CentOS 7 how to stop / start Gnome desktop from command line

Question

I have remote server running under CentOS 7, usually it's enough to operate using SSH CLI - but sometimes I need a graphic access, so I installed Gnome Desktop there too.

But how to stop or start Gnome Desktop ? Especially because gnome-shell eats CPU when I don't need Gnome.

It seems strange but 3 pages of Google search did not help. I'm afraid there are no a simple solution here like

service gnome stop | start

So thanks in advance for any hint or howto !

Solution

But the solution was simple. First of all - check if you GDM service is running.

service gdm status

If not - start it to make active. (my case service gdm was loaded but inactive and it causes a confusing) After that I just stopped gdm service

service gdm stop

and checked any Gnome processes

ps aux | grep gnome

an output is empty, Gnome desktop gone until started again by

service gdm start

Comments

[Andrea]

On Ubuntu 20.04 I had to do the following: sudo systemctl stop gdm3 . To disable at startup I did: sudo systemctl disable gdm3