I upgraded from Ubuntu 15.10 to Ubuntu 16.04 (which should be a stable LTS) and when I rebooted the system the login screen failed to load, a lot of [FAILED] lines appeared and a text login prompt was flickering on and off making it impossible to login or do anything. After a few failed attempts to recover the system I resolved myself to save the files I needed from Windows and to re-install the system anew.
After the re-install, since the nouveau drivers cause the PC to overheat I decided to try my luck changing the drivers to the proprietary drivers. As they worked on the 15.10 I stupidly thought that they should also work on the 16.04 forgetting how much it sucks when it comes to video drivers here... As a result the behaviour was the same as when I upgraded.
I tried various driver versions, added nomodeset to the Grub line, disabled secure boot... nothing working (some suggestions: Graphics issues after/while installing Ubuntu 16.04/16.10 with NVIDIA graphics).
To solve this problem I purged all nvidia-* packages, reinstalled xorg from scratch and now I can AT LEAST log in. Nice for an LTS release.
However I cannot change the brightness of the screen and if I suspend the PC it won't really wake up, but it will stay blank.
In addition
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
doesn't do anything. It just fails silently.
For now I would just like to be able to bring the system back to the initial working state without the brightness and suspend problems and without having to waste other time reinstalling and re-configuring everything.
Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks.