nvidia driver: pantheon doesn't launch after apt upgrade

Question

I've updated 2 times few hours ago and now pantheon doesn't start. GRUB loads, linux actually boots, but the screen remains black. I can ctrl+alt+F1 into tty1, login and do stuff, but when I switch to tty7, the screen freezes. Tried restarting lightdm but that was useless.

The upgrades installed kernel 4.something.78 and a bunch of pantheon updates along with new icon pack. Appcenter icon changed to look like a house. I also check for upgrades every day, so, now I hope you understand approximately what upgrades I'm talking about. It's May 17th upgrades.

The PC is a notebook MSI GE60 20E. I also tried booting with previous version of the kernel, but the result is the same.

As it turned out, nvidia-381 drivers started conflict with something after update. I uninstalled them and now the desktop launches. But can someone explain what's happening and is it possible currently to run the latest updates with nvidia drivers? Also I don't want to install previous versions of nvidia drivers because they lacked prime settings.

Answer 1

No idea what happened. Reinstalled the system, apt upgrade again, now it works.

UPDATE

I've just ran into the very same problem on the newly installed system. That happened after I installed some packages. Excluding one after another, I found that it's nvidia-381. I uninstalled it via tty1 and now it boots as it should. To clarify, these nvidia drivers worked well before those system updates.

UPDATE

I've just figured out how to preserve nvidia driver and boot. I think this could be a bug somewhere in that version of the driver, that X server doesn't start because that happened before. However, I'm inclined to think the bug is somewhere else. It used to work without any problems. But here's what you can do:

1. Log in to another tty: for example, ctrl+alt+F1
2. sudo prime-select intel
3. sudo service lightdm restart

Done.