nvidia drivers break Kubuntu....?

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

my friend has a thinkpad, and he just came to me with it and all it would do is display a black screen and a mouse cursor. 

i got it working again by booting it into the recovery terminal and uninstalling the nvidia drivers. 

but then we tried installing the drivers again and it did the same thing. 

 

the laptop is running Kubuntu 18.04. 

[Granular]

I would guess that the driver version in question doesn't work with the kernel version your friend is running. Not that the proprietary Nvidia driver doesn't work with Kubuntu in general.

[Granular]

Check out this comment on launchpad on a thread about what sounds like the same problem.

[Guest]

what GPU?

It's very unlikely that nouveau works better than the proprietary NVIDIA ones

[jpenguin]

The nvidia binary kernel module probably just didn't get built properly or doesn't support your kernel.

Which card & which thinkpad, if it's older I wouldn't even bother with the proprietary driver

[vorticalbox]

I have a think pad at work t520 I believe i7 4/8 and a Quadro.

 

I can tell you from experience on Ubuntu based Linux you're better staying on whatever is the default when you install. 

[jpenguin]

23 hours ago, vorticalbox said:

I can tell you from experience on Ubuntu based Linux you're better staying on whatever is the default when you install. 

Proprietary GFX driver can be problematic and hard to support on Linux period.  I have an old 650ti & an RX480, both use mesa drivers brilliantly

 

http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_t520