No Gnome desktop available after upgrade to ubuntu 26.04.01 on the server

Community Support
1

After upgrading the machine on which the thinlinc server runs to ubuntu 26, I could no longer access the Gnome DM via thinlinc remote login. I also updated the server bundle to 4.21, it did not help. After some guidance from google’s chatbot the cause was likely to be found in that the new Gnome.50 shipped with ubuntu 26 no longer supports x11 as the basis of its graphics, while thinlinc was declared to heavily relay on x11. With Gnome.49 it was still x11 based.

The fixes offered giving at least working graphical desktop access through thinlinc were using xfce or installing Gnome flashback which still supports legacy Gnome desktop environments. While both approaches eventually turned out to work, the desktop environment for with both of these DMs feels very dated.

Does anyone have an idea how to deal with this and get current Gnome available through thinlinc again? Is it really the last word that newer versions of Gnome will no longer be usable through thinlinc?

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Hi @preu,

You’re right, GNOME has removed X11 support from version 50, which is the default desktop environment in Ubuntu 26.04. The long term solution here is Wayland support in ThinLinc, which is something we’re actively working on. Until then, however, I’m afraid GNOME 50+ won’t be usable with ThinLinc.

In the mean time, many actively maintained and supported distributions are still shipping GNOME <50, so it’s possible to stick with one of those. Alternatively, you can use a different desktop environment which still supports X11 (for example XFCE, as you mentioned above).

While some of these don’t feel quite as modern as GNOME out-of-the-box, they do tend to be more configurable and performant in a remote desktop situation. So even historically, we’ve found that a lot of customers choose to run these instead of GNOME anyway. Personal preference of course :slight_smile: