Ubuntu – Is there a GUI app for managing Desktop Environments

desktop-environmentskdekubuntuunityxfce

newbie here. UX Designer learning to code. I did a search for this but couldn't find an answer so I'm sorry if this is a dumb question.

I'm running Ubuntu 16.04. I've been trying out a couple of different Desktop Environments and it's resulted in too many applications made for those desktop environments clogging up my application folders. I'm current using Plasma which I think I'll probably stick with it (though I'm also thinking about taking a look at KDE Neon too).

I already know how to remove stuff via the CLI I think, but I was hoping there was a GUI way so that I could see everything all at once maybe?

I also don't know if I'm actually removing them correctly because when I removed xfce4 it removed it but the xfce terminal is still available in the menu, so I don't know if that means I have to go through and uninstall manually every single part of the desktop environment separately?

Best Answer

The answer to this question, as of August 2018 is "no" as far as I can tell. After my original foray into trying DEs I had to completely reinstall my system as things were acting so buggy. Since then I've learned a bit more and modified my default DE applications (like trying out lightdm for login instead of gdm etc) but mostly I've found it best to just stick with one DE and not mess with stuff to much.

I also did hear about an old project called crunchbang which is no longer running, but took an interesting extremely modular approach to DEs. It continues on under a couple of different projects by thge community, one named BunsenLabs if I remember correctly.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to make the login screens and boot splashes match when installing different desktops

You can remove the Lubuntu splash screen in several ways. If you want to change splash screens every once in a while you can run:

sudo update-alternatives --config default.plymouth

You will be presented with a screen like the following:

enter image description here

In this case, entering a 0 or a 1 will set the splash screen to the Kubuntu logo, while entering 2 will set it to the default Ubuntu logo.

If you want to get rid of the Lubuntu logo permanently, you can remove the package using:

sudo apt-get remove plymouth-theme-lubuntu-logo plymouth-theme-lubuntu-text

Replacing lubuntu with the desktop environment you installed.

You might be asked to remove lubuntu-desktop that's OK, as its a meta package.

If you've configured gdm using sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm you shouldn't have a KDE (KDM) login screen. If your login screen looks something like this:

enter image description here

Then try configuring gdm again. If that doesn't work you can remove kdm with:

sudo apt-get remove kdm

Again, you might be asked to remove kubuntu-desktop. Its also a meta package, so go ahead and remove it.

Ubuntu – Unable to start kde

TL;DR there was a permission issue with ~/.cache/upstart/dbus-session, rm -rf .cache/upstart and a reboot solved it.

Newbie debug insights for future readers (which may well include me).

The ~/.xsession message I mentioned in the question, along the lines of

init: dbus pre-start process (PID XXXX) terminated with status 2

was actually very important. I learnt what it meant while investigating, I found it this way

First, I thought that the issue was with kde, so I tried to find how lightdm started kde
I tried to look into /etc/lightdm/ (as suggested by man lightdm) but the lightdm config files were not here but (I found it by looking into /var/log/lightdm.log) in /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d where I found the relevant file /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/40-kde-plasma.conf
According to it, what lightdm started for kde was the script /usr/bin/startkde, so I added some debug echo 'startkde is at line ##' > /home/evpok/delog lines to it to see where it failed, but none of them were executed.
checking again /var/log/lightdm.log I saw the line
Running command /usr/sbin/lightdm-session /usr/bin/startkde
so I looked into usr/sbin/lightdm-session, to which I again added debugging echo lines
After some fumbling, I found that the issue was with loading an Xsession script: /etc/X11/Xsession.d/99x11-common_start. So I looked into that one. It seemed to load normally and had only one line exec $STARTUP. Adding an echo to see what was in $STARTUP I found it was init --user. Now I didn't want to mess with init so I just traced its outputs by commenting this line out and adding instead
exec init -v --user > /home/evpok/initlog 2> /home/evpok/initerrlog
Looking into these logs, I saw this message in initerrlog

dbus pre-start process (PID XXXX) terminated with status 2
but I still didn't know what to make of it, so I looked into initlog and saw
Loading configuration from /usr/share/upstart/sessions
I looked into that dir, where I saw a startkde.conf. After some looking into documentation for upstart job confs, I saw that it had
start on started dbus and xsession SESSION=kde-plasma
obviously that was why startkde didn't start. It needed dbus, which had an error, so I looked into dbus.conf
There, there was a pre-start script stanza, hey! That's what's in the errlog of init and in .xsession-errors. So for I added again some echoes, to find that the issue was at the line
echo "DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=${DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS}" >$HOME/.cache/upstart/dbus-session (Not one of my debug echoes)
After some fumbling, I found that I couldn't touch the non-existent file ~/.cache/upstart/debus-session because of a permission issue. I tried creating it under sudo and chown it to me with appropriate permissions but it didn't work. So I just rm -rf'ed .cache/upstart.
After a reboot, everything worked as expected.

After all I just needed to stop being afraid of the internals and getting my hands dirty.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to make the login screens and boot splashes match when installing different desktops

Ubuntu – Unable to start kde

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