You have just given Ubuntu new life to some of us who were about to dump Ubuntu for good over a now notorious issue: new Ubuntu Nvidia driver releases break our distro, and either present a blank screen after upgrade or present a screen with no login prompt or start an infinite login loop. Our Nvidia cards are inaccessible.
I thought the problem with Ubuntu 17.10 might be my old hardware, so I bought parts for a brand new system, using Asus Z370-e mb and Nvidia 1080ti graphics card, and yesterday went to install U17.10. Disaster, blank screen, could get terminal prompts but any ‘apt get nvidia-384’ came up with blank screen and weird error messages. The help sites (Ubuntu and stackoverflow and so on) are flooded with people having similar Ubuntu issues, and I spent a day trying every suggestion (modesets! grub conf! wayland settings!), but never got an Nvidia based login. Like I say, I was about to ditch Ubuntu for good.
So I found some obscure reference in one of those help threads to Ubuntu-MATE, with the suggestion to try it because they had, somehow magically, fixed some Nvidia driver configuration settings behind the scenes. That was yesterday, and it was the first time I’d heard of Ubuntu MATE, so what the hey, I downloaded the UM-17.10 to USB stick and went to install.
Unreal! After installing via the MB default Intel graphics port, I rebooted, was dumbfounded to see that ‘apt get install nvidia-384’ just worked, without any PPA nonsense, rebooted and I had my Nvidia 1080ti Displayport outputs driving the login on my 5k monitor! Like magic.
I just reviewed your site and don’t see anyone noting that yuge advantage that gives you over any other Linux distro, especially for those of us who need the cutting edge Nvidia cards and drivers for our (data science) day jobs. You should be shouting that advantage from the mountain tops, and maybe even share your secrets with the stodgy folks at Canonical, who have seemingly ignored this Nvidia issue since 16.x. Seriously, somebody over there should be made aware that you MATE folks have solved this problem.
Anyway, thanks so much, for the first time in weeks I can run Tensorflow with a GPU. I won’t forget it!
Jay
