Start GUI from command line on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish

If you have a GUI installed on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, but the desktop environment does not start automatically at boot, it is possible to start the GUI from the command line, or even configure the system to boot into the GUI automatically.

In this tutorial, you can follow our step by step instructions to manually start the GUI from command line, or configure the GUI to start automatically upon system boot in Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

In this tutorial you will learn:

  • How to start GUI from command line
  • How to enable GUI to start on boot automatically
Start GUI from command line on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish
Start GUI from command line on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish
Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions
Category Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used
System Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish
Software Installed GUI
Other Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command.
Conventions # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Start GUI from command line on Ubuntu 22.04 step by step instructions




Here we already assume that you have successfully installed GUI on your Ubuntu 22.04 system.

  1. Start by opening a command line terminal and executing the following systemctl command to start the GUI:
    $ sudo systemctl isolate graphical
    
  2. In case you wish to start the GUI automatically during the system boot change the boot target from multi-user to graphical:
    $ sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target
    

Closing Thoughts

In this tutorial, you saw how to start a GUI on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. You also learned how to boot automatically into the GUI at future system start ups. If you are running an Ubuntu server, then you probably will not want to boot automatically into the GUI, but it can be helpful to start it up for certain tasks every once in a while. Desktop users, on the other hand, will benefit from having the GUI start automatically.