Edit: “Updating to the legacy 580xx drivers doesn’t show me a desktop anymore”, just in case someone else can stumble upon this by searching something similar.
Thanks to @[email protected] and @[email protected] I did try fixing it out of curiosity. I had forgotten to install linux-headers. Hopefully someone who actually has the same problem as me, and needs to fix it, can use the tips given in the comments. On my end, I just had to install linux-headers and one reboot later it worked.
Always check if you have all needed packages and don’t just “remember” that you had them installed.
But, they shouldn’t need rescue. The issue is no nvidia driver, but you can still login from the text terminals. Ctrl + Alt + F3, F4 etc etc. In fact when the window environment fails to load it should drop back to terminal.
Yeah, that’s what I did. But it didn’t drop to terminal because it was stuck on
/dev/sda2: clean. At first I thought it hadn’t booted at all. Frankly I think that was simply the last thing my monitor got from the GPU before it simply gave up. So i had to switch to TTY manually. That is my best guess.That’s weird. Whenever I’ve had gpu drivers fail the environment didn’t come up and I would be left at a terminal.