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I installed the newest version of cinnamon on my ubuntu 13.04 only to see how good it looks, hoping that I would still be able to use Unity if I didn't like it. It turns out it was a bad idea because cinnamon broke not only unity (to the point of complete uselessness) but also crucial system functions like the software center and bug reporting.

I tried to reinstall unity using terminal (I found a tutorial but I can't recall exactly what commands were there, 'reinstall ubuntu-desktop' or something like that) and purge cinnamon (with another tutorial) and now unity runs pretty much ok, but software center doesn't open and bug reporting causes a big crash (restart needed). Furthermore I can't access the 'appearance' option, it just doesn't start.

Is there way of restoring things as they were before cinnamon? Or I messed to much and have to reinstall ubuntu?

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  • I had a similar problem. Check this out askubuntu.com/questions/358625/…
    – user194862
    Oct 14, 2013 at 16:02
  • You might like to make a note for future reference that it is safer to use Clonezilla and save a clone image of your Ubuntu partition(s) before taking such major steps that might affect system stability so that you can restore your entire system very quickly if things go wrong.
    – Sadi
    Oct 14, 2013 at 18:41
  • I didn't realize that changing desktop environment is a major step and that was a mistake. I would have used something to backup data. I'm not new to computers but quite new to linux so I guess that explains much. And thanks for the advice
    – czarls55
    Oct 14, 2013 at 18:52
  • This is a bug. Cinnammon shouldn't break Unity nor Unity should break Cinnamon nor the contrary. Please fill a bug report about this.
    – Braiam
    Oct 31, 2013 at 1:10

1 Answer 1

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Cinnamon 2.0 corrupts Unity on Ubuntu 13.10 – do not install. More information here.

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  • Wish I had known that but thanks anyway. Happily ubuntu 13.10 is being released in a couple of days so I guess I'll set up the system from scratch
    – czarls55
    Oct 14, 2013 at 17:08
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    No need to re-install your Ubuntu. To get rid of Cinnamon 2 and make Unity work again, simply sudo apt-get remove cinnamon*. You may want to do this from a non-X terminal. Log out of your Cinnamon session, press Ctrl+Alt+F1, enter your credentials, remove Cinnamon, press Ctrl+D and Ctrl+Alt+F7 to return to your log-in screen, select Unity from the drop-down menu on the right-hand side of your user name, enter your password. Done. After that you may want to ppa-purge ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable, at least until the incompatibilities with Unity are fixed. Oct 15, 2013 at 0:22
  • I did remove cinnamon already using ppa-purge after having reinstalled unity, however it was all done in terminal in graphical sessions (reinstalling unity in cinnamon and purging cinnamon in unity), so that might be why unity isn't working. I would have installed 13.10 instead of 13.04 anyway, so that's not a problem really, but thanks for feedback.
    – czarls55
    Oct 15, 2013 at 6:54
  • My failed experiment with Cinnamon was under saucy/13.10, where I had no problems gettig a working Unity sessing back as outlined above. If Unity is still broken after removing Cinnamon in raring/13.04, then that's a separate bug. I'd try removing and re-installing the ubuntu-desktop metapackage to restore any missing packages. Maybe too much of a hassle if you want to set up saucy from scratch anyway. Oct 15, 2013 at 14:24

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