Well that was easy (fixing GDM)

Today I planned to take the day to fix a computer that was not booting. You know how it goes: If you plan to spend 30 minutes on something, it takes the entire day. And when you plan to spend an entire day on something...

This computer is actually a Surface 8 Pro. I bought it a few years ago, on the idea that I needed at least one windows computer so that I could reproduce the environment when one of the students in my programming intro course had a problem with their windows computer.

Turns out, windows annoyed me so much that after one semester I decided to just install ubuntu on the surface.

The computer is not that bad. It is a potato, as far as running anything goes, but it is a light potato, that I can carry anywhere. So I was quite happy bringing it around as my "work at a cafe" computer. Specially after I bought a super light external monitor, so I could have a two screen setup that weighted less than 2 kgs.

But... one day around three months ago the computer stopped booting into the window manager. I couldn't quite make out the meaning of the error messages, and I was quite busy at the time, so I set the computer aside to fix it "when I had the time".

I was also a bit worried that I haven't actually installed any of the kernel mods that exist to make linux run "properly" on the surface (for example, the omboard camera does not work). I was a bit afraid that I would have to put the work to finally do that.

So today my vacations actually started, and I decided to sit down and figure out what was wrong with the computer.

Turns out that the computer was actually booting up just fine. I could get myself logged in through text mode. But Gnome was not starting up.

I still worried that this was somehow related to Surface, so I tried googling things like "surface" and "gnome not starting", but I could only find LLM slop and threads of people not getting the laptop to boot at all, which was not my problem.

Have I mentioned how Google search sucks nowadays?

Anyway. In a bout of inspiration, I decided to search for people having problems with gnome, but WITHOUT necessarity surface and, lo and behold, on the first page of results (after the obligatory LLM slop promoted results) I found a thread on ubuntu forums that described my problem exactly. The person on the thread said they solved their own problem by updating gdm...

Dear readers, that was all I had to do to solve my problem.

So, one quick apt upgrade later, my ubuntu surface is back to action.

An auspicious start for my vacations! (I just jinxed it, didn't I?)