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Just upgraded from 16.10 to 17.04 and when it restarted it went into plasma as expected but I wanted to check out unity 8 so I logged out and changed to unity. The screen went black. I tried restarting but I believe it logins to the last de by default so it kept going from the boot screen to a black screen.

I tried ctrl-alt-1 and got to the cli but now I still can't get back to plasma or anything else that works. sudo startx brings me to a black screen with a cross hair for a curser. Here I can access guake terminal emlutor but nothing else. I created a script early that restarts the plasma desktop on start up since it would need to be restarted whenever I shut my computer and opened it again. When I ran that in the emulator the plasma desktop comes up but I'm limited in what I can do. When I try to open most applications I get an error saying "could not find the program 'program-name'". And when I try to logout nothing happens.

I do have access to my file manager and settings though but haven't been able to find a solution using either of those. Changing default login settings isn't doing anything.

Any ideas how to get back to a normal session?

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  • What happens if you try to go back to the desktop with ctrl-alt-f7?
    – rlee827
    Jun 1, 2017 at 4:36
  • The screen freezes until I go back to ctrl-alt-f1 or nothing if I do it first thing after boot.
    – sn8wman
    Jun 1, 2017 at 5:26

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I can confirm the same behaviour with Kubuntu 17.04. I change to terminal 1 with ctrl+alt+1 and issue sudo /etc/init.d/sddm status gives "running". If I do sudo /etc/init.d/sddm stop it waits for a while, trying to stop the process, then returns to terminal 7 with the same blank screen. It perhaps respawns sddm. If I kill sddm thread with kill -9 xxxx xxxx, then also same issue. If I do startx it takes me to a black screen with the kde default mouse pointer, but frozen.

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Try changing the default Desktop Environment (DE) by running the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure XXX where XXX is your active DE whether it be sddm, lightdm, gdm3 etc. and select your preferred DE (I would recommend sddm (since you are using the KDE DE) or lightdm which both allows you to select the whichever session (Unity, Plasma, GNOME etc.) you would like to start.

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