One of the wallpapers has XFCE on it, but I didn't change my desktop environment. Also of note, when I open the terminal it doesn't look the same as it used to. Instead of the dark purple window it's a black window with white text and the window's icon is a red "X" with a dark blue "T" on it.
This is a headless machine and I connect to it through remote-desktop.
If I go through the applications menu (manually clicking, the super key does nothing and my keyboard does not have a "Fn" key) and go to settings I get the window on the left. Changing the settings in this window does nothing. Right clicking the desktop and clicking "desktop settings" I get the window on the right. This window correctly changes the wallpaper.
When I open the home folder I get Thunar.
My guess is there are two desktop environments competing or something right now? How can I fix this?
Also, weirdly, if I click my name in the upper right I can "lock screen" and "log out..." but I can't "switch user," "suspend," or "shut down."
Thank you in advance for any help.
It looks like you are running XFCE instead of GNOME (the normal Ubuntu desktop). I'm not sure how that happened... but you an always just install another desktop.
For instance, you can try to make sure you have the
ubuntu-desktoporubuntu-desktop-minimalmetapackage installed:After that, the login manager should allow you to select the Ubuntu session rather than the XFCE one.
There are different flavours of Ubuntu with the other desktop environments (called Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and so on). The posted screenshot is indeed a mishmash of Gnome and Xfce though.
Ok, so after installing ubuntu-desktop and reinstalling ubuntu-desktop the desktop hasn't changed.
Ctrl+alt+T brings up the familiar terminal now though, and I can open a nautilus window by typing "nautilus."
"echo $DESKTOP_SESSION" returns "xfce." I'm logging into this machine remotely. Since I'm remote, I don't think I can log out and still be "connected" to change the DE. Is there another way to change it?
If I connect a screen to the machine the desktop doesn't load, I had to change a setting (of which I can't remember, for a reason I can't remember - something to do with optimizing the machine for remote desktop) and now the desktop only renders on the remote session.
How are you using it remotely? VNC?
Perhaps the server config started defaulting to XFCE. Maybe what happened is entire XFCE DE got marked as a dependency, installed during update, and then when some config defaulting to XFCE thanks to this became valid, you ended up here.
If it's VNC, what do you have in
~/.vnc/xstartup? Maybe a line likexfce4-session &?It's using RDP. I'm going to check out how RDP is configured on the machine and see if I can set it up "fresh" again. I think I went with RDP instead of VNC because I was connecting to it with a windows machine in the past and using RDP meant I could use the native windows RDP client.
Now that my primary machine is running Pop!_OS, I can check out whichever protocol has the better connection and re-set thing up with it.
This sounds plausible. I have seen a few guides for headless use suggesting disabling the built-in remote desktop feature and setting up xrdp, xvnc or related and then trying to fixup that session.
Hey thanks. I had started following this guide right before I saw your post:
https://ubunlog.com/en/how-to-reinstall-in-graphical-environment-of-ubuntu-when-the-desktop-does-not-load/
Essentially the same thing, except the guide uses "apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop" I used "sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop" and it found stuff to install. The terminal is running now. I'll update the post once it's done. Hope this works!