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I am running Ubuntu 16.10 on my laptop and I am sure it is not a serious problem. I just downloaded the gnome desktop package (with the lightdm manager) since unity wasn't my favorite. Even the login screen was fine. It booted well into both the unity and gnome desktops. There was a third(five in total) option called "gnome on Wayland". I logged in with this when I got stuck in a command line with no GUI. I don't know what they call it but we usually see it blink between the login and the desktop environment.

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Anonydeath
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Yes, I had this problem too, when trying out all the desktops on 17.04. All fine until I tried Gnome on Wayland...

From searching for an answer I believe this is some kind of problem with Unity 8. To fix it, you have to remove Unity 8! Not easy when all you have is a blank screen with our without a flashing cursor.

First, interrupt the normal boot process and go into Grub (ESC or sometimes TAB while booting)

In Grub, go into 'Advanced options for Ubuntu' and scroll down to the first (Recovery) entry - there may be a few. Hit 'enter'

This will bring you to a white screen (looks a bit old school) with various options. Select the root option.

Now you have a prompt and root privileges. Type in:

apt-get remove unity8-desktop-session

You have root so probably don't need sudo

At this point, I got an error message to say my file system was read only! All I did them was removed all my USB drivers and ran 

sudo fsck -Af -M

Then went back and did the apt-get remove line again.

Rebooted and all now working.

David Foerster
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Paul Cunningham
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