Hey,

Whenever I successfully enter my password and press enter I get past the log in screen of Fedora 35, but the Gnome desktop never launches. Progress stops on the grey screen that follows login. Here I can Ctrl-Alt-4 or whatever to get a login terminal. Startx works fine here. Whenever the automatic lock appears due to idleness it's the same procedure again. Some time ago log in from locked screen worked fine though.

I think the problem started when I set a permanent mount point for a drive through cockpit, or after an update. Any way to troubleshoot this in a sensible way? Before I gave up on the problem the last time I discovered a double dbus-deamon, but don't remember the relevance of that. Any ideas?

First I suggest you post this question on the ask fedora forum. They are the experts on that distro.

If you know what you did just before the problem appeared then it might be useful to try and back out those changes to see where it began and if the problem can be eliminated. I specifically would see if commenting out that entry in /etc/fstab as the first step might fix it.