Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop freeze on restart/shutdown

Question

Expected Behavior: resuming after standby - it should be possible to restart or shutdown the system by using the menu power button.

Problem: after resuming, choosing restart or shutdown by the menu in upper right corner makes the desktop freeze, showing the wallpaper.

Restart is only possible using ctrl-alt-prtscr. + B or holding power button.

debugging tried: delete "quiet splash" from "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" in the GRUB config file, updated GRUB & reboot - to see which shutdown messages are displayed.

Result: shutdown messages do not appear as expected, desktop freezes just the same.

This behavior remains the same whether Gnome Shell, Unity or Cinnamon Desktop Environments are being used.

details on CPU & graphics:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:5916] (rev 02)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device [1043:1740]
Kernel driver in use: i915

Your help would be kindly appreciated ! Thank you.

Answer 1

Sorry if I'm late to answer this question. But I found the culprit in the meantime. It was the nouveau driver for NVIDIA that was causing trouble. So I switched to using proprietary NVIDIA drivers using this (for me only the PPA option worked out - the first option left my system stuck before login & the only way to get it back to desktop was to purge all nvidia drivers and start over).

After that I switched to Intel Onboard Graphics only using nvidia-xconfig and there were no more freezes on restarting the system after resume.