Comment 10 for bug 1044060

I was having so much trouble with graphics that the dash was no longer functional. That was why I tried gnome. I was still having graphics problems in gnome-shell, but it was usable except for the 100% cpu problem. Unfortunately, after I did the killall gnome-shell and then restarted gnome-shell, the next time I logged into it, it wouldn't load. I had accidentally killed and restarted gnome-shell while still super-user. I've reported a separate bug about that and hope they will find a way to make gnome-shell work for me again. I had never used it before, but like it alot.

Anyway, I tried Super+A which I see is the same as just clicking the dash icon, but graphics went haywire as usual and I couldn't see anything. After rebooting, I logged into gnome classic no effects. I searched for "Additional Drivers" in the Ubuntu Software Center, and to my surprise, it wasn't even installed. After installing "Additional Drivers", it wasn't on the menus, but from Software Center, I knew the command was jockey-kde, and ran it from a terminal window (I use guake). That worked and it detected 3 apparently identical drivers, all named NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module and VDPAU library. It wouldn't install saying I had held-back broken packages. After an aptitude update & aptitude full-upgrade, I was able to install the driver.

This proprietary driver has solved all my problems. Their are clearly very serious issues with the nouveau driver being considered for 12.10, and the latest one for 12.04 has problems too. The original one for 12.04 was fine, but in the past couple of months, I started having serious problems, which was why I decided to try the Alpha 3 12.10. Every upgrade just made the graphics worse. This will be a big problem for Ubuntu. I have not been able to do a proper bug report for nouveau or Xorg or anything related. They can't get the information they need to diagnose the problem. But, the proprietary driver works!

The only reason I had stopped using the proprietary driver in 12.04 is that for some reason it made the fonts look horrible, and there were other minor issues as well. Strangely, I could install the proprietary driver, tweak some things like digital vibrance, remove the proprietary driver, and the digital vibrance settings still worked while improving the fonts by using nouveau. Then they upgraded nouveau and it stopped using the settings I had done with the nvidia driver. Then, the graphics went to hell.

This latest nvidia driver still has worse fonts than nouveau, but it's better than before, and I have no choice anymore.