Since I reinstalled EOS last month my intel i7 based laptop w/ nvidia won’t shut down, it just stays on the black console screen with the blinking cursor and I have to press the “magic sysrq” key combination to force a shutdown. My dmesg doesn’t show anything unusual. Apart from that everything else just works. Perhaps something to do with the latest kernels or other packages? What should I check to try to figure out the reason?
Have you tried systemctl poweroff in a terminal to see if it shows any error messages?
Are you using GDM and Gnome desktop? I do and I ran into this bug …
Gnome/systemd 2 min shutdown delay
… of course if you are using a different desktop, this won’t apply.
You will probably want to read (or at least scan through) the entire bug report from the top to see if it applies to you. I could see some messages in the journal from the prior session using
sudo journalctl -r -b -1
which showed overlapping user session start and shutdown at the same time causing a two minute timeout for the attempted start before shutdown would complete.
Yes, I’m using Gnome and gdm. Applying the fix you linked in your comment appears to have solved the issue. Thanks!