ubuntu 18.04 won't shut down, stop job is running

I switched to lightdm, after having troubles with a freezed screen when logging in on gdm3. Now logging in works fine, but my computer won't shut down now and it keeps saying this

a stop job is running for light display manager

Any ideas how to fix this?


I had exactly the same problem after changing to LightDM because I had boot freezing and/or freezing when trying to open system settings. Looking around (in Ubuntu 18.04 stuck at shutdown) I found the shut down is able to proceed if you do two things:

  1. Turn off WiFi manager
  2. Go to power settings and set automatic suspend off and set "blank screen" to never.

However this is certainly not a good solution, or rather no solution at all.

The real solution for me was rather simple, run:

sudo apt clean
sudo apt autoremove

I cannot find a log of the output the terminal gave me, but I can remember it removed some stuff related to WiFi panel indicators. In any case, after this I turn on WiFi and set my power settings back to usual and the reboot is just perfect. I hope this helps.

Note that previously I had removed common-indicators to allow app indicators in tray with LightDM.