Inactive Zorin Taskbar after wake

General Help
3

Zorin OS 18.1 — Zorin Taskbar disappears/moves after lock/unlock and GNOME Shell crash

I believe I have found a reproducible workaround for a Zorin OS 18.1 desktop/taskbar issue, although I have not yet identified what causes GNOME Shell to set disable-user-extensions to true.

System:

  • Zorin OS 18.1 Pro
  • GNOME Shell 46
  • X11 session
  • Kernel: 7.0.0-31-generic

Symptoms

The Zorin Taskbar works normally initially, but after using the system for some time / locking and unlocking the screen:

  • The bottom taskbar disappears.
  • Sometimes the taskbar appears at the top instead of the bottom.
  • 3-finger touchpad gestures may still work.
  • Swiping with the gesture can temporarily make the taskbar/UI appear.
  • zorin-taskbar becomes inactive.
  • In my case, GNOME Shell also experienced a segmentation fault.

I also found reports of very similar Zorin OS 18.1 behaviour:

What I found

When the taskbar was broken:

gnome-extensions info zorin-taskbar@zorinos.com

Enabled: No
State: INITIALIZED

I then checked:

gsettings get org.gnome.shell disable-user-extensions

and got:

true

Interestingly, zorin-taskbar was still listed in:

gsettings get org.gnome.shell enabled-extensions

So it looked enabled in the extension list, but GNOME Shell was globally preventing user extensions from running.

Fix / workaround

I ran:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell disable-user-extensions false

Then:

gnome-extensions enable zorin-taskbar@zorinos.com

After that:

gnome-extensions info zorin-taskbar@zorinos.com

returned:

Enabled: Yes
State: ACTIVE

The Zorin Taskbar immediately returned to the bottom of the screen.

Additional logs

Before this recovery, GNOME Shell had actually crashed:

org.gnome.Shell@x11.service:
Main process exited, code=killed, status=11/SEGV

There were also errors involving zorin-appindicator, zorin-taskbar, and x11gestures in the session journal.

Therefore, I am wondering whether GNOME Shell's crash-recovery mechanism is setting:

org.gnome.shell disable-user-extensions = true

and leaving Zorin's desktop extensions disabled after the recovery.

Question

Can the Zorin developers confirm whether this is expected GNOME Shell crash-recovery behaviour, or whether Zorin's zorin-taskbar / zorin-appindicator extensions can trigger this state?

The workaround:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell disable-user-extensions false

followed by re-enabling zorin-taskbar restores the taskbar without reinstalling Zorin OS.

I would also like to know whether there is a permanent fix for the underlying cause, because the setting should presumably not remain true after the desktop recovers.