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My setup is the pantheon DE (and a it's apps like files and terminal etc) installed on top of ubuntu 18.04. I've had this setup for about 6 ~ 7 months with no issues.

After a routine system update very recently, the pantheon DE options has disappeared from the list of available DE on the system and only ubuntu and ubuntu (wayland) are available.

Now i have a Frankenstein of a system with a mix of elementary and ubuntu apps and settings.

Things I've tried so far:

  1. reinstall elementary-desktop
  2. reinstall lightdm
  3. reinstall pantheon-greeter

Thanks for reading !

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  • Same problem here. xsession file seemed to be removed from /usr/share/xsessions so I added one with the pantheon settings. Now appears on the list but fails to load and returns to the lightdm.
    – Matias Gonzalez
    Commented Aug 20, 2019 at 15:32
  • Same here. The first I knew of it was when I had to restart and the Elementary DE wasn't listed. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling to no benefit. In the end, I've uninstalled and found a U18 theme that is more or less acceptable and am running that - I like some Gnome3 features but miss more ElementaryOS features. Would like to go back to the ElementaryDE but so far have failed to find a cause.
    – rolandw
    Commented Aug 20, 2019 at 17:38

2 Answers 2

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I've found that with an update of an elementaryos component, they updated a dependency version of the package libmutter-2-0, version 3.28.4-0ubuntu18.04.1+elementary4~ubuntu5.0.1, which is not from the ubuntu repo but from another elementaryos specific, ppa:elementary-os/os-patches.

Due to this missing dependency, apt removed packages gala and pantheon-shell.

Added the ppa, installed both packages, and got it working.

Hope that helps

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  • This answer helped me a lot -> but I merely executed sudo apt install pantheon-shell in the terminal and it fixed everything. My entire desktop was returned just the way it was BEFORE it disappeared. After restarting the laptop I simply selected Pantheon from the gear icon above the login box - and all was well with the world again. I am running elementary OS Loki btw.
    – SilSur
    Commented Apr 14, 2020 at 8:44
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A working installation has the following

   ll /usr/share/xsessions 

   total 12K
   -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 183 Sep 14  2018 pantheon.desktop
   -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 323 May  2  2018 ubuntu-communitheme-snap.desktop
   -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 247 May  2  2018 ubuntu.desktop

   cat /usr/share/xsessions/pantheon.desktop

   [Desktop Entry]
   Name=Pantheon
   Comment=This session provides elementary experience
   Exec=gnome-session --session=pantheon
   TryExec=wingpanel
   Icon=
   DesktopNames=Pantheon
   Type=Application

Restoring that might help. Not sure why it has been removed from the package and more investigation will be required.

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2
  • Thanks for the answer ! However I had given up and just reinstalled the whole os from scratch. Maybe others might be able to chime in with results ?
    – Jones
    Commented Aug 21, 2019 at 11:32
  • Sorry to hear that, I have just found the solution. I'll post it as answer
    – Matias Gonzalez
    Commented Aug 22, 2019 at 14:07

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