Forced to create a new user account after reboot, Old account is gone?

Question

I have had this happened to me twice. I installed the current Odin release and set it up (installed some apps, changed some settings). I also rebooted several times, for example after installing the nvidia-470 drivers.

At some point i noticed the rather convoluted hostname and decided to change it with:

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname newhostname

After that I rebooted and was thrown in the second part of the installer where you need to (again) set your keyboard layout and the create your user account.

When I entered my existing account, it said, this account is available (it showed a green checkmark) but when I proceeded to create that user, it complained about the user account already existing.

I created a new account and looked around in the system. The home folder of my old account is there, but I can't login with that account. It only shows me the new account.

Interestingly, the account page in settings only shows my current account (jonathan), but when I click on Unlock to change some settings, it shows my old account (inhji) as a choice:

Also, if I try to create a new user with the old account name, the user creation window just disappears after clicking on "create user".

Has anyone had this happen to them before?

Answer 1

Okay, I figured it out.

I had set /bin/fish as my login shell (which does not exist, it's /usr/bin/fish), which made the user disappear from the login screen and since there was no more user available to login with, it threw me back to the "Create User" part of the installer.