Xfce / lightdm window manager often fails on boot

Hi all,
have had a strange problem for the last two weeks or so:
When I boot my computer, my lightdm/xfce session often starts without window borders and without the task bar (background image is there, though). This is not always the case, but in about 80% of the cases.

So looks like this is some service boot timing problem.

This all started after I updated to kernel 6.1.19 about two weeks ago, but of course it may not be related to the kernel directly, but maybe to some other updates that came at the same time.

One specialty with my system: I have auto login enabled. (My home partition is encrypted and so I have to enter my password beforehand anyway).

When the problem occurs, I can still start a terminal window (without borders) via keyboard shortcut and when I then restart lightdm via sudo systemctl restart lightdm, lightdm and xfce come back up and everything is fine. The latter works every time. So it looks like there is some timing issue at boot time.

Does anyone have an idea, where the problem might be or where I could start to look? (The journalctl-logs of lightdm do not show anything unusual when the problem occurs just as /var/log/Xorg.0.log.)

In addition, take a gander at:

  • journalctl -b -p3
  • ~/.xsession-errors
  • /var/log/lightdm/

Just double-checking:

  • current on updates
  • no outstanding pacnew files

Maybe:

  • remove ~/.cache/sessions
  • rather than restart lightdm, xfwm4 --replace

Thanks for the suggestions. There are some error messages from journalctl -b -p3. Am currently going through them and see if any of them are relevant for my problem. (E. g. found out, that I had nvidia-utils and cuda installed even tough I have an AMD system with amdgpu. Just removed them.)

Ok, problem seems to have vanished. Since a few days (I guess after some new system updates) the problem seems to have disappeared. At least no problems on boot anymore. Thanks @stargazer for the suggestions!

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