincide with the 
moment of the crash.  Here are the messages from session.log:

** (gsd-usb-protection:1051): WARNING **: 11:15:06.587: Failed to 
connect to the screen saver: Error calling StartServiceByName for 
org.gnome.ScreenSaver: Timeout was reached
gnome-session-binary[842]: WARNING: Application 
'org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.UsbProtection.desktop' killed by signal 11

** (gsd-power:1063): WARNING **: 11:15:06.855: Failed to connect to 
the screen saver: Error calling StartServiceByName for 
org.gnome.ScreenSaver: Timeout was reached

(gsd-power:1063): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: 11:15:06.855: invalid 
(NULL) pointer instance

(gsd-power:1063): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 11:15:06.855: 
g_signal_connect_data: assertion 'G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' 
failed

** (gsd-usb-protection:1443): WARNING **: 11:15:31.652: Failed to 
connect to the screen saver: Error calling StartServiceByName for 
org.gnome.ScreenSaver: Timeout was reached
gnome-session-binary[842]: WARNING: Application 
'org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.UsbProtection.desktop' killed by signal 11
gnome-session-binary[842]: WARNING: App 
'org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.UsbProtection.desktop' respawning too 
quickly


Any suggestions for solutions or workarounds?  Has anybody else 
experienced this behaviour?  Due to the long time between updates 
(previous generation was from February), it might not be obvious to 
track the change that causes this error (likely a new gnome desktop 
version I suppose...).

sincerely,

Thomas