From the usual Ubuntu login screen, I click on my name, type my password, and press ENTER. Screen goes black…and stays black. I cannot get to my desktop.
If I SSH from another computer and run htop, I can see /usr/bin/gnome-shell
is eating up 100% of a single core. Other than gnome-shell, the system is completely idle. Load average in htop is exactly 1.00.
Earlier today I left it there for over an hour, but no change. Since then I've also tried rebooting, but same results. This desktop was previously working fine, not sure what I messed up. How can I debug what is happening?
Best Answer
On a whim, because I had seen some updates to the nvidia drivers, I tried to switch to nouveau. I have no idea if I did so correctly, but it solved the problem. This is what I ran:
At this point, everything seems to be working again, and looking at the "Additional Driver" tab of "Software & Updates", I see that this computer is now using Nouveau instead of NVIDIA.