Why do I sometimes get a gdm similar to gnome 2's?

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2013-02-28 at 16:13 +0000, Marco Scannadinari wrote:
> Sometimes, usually when updates are installed, after booting, I get a
> gdm screen similar to this -
> http://lippolweblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/gdm.png. It uses the
> same animations as the new black gdm, but it just has the plain white
> layout as of the old gdm 2.x.
> Has anyone experienced this? What is the cause?

The "older" UI is shown when detection that your graphics card has the
necessary OpenGL support fails.  That includes a timeout.  If your
machine is starting a lot of services at boot, and if your hard drives
are too busy loading stuff to run the test tool as quickly as they
should, this may happen.  It likely won't be shown if you get a faster
hard disk.  Clearly a bug though.

Dan