I’ve been messing around with a fresh Ubuntu 20.04 install on an HP 17 laptop. I was feeling curious and adventurous and installed enlightenment, deepin, and arctica desktops, with the intention of finding the one I liked best.
After installing lots of desktop environments, themes, fonts, etc. the machine was hanging at boot.
Removed the ‘splash’ arg from the ‘linux’ line in grub, so I could more easily see what’s going on….lightdm was failing to start.
After logging in on a tty, I ran ‘lightdm —-test-mode —debug’, and found: “Seat seat0: Failed to find session configuration lightdm-deepin-greeter”. This seems to be the issue.
I’m stuck. How to resolve this issue? A few detailed questions:
Lightdm seems to currently read quite a few (16) config files, from /usr/share and /etc and users’ .local folder, if they have one. Which one should I edit? Or maybe I should create another file altogether?
Lightdm seems to have some info in the Arch wiki, and some different stuff in the Debian wiki. After perusing these, it seems like they’re independent docs. Useful stuff, and no conflicting information, as far as I can tell, but where is the canonical doc for lightdm?
I made this mess by installing packages. Is there an order dependence to getting lightdm working with deepin, enlightenment, Arctica, and Unity? How is it possible that installing a bunch of packages can break it so hard it won’t boot?
Seems like there are two paths:
A. come up with a custom config file solution for my situation. This seems like it’s brittle vs. updates and upgrades.
B. Find the correct order to install these packages or perhaps a missing one. This seems like the package system should have already defined dependencies to avoid missing packages, and defined them in such a way as to avoid order-dependence of any kind. Is there something else I can do here?
