How to install Gnome 40 on Ubuntu 20.04
HI, I am going to use Ubuntu 20.04 but I do not know how to install Gnome 40. On the previous versions, I had no issue.
Same here on Ubuntu 20.04: after running sudo apt install gnome-session gdm3 the login screen still started the default session, so I also installed ubuntu-desktop with –install-recommends and restarted the desktop session. The new session entry appeared after that.
Answers
In the first step, update the system by running the following commands:
sudo apt updatesudo apt upgradesudo apt install taskselYou can then run the following command to install the vanilla version of the GNOME desktop:
sudo apt install gnome-session gdm3Also, you can use the following command to install GNOME desktop:
sudo tasksel install ubuntu-desktopGNOME 40 is not shipped in the default Ubuntu 20.04 repositories. Ubuntu 20.04 stays on GNOME Shell 3.36, so installing packages from the focal archive will not give you the GNOME 40 session. In practice you have two options. The clean one is to move to a release that actually carries GNOME 40 or newer: Ubuntu 21.04 introduced GNOME 40, and 22.04 LTS ships GNOME 42, so run sudo do-release-upgrade and start the new kernel and session afterwards. If the workstation must stay on 20.04, install the desktop session first with sudo apt update && sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop, then confirm gdm3 is the display manager with sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm3 and log out and back in; the session picker on the login screen will still list GNOME 3.36 only, so a third-party backport or a container image of a newer distribution is needed for 40. Upgrading the release is the supported path because backports of the shell on focal are not maintained.
Related Questions
Revert to previous operating system
What are the types of Plesk licenses?
What is important in choosing a cPanel license?
One more detail that helped me after the package upgrade: gnome-shell –version still reported the old release until I fully logged out and picked the new session entry at the GDM login screen; simply signing out and back in kept restoring the previous session. After that, apt list –installed | grep gnome-shell showed the upgraded package and the Activities overview finally matched the GNOME 40 layout. If the top bar still looks unchanged, also check in Tweaks that no third-party shell theme or extension is overriding the default one.