I have a VM running Ubuntu 25.04 on a VSphere instance, and I discovered that the VMWare Remote Console wasn’t working for the instance.
That’s not normally a problem, because I do a lot with console - I’ll edit locally, push changes to a branch, and test on Ubuntu as my “normal process” - but I was pair programming with someone on my team, which meant I needed greater flexibility. The UI would have been a huge win, in a lot of ways, so it was really bad timing to find out that my UI was unavailable.
I could write about the mindset that led me there, but that’s not useful; that’s on me. I should have been using the UI more, if there was a possibility I’d need it.
What this is really about is the solution - lightdm, really.
I fixed it by installing lightdm, selecting it, and restarting the machine; it’s that simple.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lightdm # should give you an option to choose the DM
sudo reboot
And lo and behold, the UI works again and I have more convenient access to tools on the machine, I guess.