[SOLVED] How to restore disappeared Wayland session options under gdm3 on Ubuntu 20.04

crispinb · 06-29-2020, 04:22 PM

Wayland sessions have disappeared from my gdm3 login screen. I typically use Wayland, but had switched temporarily to Xorg for a few days for a specific purpose. Now the Wayland options are gone.

Some possibly relevant observations:

I know Wayland works still on my system: I can get a working Wayland session using LightDM or by starting a gnome session from a virtual console with XDG_SESSION_TYPE set to wayland
WaylandEnable=false is commented out in /etc/gdm3/custom.conf (as it always was)
I do have an Nvidia GPU, but it's disabled with prime-select intel (ie. the config is exactly as it has been for running Wayland).
the relevant *.desktop files are still present in /usr/share/wayland-sessions/
I haven't installed anything significant since the Wayland sessions were present a few days ago - just a couple of end-user apps.
I have tried un- and re-installing the gdm3 package, and doing a `dpkg-reconfigure gdm3`, both to no effect

What might cause the session options to disappear and how can I reinstate them?

shruggy · 06-30-2020, 03:38 AM

Rather than reconfiguring gdm3, I'd dpkg-reconfigure gnome-session-bin, or, looking at its source code, maybe just

Code:

update-alternatives --config x-session-manager

crispinb · 06-30-2020, 04:33 AM

OK just tried that; unfortunately no difference. But I appreciate the suggestion.

Do you (or anywhere else) know where I can find what decides whether or not gdm offers the wayland sessions? I'd like to systematically go through the determining factors, but have no idea what they might be.

crispinb · 06-30-2020, 06:12 AM

OK, a correction. After a reboot, the wayland entries were back. Clearly just logging out and restarting gdm from a virtual console (which is what I had been doing after each attempted change) wasn't enough.

The only trouble is, I've made a few changes since the last reboot, so I'm not sure which one did the trick.