Invalid Locations.xml file can crash Gnome and GDM
I tried adding my town's coordinates in Locations.xml, but I accidentally deleted the opening angle bracket of the coordinates' closing tag without noticing. Then, I used alt+F2
r
to restart Gnome, and then Gnome freaked out: windows were not being drawn correctly, overlapping windows got weirdly melded together, cursor was able to move but not interact. Then, I used alt+ctrl+backspace
to kill the session, and when I got back at GDM, it gave me the white screen saying "Oops! Something went wrong! Contact the administrator". After restarting the computer, GDM was in the same state.
When I realised what happened and fixed Locations.xml, restarted GDM with systemctl, and it works again.
I don't know if this issue is on GDM or something else and not gnome-weather related, but I thought I should report it either way. An XML file about coordinates should not be able to bring the whole graphical system down.