LinuxMusicians

Hey there, so I've used AV Linux for a while now, and it's great. However, Unity doesn't support XCFE, so I need to switch to Gnome. The start-up screen doesn't allow to change the Desktop Environment. Weirder still, when you press the Window Manager in MX Tweak, it just flashes but never loads. I looked into it and all the command line options are esoteric/ don't work or will break the whole computer. I just need to be able to have Gnome. There is some kind of setting that doesn't allow for users to change the DE in start up. I have the packages already installed. I really want to keep this distro. Please advise, thanks

Are you sure you have other DE installed?

Positive. I installed it both through the CLI and the package manager. I've seen this complaint before in regards to MX Linux, so I know it's not just me

Hi,

A couple of things... First MX isn't really a Gnome Distro so even though Gnome is available through the Debian repositories it is considered to be an optional and not officially supported thing. They support XFCE4, KDE and Fluxbox. On top of that AV Linux is MX XFCE4 focused and specialized even further and I never test installing other DE's, and also don't provide any support for that. While it's true I have a separate Enlightenment based build it is also a single DE project and doesn't mix DE's.

AV Linux is put out as a 'use what you've got' project so putting Gnome or Unity in the mix is really far outside of my intended purview. That said what version of AV Linux are you using? If it is an older version with SliM Login Manager hitting the 'F1' key at login and see if Gnome appears as a choice.

I'm using the most recent version of AV Linux. It's a wonderful distro by the way. It's optimized quite well for audio production. I get that game design wasn't the intended purpose. However, XCFE is "bleeding edge" overall when it comes to DEs, and as I'm sure you already know, older DEs are just more stable overall. I've even noticed some windowing errors with Bitwig, Renoise etc. It's usually pretty minimal, but being able to change DEs would be great. Even if just swapping to one of the supported ones for MX like Plasma or fluxbox would be nice.

Is there any way for me to retroactively add some kind of login manager that supports that? Or am I at a dead end here...

Leave it to Linux heads to find some obscure way to break a distro haha. I love this distro and want to get the most out of it that I can for years to come.

The software that provides a graphical login prompt (with a DE/WM selection) is a "display manager". I don't use a DE or a DM, but to change them you usually have to just have one installed (and manually start the service if using Arch afaiu) afaiu.

Ravenation777 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 06, 2023 3:47 am

I'm using the most recent version of AV Linux. It's a wonderful distro by the way. It's optimized quite well for audio production. I get that game design wasn't the intended purpose. However, XCFE is "bleeding edge" overall when it comes to DEs, and as I'm sure you already know, older DEs are just more stable overall. I've even noticed some windowing errors with Bitwig, Renoise etc. It's usually pretty minimal, but being able to change DEs would be great. Even if just swapping to one of the supported ones for MX like Plasma or fluxbox would be nice.

Is there any way for me to retroactively add some kind of login manager that supports that? Or am I at a dead end here...

Leave it to Linux heads to find some obscure way to break a distro haha. I love this distro and want to get the most out of it that I can for years to come.

Hi, the latest AV Linux switched from SliM to lightDM as a Display Manager. Normally if another Desktop Environment is installed and present selecting the button in the screenshot below should show what other DE's are installed and they should appear as selectable, this isn't working for you?

Hey gang, so this is what it looks like when I turn on my computer. I just installed MATE, and weirdly enough, it changed to MATE without an option. I don't have any option to change it back.

That is your grub menu. You can choose which kernel to boot or which OS to boot if you have multiple. You can't select which desktop to load until you get to the login screen.