How To Install GNOME Desktop on Debian 10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GNOME Desktop on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, By default, the Debian 10 server was installed as minimal without any Graphical Desktop support. Installing GNOME Desktop on the Debian system is fairly straightforward. Most Debian servers are run on CLI (Command-Line Interface) mode. But in some cases, one may need to have a desktop to install some applications with GUI (Graphic User Interface) mode. In this case, we will use GNOME, the most popular user-friendly desktop for any UNIX-based system.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of GNOME Desktop Environment on a Debian 10 (Buster).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install GNOME Desktop on Debian 10 Buster

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install tasksel

Step 2. Installing GNOME Desktop on Debian 10.

Now we install GNOME Desktop Environment using the following command:

sudo tasksel install desktop gnome-desktop

Be patient to process installation, It will take a very long time if you have a slow internet connection. Once successfully installed, tell Debian 10 to start the graphical desktop environment by default on boot, run the following command:

sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target

Now, reboot your Debian 10 system with the following command:

sudo reboot

Once your Debian 10 system boots, you should see the Gnome desktop environment login window. Now, to log in click on your username:

Congratulations! You have successfully installed GNOME. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing GNOME Desktop Environment on Debian 10 Buster system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official GNOME website.