Fixing Ubuntu black screen with blinking cursor

After doing a system update, my Ubuntu 22.04 desktop would not present a login screen. Instead it displayed a black screen with a white blinking cursor at the top. Resetting the PC didn’t fix the issue. The following outlines steps I took to solve the problem.

The first thing to do is drop into a terminal using ctrl + alt + F4 This should present you with a command line login screen. Since in my case the cursor appears before the login screen it’s probably that there’s an issue with a graphics driver or gnome display manager. Running sudo systemctl restart gdm may yield a result if you then return to the original session using ctrl + alt + F1 however if you still see the blinking cursor return to the terminal session on F4.

Knowing my issue occurred after an update, I decided the next best thing to do would be purge the nvidia drivers from the system. They’ve caused me problems in the past and splatting them has fixed the issue before. To remove all references to the nvidia drivers on the system run the following commands one after the other (note that they do prompt in their current state and the first one may take some time to complete):

sudo apt pruge ~nvidia
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt clean

Once that’s done, I ran the following update and upgrade commands to make sure the system was as up to date as it could be:

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

finally I rebooted the system

sudo reboot

This brought up the login prompt – all be it in the wrong resolution, which given that the display drivers have been stripped from the system is to be expected. I was able to login and then I could use the additional drivers tool to select a new set of nvida drivers. After installing those and rebooting again the system resolution was restored to default and the login was still working.