Lost kubuntu, only unity

[jglenden]

Somehow, my 14.04 has lost the kubuntu login+setup. Previously, on boot a login screen would appear and after a certain time (I had auto login enabled) the kubuntu startup process would begin. But now, the login screen again disappears as before but I get the Unity desktop. Do not know how to recover from this, could not find anything useful in my searching.

Not a computer professional, but have been using linux since 1997 (and before that unix) so have some sysadmin experience. And have gotten into a few messes before, but this is the least understandable to me. Am thinking my only recourse may be to upgrade to the current LTS, with hopefully little pain or loss of data. But would prefer to get back to my old kubuntu setup if possible, so I can later upgrade from there. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[claydoh]

Dual boot, or have both unity and plasma installed together?

If the latter, just log out. This will you back to a login screen - it will not auto login in this case. There *should* be a section on the login screen to select a desktop session.

It will look different depending on whether you are using Ubuntu's login screen or Kubuntu's.

On the default Ubuntu login, it will look something like this (I think).



Note the arrow. Click the Ubuntu icon there, and you should see a drop down to select either Ubuntu/Unity, or Plasma Desktop. Select that. It will now be the default until you decide to log in to Unity again.


If you are using the Kubuntu login screen looks something like this (I think):



Note the box below the user list. It should be a drop down list where you can choose which desktop to log in to.

I will assume you have the Unity greeter, as this is the one where it is not obvious at all how to change the desktop session at login.

[jglenden]

Wow. That worked, but not the first time when I simply logged out and logged in again. That time I saw a gear icon which opening indicated GNOME was my default, so switched to Plasma - but again Unity appeared. Tried a few more times with same result, so finally powered off. The login appeared WITHOUT the gear icon. But I remembered where it was from last time and clicked on that spot and got a drop down menu! Again selected Plasma - and this time it worked. I am over-joyed. Now I just need to re-backup my box. With this problem the first thing I thought of was to do another backup immediately, but did not realize the dd command would over-write the backups already on the disk.

It will be a long day but ending well, so THANK YOU for your help, particularly its promptness saved me from more hours of tearing my hair out.

[claydoh]

saved me from more hours of tearing my hair out.

We all can relate to that

[GreyGeek]

We all can relate to that

Especially those of us without hair!

[jglenden]

Panic? Who? Me? Had just finished some admin cleanup work which included replying Yes to several things apt wanted to automatically delete as being no longer used - so thought that in all of that I'd deleted something important.