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Yeah.... Ubuntu 18.04, it was fully updated earlier today.

So, heres how it went, everything was fine, I shut down my PC as normal, a couple hours later, I turned my PC back on and for some reason it booted into a terminal.

I tried rebooting, running ¨startx¨ and ¨init 3¨ and ¨init 5¨ but nothing worked. I tried running ¨sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop¨ and ¨sudo apt install --reintall ubuntu-desktop¨ but no help.

So, after doing a bit of research, I had decided that it was potentially a display manager issue, so I ran ¨sudo apt install lightdm¨ and selected that as the default display manager in the window that popped up. I rebooted after that, but I was stuck on the dots scrolling to the side screen. (managed to fix this later)

Next, I rebooted (went into terminal again), and ran ¨sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm3¨ I don´t quite remember around here, but I think what happened was I ended up reinstalling gdm3 and running sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm3¨ again, then rebooting.

But- Once I had rebooted, into a GUI I might add, it was.. different. I am sure that I was using GDM3 before, but everything was all blue and old looking, there was no favourites bar and on the desktop there was applications labled ¨file system¨ and stuff like that. However, I did notice that all my files were still there, they even had their custom icons.

So, this got me very confused, what had happened to my desktop?

I then went into a terminal window (ctrl + alt + f3 I think) and tried reinstalling gdm3, tried using lighdm, but no help. After trying to get it to work one last time, I rebooted and tried reconfigurng gdm3 one more time. It threw up an error saying that action ¨reload¨ was required or something like that.

After rebooting and reinstalling gdm3 I could reconfigure it (set it to default)

OK GREAT.

now I rebooted and was greeted with a login screen that looked familiar.. no background, but I dont remember if I had set one.

BUT LOGIN LOOP

I changed the ownership of .Xauthority and .ICEauthority to myself, this fixed that issue.

But now, I am left with a bizzare desktop environment, all my files are still there, and even my desktop files have their custom icons! yayy! but what hapened to my - stock ubuntu I might add - desktop environment and how do I get it back?

Picture of the weird environment:

enter image description here

Mungo Kavanagh
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That is just XFCE. XFCE is just another desktop environment for Linux.
If you want the more traditional Ubuntu desktop you can log out and then when you are logging back in, there should be a gear icon. If you click on it there should be a few options, one saying Ubuntu. Click on that, then login and you should be using your old desktop environment.
In the event that there is not Ubuntu option, you can reinstall Ubuntu GNOME by first installing tasksel by typing sudo apt install tasksel into the terminal. And then sudo tasksel install ubuntu-desktop into the terminal. After that reboot and check if there is an Ubuntu option, select it and login.

Newo
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