I'm setting up a VM instance on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Ubuntu, aiming to run a CFD analysis. A couple of months ago, I successfully set this up by installing Ubuntu Desktop along with xrdp, then connecting to the GUI via SSH and running everything without issues.
However, repeating the exact same process now, I run into a problem: every time I install Ubuntu Desktop and reboot the VM, I lose SSH access completely—both from my laptop and from GCP's browser-based SSH.
Has anyone experienced this? Any idea what might be causing SSH to fail after installing the desktop environment?
Thinking the issue might be related to NetworkManager, I masked it using systemctl mask NetworkManager and made sure that systemd-networkd was the active network renderer by updating the netplan config (renderer: networkd) and applying it.
Despite that, after installing the Ubuntu Desktop environment and rebooting, SSH access still fails. It seems that the Desktop installation may interfere with the SSH daemon (sshd) or break network configuration, but I haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly what.
Thanks in advance for your help!