Changing my desktop environment on Ubuntu 18.04

Question

I was wanting to know the proper way to replace the default desktop environment of ubuntu 18.04 with the cinnamon desktop environment, How would I go about installing the cinnamon desktop environment and removing the default one from the system?

Answer 1

It is dangerous to uninstall the standard Ubuntu GNOME desktop, however you can install Cinnamon desktop environment and make it your default. Since there is no longer an official Cinnamon port for Ubuntu, we can use this unofficial PPA which still works perfectly.

1. Add the PPA to your system with sudo add-apt-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon.
2. Refresh sources with sudo apt update.
3. Install Cinnamon with sudo apt install cinnamon
4. Logout of your current session (no need to reboot).
5. Now click the gear icon next to the "Sign in" button.
6. Select "Cinnamon" from the options that appear.
7. Now when you click "Sign in" you will be greeted with the Cinnamon desktop environment.

Answer 2

To install Cinnamon desktop, First you need to add the PPA (Personal Package Archive). Open terminal either via Ctrl+Alt+T keyboard shortcut, or from application launcher. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon

Now, type your password for sudo prompt and hit Enter to continue. Then install Cinnamon desktop via command:

sudo apt install cinnamon

Once installed, log out and login with Cinnamon session. Once Cinnamon is installed successfully, uninstall ubuntu-gnome-desktop and it's dependencies

sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove ubuntu-gnome-desktop

This will remove the ubuntu-gnome-desktop package and any other dependant packages which are no longer needed.

Purging your config/data too

If you also want to delete your local/config files for ubuntu-gnome-desktop then this will work.

Note that Purged config/data can not be restored by reinstalling the package.

sudo apt-get purge ubuntu-gnome-desktop

Then run:

sudo apt-get autoremove 

to remove extra packages and dependencies no longer needed on your system.