riquisimo

Oh man, I can't figure out what I did.

Somehow I routed the main display to the RDP session, meaning if I plug in a monitor I get a black screen instead of the desktop. I have to figure out what file I edited to do that. But searching online now none of the tutorials use whatever method I used roughly 6 years ago.

Oof. This is rough. What config files are you referring to?

I'll give that a try.

Back when I set this up, for some reason, to get RDP working I needed to disable the local video output and have the main desktop be funneled into the remote session. I don't remember the details of how or why. I'll figure out how to reverse it and log in locally and see what I can gather.

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.

I didn't have an issue like this going from bionic beaver to focal fossa, but I don't think my setup was as complicated before. Do other distros have this problem? Mint? Debian? (Does Debian ever update?)

That makes a lot of sense. I'll work on logging into the machine locally and see what I can figure out from there. Thanks!

EDIT: I can’t figure out how I set this up. Somehow I routed the main display to the RDP session, meaning if I plug in a monitor I get a black screen instead of the desktop. I have to figure out what file I edited to do that. None of the tutorials that I can find now use whatever method I used roughly 6 years ago.

Totally fair. This machine has just been long running and switching distros has been more work than it's worth. Though because things are breaking I'm looking to alternatives now. But for the time being, and to help me figure out this problem if I have it in the future, I'm trying to figure this out.

Yeah I've been running this machine on ubuntu since Bionic Beaver in 2018. Cannonical wasn't such a bad guy back then, and migrating everything over to a new distro has always taken more effort than it's worth. This machine runs headless and for the most part I interact with it though portainer so it hasn't been an issue.

It's just with the occasional remote desktop login that things are broken now. Do you have a recommended distro for servers/remote desktop usage?

The problem is that some desktop elements/settings seem to be xfce while some others are gnome. I'm going to need to do a deep dive to figure out how I set up remote desktop on that machine. Log in locally, get it working locally correctly, then see if I can get it working over RDP correctly.

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.

That link seems to be filled with ways to clone drives, but if I'm migrating I wouldn't want to clone ubuntu and take it with me.

I know that your /home folder can be on a different drive/partition, but can you install files to a different location as well? Like install docker etc. in your /home folder or something and then if you switch distros just bring your /home folder with you and remake the links to the apps or something.

As user-focused as linux is (at least linux users), I wouldn't be surprised if there was some tool that made this easy. But idk.

Hey thanks. I had started following this guide right before I saw your post:

https://ubunlog.com/en/how-to-reinstall-in-graphical-environment-of-ubuntu-when-the-desktop-does-not-load/

Essentially the same thing, except the guide uses "apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop" I used "sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop" and it found stuff to install. The terminal is running now. I'll update the post once it's done. Hope this works!

My primary machine runs Pop!_OS, but I've had this machine running for years. Back when I installed Ubuntu on it, Canonical wasn't widely known as a bad guy. I've got various services running that I would need to resetup if I started from scratch.

I get where you're coming from, but to migrate everything over would take so much time. For now I would really like it if my desktop just worked correctly. When I get the time I can look into putting mint or debian on it.