Authentication Required window stuck after login

20.04 gnome-shell window

34,331

Solution 1

I faced the same problem on Pop_!OS, no need to reboot actually;
The easier way is to just restart GNOME by one of two ways:

press Alt + F2, type r then Enter

in terminal, type killall -3 gnome-shell

This should just restart Gnome Shell. You will not lose your open windows, but you should be reminded to save all your work regularly!

Solution 2

I don't recommend the killall -3 gnome-shell approach because:

It causes Steam and any running games within to exit.
It has a weird side effect of bringing up new instances of GUI apps like 1Password rather than bringing up the existing minimized process.

I use the following alias 'gf' for "gnome fix":

For zsh and bash:

alias gf='dbus-send --type=method_call --dest=org.gnome.Shell /org/gnome/Shell org.gnome.Shell.Eval string:"global.reexec_self()"'

For fish:

alias gf 'dbus-send --type=method_call --dest=org.gnome.Shell /org/gnome/Shell org.gnome.Shell.Eval string:"global.reexec_self()"'

Solution 3

Thank you for the nice tip!

For me it started happening seemingly all of a sudden. I am on a fresh Linux installation. Other than playing around with power management (suspend and hibernate) to make them work better, I did not fiddle around with anything else. It is happening after I login from suspension/reboot.

After a couple of days of trying to understand what might be wrong, I noticed a couple of things:

When trying to restart the window did not only display the 3 buttons Cancel, Restart, Power off BUT it stated that there is another user logged in (with the same name as me). I checked how many users were logged in but there was only one (me)
The authenticate window popup was popping up when I was trying to reboot (with the message ~= "authentication is needed for reboot")
All of a sudden the brightness control stopped working and my screen brightness was not changing when I was updating the slider (I know weird...but again I had done nothing to fiddle around with it)

Those clues led me to think that the latest package I had installed might be the culprit. It was the "chrome remote desktop" package which is related to logging the user to the current active window session and touching on display properties..

And after uninstalling the package everything worked as before! No stuck authentication popups, no duplicate ghost users and I can control my display's brightness.

I hope those observations and my experience is useful to someone out there.

34,331

yang mandi

I am a young person(Not yet 18 years old). I am learning about life right now :)

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

yang mandi almost 2 years

I am using Ubuntu 20.04 and need help with this:

The Authentication Required window is stuck and I can't close it :(

Is there any easier ways to remove it than rebooting?
- Admin over 2 years
  
  we are in 2020, linux completing so many years and we still face this annoying kind of "bugs" ... that time we consider just not using gnome anymore...
tnk479 over 3 years

I used the killall command and that worked.
Paulo Neves over 3 years

Note that this will not kill your session nor any open programs. It is non-destructive.
princebillyGK over 3 years

I was about to restart the whole computer and then I see this solution. Thank you so much.
Chan Kim about 3 years

@AnanRaddad Hi, I used your method several times, but I changed gnome keyboard shortcut, and assigned Alt+F2 to something else. So I can't use Alt+F2. (a search tells me the default Alt+F2 was 'Run Console' but I can't find the menu in the keyboard shortcut edit window) Please help me.. what can I do in this case?
Chan Kim about 3 years

Hi, all, I found I've changed the keyboard shortcut 'alt+F2' to 'alt+F8' and can now do the same with 'alt+F8'. So in case different shortcut is set, the shortcut function name was 'show the run command prompt'.
nabeel almost 3 years

Much Appreciated! This became a lifesaver
davidawad almost 3 years

This worked perfectly for me as well, thanks!
Ryogi over 2 years

For me, this kills emacs windows on ubuntu 20.04.
Zanna over 2 years

I don't think your echo command will kill nautilus. Also, there's pgrep nautilus and even killall nautilus etc for lazy typists like me...
yang mandi over 2 years

Now when I see that your solution also works, I am not gonna change the accept mark since I already placed it for a year ago but you got my upvote :)
Michael over 2 years

Both solutions work! I'm just noticing weird artifacts with one versus the other. Thank you. :)
Admin about 2 years

Do you use ubuntu 22.04 with Wayland?
Admin about 2 years

This does not really answer the question. If you have a different question, you can ask it by clicking Ask Question. To get notified when this question gets new answers, you can follow this question. Once you have enough reputation, you can also add a bounty to draw more attention to this question. - From Review
Admin about 2 years

NOTICE that restarting the gnome-shell would not work on Ubuntu 22.04 with Wayland :(
Admin about 2 years

can you provide your environment info?
Admin almost 2 years

No, this does not answer the question. Much as a judge will hew to outdated premises for engagement, let's not lose the value of Stack, which is to provide value to developers
Admin almost 2 years

Very interesting. However, I'm using RDP to connect into multipass! hahaha. Still upvoting.