I recently installed Ubuntu on my Lenovo ThinkCentre and decided to try out the Cinnamon desktop for a change. However, I didn't like it, so I uninstalled it, but now my system boots to tty1 instead of the graphical desktop. It seems I might've accidentally uninstalled not just Cinnamon but also the Ubuntu desktop environment. Whenever I attempt to reinstall or update, I get errors about missing dependencies. I'm eager to fix this issue myself rather than reinstalling from scratch. For context, I'm running Ubuntu 24.04, and this issue started after I updated to 20.04.3. The app center was acting strange before I got stuck in tty1, which may be relevant.
2 Answers
One quick fix is to just reinstall the desktop environment. It usually takes just a few minutes. If you want to dig deeper, you can track down the missing packages and try to reinstall them. That might take longer but could fix things up properly.
If you're still at the terminal, try typing `startx`. This might get you a GUI login where you can choose your desktop environment. I'm assuming the default Ubuntu desktop is using Gnome and possibly Wayland, so it might not work, but give it a shot! Let us know how it goes! CHEERS!
Thanks for the tip! I tried `startx`, but it didn’t work; it was using Gnome.
How do I track down the missing packages? It shows me a list, but I can’t access the PPAs.