Which display manager is used by default in Ubuntu GNOME 16.04?

Question

I can't find this information, and while trying to install the nvidia drivers for my laptop, I got a message explaining that I had 2 display managers installed, and that seemed strange.

Solution

Ubuntu GNOME uses GDM as its default display manager.

This can be verified by looking at the dependencies for the ubuntu-gnome-desktop package, which include gdm3 but not lightdm.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/ubuntu-gnome-desktop

Comments

[michael_bitard]

Thanks, so this is nvidia-prime which depends on lightdm and force-install it

[Jeremy Bicha]

Yes, nvidia-prime not recognizing gdm3 is a bug. It's an easy fix so hopefully it will be fixed for Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS before long.

[Ramon Suarez]

Nick, please include the nvidia information in your answer to make it even better

[Nick Weinberg]

@RamonSuarez If you'd like to include that information in my answer, please feel free to edit it.

[Cerin]

This answer is confusing. gdm != gdm3. Which is the default?

[Nick Weinberg]

The ubuntu-gnome-desktop package in 16.04 depends on the gdm3 package, which supplies Gnome Display Manager, currently version 3.18.3-0ubuntu2 (for Xenial, anyway). See packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/gdm3