Yesterday I installed updates on my Ubuntu 24.04 work laptop and rebooted, and was annoyed to find that I was being logged into the Unity desktop, not XFCE. Not only that, but after logging out again I discovered that there wasn't even an option for selecting XFCE. The login screen also looked different.

The solution seemed to be to select a different greeter. More details under the cut.

I think what triggered this was an update to gdm3. I was being logged into the Unity desktop, not XFCE. Not only that, but after logging out again I discovered that there wasn't even an option for selecting XFCE. The login screen, and asked to choose between lightdm and gdm3, and I (think what triggered this was an update to gdm3. I was being logged into the Unity desktop, not XFCE. Not only that, but after logging out again I discovered that there wasn't even an option for selecting XFCE. The login screen also looked different.

The solution seemed to be to select a desktop session.

dpkg -l | grep greeter showed that only unity-greeter was installed. That sounds fishy! I installed updates on my Ubuntu 24.04 work laptop and rebooted, and was annoyed to find that I was back to being able to select a different greeter. More details under the cut.

I think what triggered this was an update to gdm3. I was being logged into the Unity desktop, not XFCE. Not only that, but after logging out again I discovered that there wasn't even an option for selecting XFCE. The login screen, and there's some choice of them that may be independent of the display manager? bad configs in /etc/lightd?) I finally found some advice about "greeters". Apparently the greeter still looks different (a new, third UI) but... it works, so I probably won't look into it further