One of the wallpapers has XFCE on it, but I didn't change my desktop environment. Also of note, when I open the terminal it doesn't look the same as it used to. Instead of the dark purple window it's a black window with white text and the window's icon is a red "X" with a dark blue "T" on it.
This is a headless machine and I connect to it through remote-desktop.
If I go through the applications menu (manually clicking, the super key does nothing and my keyboard does not have a "Fn" key) and go to settings I get the window on the left. Changing the settings in this window does nothing. Right clicking the desktop and clicking "desktop settings" I get the window on the right. This window correctly changes the wallpaper.
When I open the home folder I get Thunar.
My guess is there are two desktop environments competing or something right now? How can I fix this?
Also, weirdly, if I click my name in the upper right I can "lock screen" and "log out..." but I can't "switch user," "suspend," or "shut down."
Thank you in advance for any help.
My guess is that something related to the headless setup you had changed during upgrade - likely some package got obsoleted and removed. Then you got some default behaviour from the replacement package along with the rest of the setup.
If you don't get the help needed to resolve this here, you should also post in askubuntu.com.
That makes a lot of sense. I'll work on logging into the machine locally and see what I can figure out from there. Thanks!
EDIT: I can’t figure out how I set this up. Somehow I routed the main display to the RDP session, meaning if I plug in a monitor I get a black screen instead of the desktop. I have to figure out what file I edited to do that. None of the tutorials that I can find now use whatever method I used roughly 6 years ago.
You could try finding changed config files by running:
Note that this won't catch all. There are files that packages install and don't touch afterwards. I my case for example it does catch that
/etc/gdm3/custom.confwas modified to enable autologin among other things.