If Ubuntu 24.04 kicks you back to the login screen with "Oh no! Something has gone wrong" every time you enter your password, the culprit is almost certainly the weather integration in GNOME Shell — not your graphics driver, not your extensions, not your user profile. A failed response from the met.no forecast service trips a bug in the libxkbcommon library, and the shell dies with signal 11 before the desktop can start. Clearing your saved weather locations from a text console restores your session in a couple of minutes, with no reboot required.
How a weather outage crashes the whole desktop
GNOME Shell pulls forecast data into the clock menu whenever a location is configured, either through the GNOME Weather app or via automatic location detection. While the met.no service answers normally, nothing goes wrong. When it returns an error such as an HTTP 502 "Bad Gateway", the shell walks through its error-handling path — and that path crosses a defect in libxkbcommon's registry component. The result is a segmentation fault: the shell exits, and the session manager drops you back at the login screen.
Three details explain why this bug is so confusing in practice:
- Only users with a weather location set are affected. If no place is configured in the Weather app or the clock menu, the shell never contacts met.no and the crashing code path stays dormant.
- Wayland and Xorg sessions crash alike. The defect sits in a shared library that both session types load, so switching session type at the login screen changes nothing.
- Extensions are irrelevant. Disabling them does not help because the fault is not in extension code at all.
The defect was fixed upstream in libxkbcommon 1.8.0, released in October 2024. Ubuntu 24.04 still ships 1.6.0, which is why a hiccup on the weather service's side translates into a local login loop. A backport request for the fix has been filed on Ubuntu's bug tracker, and marking yourself affected there helps get it prioritized.
Confirm the diagnosis before changing anything
Because you cannot open a terminal inside the broken session, switch to a text console with Ctrl+Alt+F3, log in with your normal user account, and search the current boot's log:
journalctl -b | grep -E "met.no|GNOME Shell crashed"The signature is unmistakable: a line reporting that the shell failed to fetch met.no forecast data with a 502 status, followed about one second later by a line saying GNOME Shell crashed with signal 11. The stack trace pointing into ui/init.js that usually accompanies the crash is generic and shows up in many shell crashes — it is the pairing of the weather error with the crash that identifies this particular bug. If those lines are absent, your login loop has a different cause, and graphics drivers and extensions become the more likely suspects.
Get back in: clear the weather configuration
Stay in the text console and run three gsettings commands as your own user — no sudo needed:
gsettings set org.gnome.Weather locations "[]"
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.weather automatic-location false
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.weather locations "[]"
The first command empties the location list used by the GNOME Weather app; the other two switch off automatic location detection and empty the list shown in the shell's clock menu. With no configured location, the shell never queries met.no, so the crashing code path is never reached. Switch back to the graphical login with Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+F2 (the exact key varies by system) and sign in normally.
Making the fix stick
If the crash returns after a reboot
The gsettings values live in your user's dconf database and normally persist across reboots. In some setups, however, a location gets re-added automatically and the crash loop resumes. The bulletproof fallback is to remove the integration entirely:
sudo apt remove gnome-weatherThis costs you the Weather app and the panel forecast until you reinstall it, but it guarantees the offending code never runs again.
When can you re-enable weather?
Treat the crash as mitigated, not fixed, until Ubuntu ships libxkbcommon 1.8.0 or later. Check the installed version with:
apt policy libxkbcommon0Once a version at or above 1.8.0 arrives through normal updates, re-add your weather locations or reinstall gnome-weather. Note that simply waiting for met.no to recover also stops the crashes — but that is a coincidence of timing. The next service outage will knock your session out again, so a spontaneous recovery is not a fix.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does switching between Wayland and Xorg at the login screen help?
No. The crash happens in a library both session types use, so the "Ubuntu on Xorg" option fails exactly like the Wayland default.
I disabled all GNOME extensions and it still crashes. Why?
Because the fault is not in an extension. The built-in weather integration triggers a bug in libxkbcommon, so extension troubleshooting is a dead end for this symptom.
Will clearing my weather locations lose any data?
Only the saved list of places, which you can re-enter once the fixed library reaches Ubuntu. Your files and all other settings are untouched.
Can I just wait for met.no to recover instead of changing settings?
You can — the crash stops while the service answers properly. But the underlying bug remains, and the next outage reproduces the login loop, so disabling the location is the durable fix.
How do I know the fixed version has arrived?
Run apt policy libxkbcommon0 or check the package in the software updater. Version 1.8.0 or newer contains the fix; Ubuntu 24.04 currently ships 1.6.0.
Is this a sign of failing hardware or a broken installation?
No. Signal 11 looks alarming, but it is an ordinary software defect triggered by an unlucky combination of a remote service error and a library bug. Once mitigated, the system behaves normally.