Yes, user-level configuration—such as dotfiles and autostarted Podman containers—can cause intermittent failures of the Ptyxis terminal and its Flatpak version to launch after boot. In the provided case, the issue only occurred with the original user account and not with a new one, indicating a user-specific configuration problem. The user's dotfiles (e.g., .bashrc, .zshrc, .profile) did not show obvious misconfigurations, but disabling autostart applications like Podman and Steam appeared to resolve the issue. Podman, when running in rootless mode and autostarted, can interfere with user session environment variables (such as XDG_RUNTIME_DIR) and user-level systemd units, potentially breaking terminal startup or Flatpak sandboxing.

To diagnose:

• Disable autostart applications (Podman, Steam) one at a time and reboot to see which triggers the failure.
• When the issue occurs, check logs with journalctl --user -b, systemctl --user status, and podman ps -a for errors or stuck services.
• Inspect user-level Podman systemd units with systemctl --user list-units | grep podman and review any that auto-start containers.
• If necessary, incrementally copy dotfiles and systemd units to a new user account to isolate the problematic configuration.

References:

• Podman documentation
• Related Fedora debuginfod service