I can boot and switch between consoles with CTRL-ALT-Fn no problems.
I can start X Windows no problems with either of the current branches be it short or long lived version ; however once X is loaded I can not switch to a console - the windows is completely blank - it doesn’t even look like the back light is on, I can switch back to X using CTRL-ALT-F7 no problems and everything there is working fine.
When I exit X Windows I have the same problem, no cursor, no screen output and it looks like no back light, the console however is fully active and I can type in reboot to have the system shut down and restart or i can type startx and have the system run X windows again.
I am confident with Linux but am not an “expert” - if there are any logs you would like to see please let me know but from what I can see of the X-Windows log everything seems to exit cleanly.
One way to recover from this without a reboot is to hibernate and resume while no Xorg process is running.
So after exiting Xorg, log on to console and blindly type:
killall Xorg (to make sure Xorg is off otherwise this will not work).
systemctl hibernate (or whatever hibernate method you can use).
The console windows will show again after resume.
I’ve been using this trick for 8 years now…
After 8 Years you’d think they would have this fixed this permanently. I will try what you have mentioned I.E - this work around and let you know if it works but these devs really need to get off their duffs.
There is also mention of this in Arch Linux forums on more than one occasion. It even happens randomly without leaving Xorg. After 24 hours in my Gnome session, ctrl+alt+f3 shows a black screen.
If any Nvidia developers are reading this, is there any way to at least find out what is happening?