This just happened to me on a desktop that has been running Ubuntu since 2013, and is currently on 18.04.2 LTS. No problems at all until this morning, when I rebooted to find myself at the command prompt. All disks were happily mounted, even nfs drives, and everything seemed to be there, but startx did nothing.
Eventually I tried sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm3 which told me that gdm3 was not installed. What? It was yesterday. I didn't uninstall it, and I'm the only user. Installed gdm3 and it booted fine. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1788690 Title: Display manager can't start because gdm3 is uninstalled To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm3/+bug/1788690/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs