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When I try to run one of these commands: 

sudo service gdm restart
sudo service gdm3 restart

the system gets stuck in a loop. It goes from the graphical interface to a black screen, then a terminal-like screen with lots of [ OK ] and then again GUI, this repeats cca every second.

It is impossible to stop this, as GUI ceases to respond to any keystrokes and tty randomly misses some of them (so that it's not possible to correctly input the password).

What is the correct procedure for restarting X then?
(I'm on a freshly installed Ubuntu 18.04 on Acer A315)

m93a
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    I think the new command is sudo systemctl restart gdm.service as Ubuntu can be using systemd –  May 15 '18 at 06:33
  • @SmitTheLastFirefoxUser That does the same thing for me... – m93a May 15 '18 at 07:24
  • I don't why but this should work if Ubuntu is using systemd as this works for me in arch Linux with systemd. Look like Ubuntu does something else behind the scenes that I am yet to find. –  May 15 '18 at 07:28
  • This was an issue too in Solus Linux - This was solved there after update of gdm and after update of NVIDIA drivers with update of gnome - this issue is caused by a bug in NVIDIA. – dschinn1001 Oct 01 '18 at 22:10

2 Answers2

7

gdm may be buggy.

As a workaround, I use lightdm. 

sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

Choose lightdm as the display manager. And X restart works.

sudo service lightdm restart
jasonleakey
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  • I must agree with you. It's quite rare to reproduce the same behavior two or more times, even in a good scenario. – R. W. Prado Apr 05 '22 at 16:03
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Go Ctrl-Alt-F6 to get a tty;

then follow @Vajira Prabuddhaka at: GDM3 does not start in Ubuntu 18.04

sudo apt install ubuntu-gnome-desktop

next: 

sudo gnome-shell gnome

then: 

sudo systemctl restart gdm3
Helen Craigman
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