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.

  • riquisimo@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 months ago

      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 like xfce4-session &?

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        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.

      • riquisimo@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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        3 months ago

        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.