Dear Maintainer,

There is a issue in Stretch and GNOME in particular. If i don't open gnome-
terminal in a few minutes after start up it won't open at all unless i reboot.
This is persistent only in GNOME, i didn't encounter this bug in Xfce or MATE.
I installed mate-terminal in GNOME and it works fine. Only gnome-terminal is
affected by this bug.

Can you try running gnome-terminal from within mate-terminal or some
other terminal and see if there are any error messages?  You might also
see useful messages in syslog or by running journalctl.

Also, there are some gnome-terminal debugging tips at
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Terminal/Debugging which may help you figure
out what is causing this.

I have the same problem on a freshly generated virtual machine.

the output is:

ds4b@ds4b:~$ gnome-terminal
Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: Timeout was reached