Having just installed Ubuntu 24.04 I want to change from the Unity desktop to my favourite Classic View (Metacity).
I installed gnome-session-flashback from the command line, set preferences to “password required on start-up”, and expected, when clicking on my name, that a reboot would present me with the usual “gear wheel” at the bottom right of the screen, the clicking of which would offer me a choice of desktops. But no gear-wheel appears so I was stuck with the awful Unity.
My solution was found on the web.
At a command line enter sudoupdate-alternatives --config x-session-manager
This will present one with a numbered list of optional desktops - enter the number of the line listing Metacity, then log out and log in again.
When you click on your name in the log-in panel, the gear-wheel appears at the bottom right of the screen. Click on it and select Metacity and login as usual.
Voila! I hope this helps others in the same predicament
So, whereas on M$ platforms “windows” was essentially the operating system and the GUI / desktop was an integral component, on Unix the graphical element is a stand-alone component. (so on Linux servers for example you save lots of resources by not installing a desktop)
This Unix desktop component dates back to the dawn of time and is referred to as X11. Over the years it’s not been well maintained and as a result a new system has been developed to replace it. This system is called Wayland. They are, unfortunately, significantly different. We’ve been seeing Wayland appear experimentally over the last few years, then it was put in as an option, now I’m hearing that X11 is going to be removed as an option .. which has the potential to break some packages that haven’t been updated to work with Wayland.
I run Wayland on my desktop because it has lots of RPi optimisations .. it also has lots of bugs that manifest themselves in other applications (still).
Point is that there are a whole bunch of login managers, some older ones are less likely to support Wayland, so a number of less main-stream options and their associated sessions seem likely to disappear from distro’s like Ubuntu who want to streamline and focus on Wayland .. so my first thought re; your issue was “Wayland”, just because it’s becoming my “goto” for graphical issues.
Couple of case-in-point examples;
KDE screen-shot tool (Spectacle) which is a superb bit of software, if I try to do a screen capture of a rectangle, it gives me a white screen (under Wayland) works fine on X11.
NoMachine.com .. my go-to for remote access. Works great on X11, just doesn’t support Wayland.
Many thanks for your very detailed explanation - that was very helpful.
It does seem a bit premature to remove legacy desktop functionality without making any effort to support them for a reasonable time. The way things are going these days.
Yeah, it’s a “corporate strategy”, different distro’s have different strategies. Some operate on “new and shiney to get more attention”, some operate on “we know you rely on this, so not breaking it comes first”.
I’ll let you guess which distro’s employ which strategies ..
