Gnome seems to crash on the first login

FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p3

Just installed today on Asus Zenbook UX31E

I installed Gnome following these directions.

I used the enable GDM method (the first thing it lists).

When I log in, as soon as I open any application, Gnome seems to crash and put me back at the login screen. If I login again, things seem stable.

Also, (and I have no idea if this is related), when I log out, I'm stuck at a black screen with a block cursor in the upper left hand corner and there's an unresponsive mouse pointer in the lower right hand quadrant of the screen.

I updated my system using freebsd-update.

Any ideas or clues as to why Gnome is crashing (and why it seems to hang on logout) are appreciated. Thank you.
 
It's the same for LXDE. This crash only happened just once on the first start, later times it worked without any problems. Don't know if your GNOME is the same as my LXDE or just continue to crash.
 
I used the enable GDM method (the first thing it lists)
Try switching off GDM to work out whether it's GNOME or GDM that's causing the issue. The next section in the handbook page that you've linked has an explanation on how to start GNOME using startx. Try that and see if you get any error messages on the command-line.
 
I installed GNOME three years ago, and I cannot remember whether there was an issue on the very first login.

Regarding logout, there where a bunch of issues that hit me and I was in need to resolve this, because I was going to ship some preconfigured systems to customers, which would not have the patience to deal with it.

First of all, I was not able to get user switching to work. This lead always to irrecoverable crashes, and therefore, I disabled it on all accounts:

sudo -u user1 dbus-launch gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.lockdown disable-user-switching true
sudo -u user1 dbus-launch gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver user-switch-enabled false
sudo -u user2 dbus-launch gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.lockdown disable-user-switching true
sudo -u user2 dbus-launch gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver user-switch-enabled false
...

For some reason, immediate logout after logging in, does not work immediately, it takes 1 or 2 minutes, and there is no feedback on the screen, after you pressed the logout button. The workaround is, to wait and let it go.

Here usually the first login/logout cycle does work without flaws, except those said above. However, when I then logout from the second session, gdm itself would crash, and I would see the black screen as well. In order to recover from this, I press <ctrl><alt><F1>, then login as root and restart gdm by service gdm restart.

For myself, this would have been a sufficiently viable workaround, however, impatient customers probably won’t like it too much. So, I wrapped gdm by a daemon(8) like program that I wrote myself, and which would automatically clean-up the residues of a crashed gdm and then restart it. The user would see almost nothing about a crash happened.
 
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