So my install of ZorinOS17 Pro has 3 users: Admin (me), my mom, and my dad. My dad came to me and told me his email and his firefox were not working. Turns out, almost no app on his profile will open not even the terminal. The only thing that will open on his side is the software store, everything else just gets the spinning blue wheel of death for roughly 10 seconds, before it gives up. However everything works just fine on my mom and mine's sides. I went on my side to see if maybe permissions got wonky after I updated to 17, but everything looks fine. Same with my mom's side.
The only solution I can think of is to just delete his user profile and make a new one, but I wanted to check and see if I could find a better solution. Any thought/advice will be much appreciated!
The Software Store uses GTK4.
The other apps likely are all GTK3.
So, my first thought would be a misconfiguration in ~/.config
This can be swiftly narrowed by knowing what changes have been made to that user account.
If you want to brute force it, logged into the Dad user account:
You can tap ctl+alt+F5 to enter a TTY terminal.
NOTE: To Exit the tty terminal, tap ctl+alt+F7. You will want to remember this before you enter the tty so you can get back out of it.
To use GUI, without opening terminal, you still would need to be able to launch the File Manager.
Tap ctl+h to reveal hidden system files in the Home Directory.
Right click ~/.config and select rename, then add -bak to the end of the config file directory name.
Log out and back in or reboot to test.
The terminal thing opened, but it would not let me exit with ctl+alt+F7. It also required me to log in, but it wouldn't let me?
I found out OnlyOffice and Audacity would open. So I made a new document and hit save-as, which opened up the file manager. Managed to get to the .config folder and renamed it. When I did, suddenly my dad's desktop populated with two files and the trashcan (which was full, but right clicking it would do nothing). I restarted, logged in, and back to square one. Desktop empty again. I went back to look at your previous post and saw you said to ad -bk instead of -bak so I did it again. This time the desktop populated with those two files, but no trashcan. Terminal, file manager, etc. still will not open. However, Brave works, so I am currently typing this from his profile.
Update:
Uh...so right after I clicked reply, out of curiosity I wanted to see if I could open the files on the desktop. When I double clicked one, it opened as if it were always minimized. Closed it, reopened like a new window would. Then I tried clicking the file manager icon, and it opened. Firefox opened, terminal opened, all the apps are opening now. Restarted the PC, and everything is still working. Trashcan still isn't on the desktop like it use to be, but that's fine I can reset that.
My only thought is maybe my dad did something with those files when he saved them to his desktop and something glitched when I upgraded from OS16 to 17? Not sure. Gonna keep an eye on it in any case. Is it safe to delete the .config-bak and .config-bk?
