I have to tell the OS twice to shut down or restart
 

I am running Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon. When I do Menu, Quit, Shut Down (or Restart) nothing happens. I have to do that twice in order to shut down or restart. To Suspend I only have to do it once. I have had this problem for many years through many versions of Linux Mint. I have a separate partition for Home and Root. so every time I upgrade the OS I leave Home untouched. Any suggestions would be welcome.

I gather you are issuing the commands from the menu of the desktop environment.

Do you get the same behavior when you issue the commands from the terminal?

I'm wondering if the GUI shutdown function is issuing a shutdown command but with a timer delay (rather like shutdown without specifying now)?

In addition to trying frankbell's suggestion of shutting down the machine with systemctl poweroff or shutdown now, have you tried issuing a shutdown through the GUI once, but waiting a couple of minutes to see if it eventually initiates the shutdown?

Another option to see if the GUI shutdown function is issuing a timed shutdown is to run journalctl as root, scrolling to the bottom of the output with End and then using the GUI shutdown button and seeing if there's a broadcast message about the system being powered off at a particular time.

I see this happen when I have VirtualBox's management window open (the one you start them from) and the first go shuts that then the second shuts down my machine. Perhaps you have a similar thing open?

Further information:.

Sudo reboot and sudo poweroff both work first time.

Yes, I always have Virtualbox loaded. I closed it and hey presto the problem goes away. Isn't that strange?

Many thanks for all your help. I will also have a look at the suggestions made by Valeoak but I think i will close this thread now.