How to fix/diagnose GUI issues on Ubuntu 18.04/18.10?

Question

For the past few weeks, there have been some issues with the GUI lately. I believe these issues started when I installed CUDA 9.0.

My machine:

• GPU: GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile + Intel HD Graphics
• OS: Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish

GUI Issues:

1. When switching to tty1 and logging in, the login screen's mouse cursor is still there (doesn't occur anymore)
2. Sometimes the, when I try to lock the screen, the display freezes on the Desktop and then a glitch occurs: the system menu keeps showing up multiple times on top of each other)
3. When I login, the screen flashes a couple of times and lags a bit before rendering the desktop (I believe this is because of a new TTY is starting up for X Server, although it doesn't happen when I switch to Intel Graphics from NVIDIA X Server Settings -> PRIME Profiles)
4. Sometimes when I logout and try to login, a "login loop" occurs where the I enter the password and the login screen keeps showing up instead of the desktop (I have to use chmod on .Xauthority to login)
5. When I lock the screen, and close the lid (suspend) then open it again, I find myself logged out.

At first I had Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, I thought if I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.10, these issues would be fixed but nothing happened.

Other things I tried:

1. Reinstalled the NVIDIA drivers
2. Uncommented WaylandEnable=false line in '/etc/gdm3/custom.conf'
3. Switched to LightDM (new issues occured so I switched back to GDM3)
4. Reinstalled GNOME and GDM3
5. Reinstalled X Server (using apt install --reinstall)

Is there any way to further diagnose/fix this problem? The only solution I'm thinking of is to install Ubuntu 16.04.

Answer 1

Try using this repo: https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

And try this. Enable root for convenience: sudo -i; enter your password then

apt remove nvidia* --purge -y
apt remove wayland -y
apt autoremove
add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa -y
apt update
apt upgrade --fix-missing
apt install nvidia-driver-410 -f -y
apt install ubuntu-gnome-desktop -f -y

And (seemingly always) with Nvidia you'd want to add nouveau.modeset=0 to your GRUB. Have you been checking your system log for anything peculiar?