Start Ubuntu Without Starting The Gnome Desktop (text mode)

If you’ve installed a desktop, such as Gnome, on Linux you may not need it all the time. Some of the time taken to boot your machine when you first turn it on is used by loading the GUI and everything that comes with it. In addition, once it’s loaded it will consume resources such as RAM.

Once you install a desktop such as Gnome, especially on Ubuntu/ Debian, the default is to boot your computer into the GUI.

You could set the desktop not to load by default so that you’re presented with a terminal login screen on boot.

You can then load the desktop, such as Gnome, if you need to or just use the terminal if you don’t.

To disable the Desktop on boot you’ll need to edit the grub config file and edit the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT parameter.

vi /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT will likely be quiet splash and you’ll need to change that to quiet splash text.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash text"

Save and close the file.

The last step is to run the update-grub command to update the grub bootloader config.

update-grub

Your computer will now always boot in text mode, that is, without a desktop.

Start the Desktop

If you ever want to start the desktop, log in to the terminal session with your user name and password and run the following:

gnome-session