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I'm using Ubuntu Desktop 23.10. I've tried every suggestion in this thread as well as many others online, but I cannot get back into the Ubuntu GUI/GNOME desktop environment. I'm using Ubuntu 23.10 desktop.

karel
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boonslang
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  • It's best if you're specific; ie. you're using Ubuntu 23.10 instead of a vague term like latest version. Your picture seems to me to show gdm.service actually started correctly (ie. it wasn't Starting but Started); then an issue occurred. – guiverc Oct 15 '23 at 01:14
  • is there a way to check if gdm.service is causing the problem? or any other way i could determine the cause – boonslang Oct 15 '23 at 02:37
  • I opened another tty and can confirm that gdm service fails to start. – Mostafa Ahangarha Nov 13 '23 at 12:47

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I just faced with this issue and after trying different options, I finally could solve the issue by doing the following steps:

  • While being stuck in the page you shared the image, press Ctrl+Alt+F3 to get into another tty.
  • Provide user/pass and login to your account
  • Run sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
  • To verify the solution, run startx. If successful, you can restart the system and expect the gdm can work properly.
Mostafa Ahangarha
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    Thank you for the solution! – Gunjan Paul Dec 22 '23 at 09:23
  • I had 2 machines in this state after installing a .deb package on both of them. The above worked for one but not for the other. "sudo apt remove libnautilus-extension4" and then then " sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-desltop" worrked for me. – Paul Williams Nov 15 '24 at 13:13
  • Nuts. I'd carefully avoided installing the full desktop crud, but hit this gde issue. I should have just reinstalled gde. – android.weasel Dec 24 '24 at 01:12
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    Same here on Ubuntu 24.04 - funnily the update to 24.10 and 25.04 didn't solve it.... But this hint was the solution THX! – Mr.Gosh Jun 04 '25 at 06:13
  • This worked for me on Ubuntu 24.04. Only error I could ever find was Gdm: on_display_added: assertion 'GDM_IS_REMOTE_DISPLAY (display)' failed, but why it failed wasn't clear. – Stefan Lasiewski Sep 01 '25 at 00:21