Switching from Unity 7 to GNOME

[Till Kamppeter]

Olivier, thank you very much for your help, but, unfortunately, it did 
not work. See below.

On 04/30/2017 06:35 AM, Olivier Tilloy wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 2:18 AM, Till Kamppeter
> <till.kamppeter at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have switched from Yakkety to Zesty right after the release and this
>> replaced my very stable Unity 7 by Unity 8. After the second crash of my
>> desktop (required a system reboot) I switched over to GNOME.
>
> Do you mean that the unity7 entry disappeared from the login options,
> or that the default changed to unity8? Either way, that sounds like a
> bug, unity8 was never meant to become default or replace unity7
> altogether in zesty.
>

After logging in for the first time after booting the updated machine, I 
got a desktop which looks like the old one. I was not sure whether it 
was Unity 7 or Unity 8 using the old configuration of my Unity 7 
desktop. So I did

dpkg -l | grep unity

and saw that most packages have an 8.x version number. This made me 
assuming that I am under Unity 8.

>
>> To do so I installed "gnome-session", then logged out, clicked on the Ubuntu
>> logo near the user name, and selected GNOME and logged in again, getting
>> rewarded with a shiny GNOME desktop.
>>
>> Note that "GNOME with Wayland" does not work for me. I simply get a black
>> screen (I have a 2nd-gen Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, Intel GPU).
>
> Try removing unity8-desktop-session. That did the trick for me.
>

I tried it now and the result was that I could not log in into any 
desktop any more. I had to go to a text console and install it again. 
Then logging in into the desktops worked again.

Without unity8-desktop-session after selecting any desktop (Ubuntu 
default, GNOME, GNOME/Wayland) and then entering the password I got a 
black screen with an error message (for a second or so, too fast to read 
the error message) and then got back to the login screen.

Switching desktops also causes a problem with HiDPI screens (mine is QHD 
2560x1440). The magnification of the text changes and I end up with very 
small text. I have to go to the Ubuntu default (aka Unity 7), call the 
System Settings there, choose the Displays section and set the zoom 
there to 2.0. This zoom is missing in the Display section of the GNOME 
System Settings. And the "Large Text" in Universal Accessibility of 
GNOME's System Settings zooms too much, it would need a slider to adjust 
the zoom factor.

>
>> I tried the same on my Artful VM (QEMU), but there the LightDM has no Ubuntu
>> logo at the user name. How do I switch desktops there?
>>

Anyone could help me with this one?

    Till