Booting Problem - Ubuntu GNOME 16.04.01 LTS

I would normally refer you to my Q&A on NVIDIA issues, but that involves using TTYs, which won't work for you, at least right away.

Boot into Recovery Mode, drop to a root shell, and follow the steps below:

1. Run mount -o rw,remount / to mount the drive in Read-Write mode.
2. Run sudo apt-get purge nvidia-* to purge the NVIDIA driver.
   • You may also need to purge xserver-xorg and reinstall it, which will require you to enable networking in Recovery.
3. Reboot. You may have to add the nouveau.modeset=0 flag in GRUB to boot properly (Check my Q&A for specifics).

You should be past the screen flicker and be at your desktop.

4. Now reinstall the NVIDIA drivers the proper way:
   • sudo apt-get install nvidia-367 (or 340, 352, 364, 370, whichever works).
5. Reboot again.

You should be up and running: good as before. I don't see how Kali could have done this, but if you messed around with your filesystem, then it's definitely possible.

I had the same problem. When examining the logs in /var/log it was kindof obvious, that the issue was because of gdm3. Since lighdm never works for me I had to find a completely different display manager. It worked for me with SLiM, bit i did not try any other dm yet. I'm probably just going to install some flat theme for it and keep it.

https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Displaymanager/

sudo apt-get install slim 

i managed to get into tty2 (Strg+Alt+F2) and do this. But if this doesn't work for you, you can also enter a console in the advanced boot options on startup.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecoveryMode

(Nvidia & Ubuntu 16.10)