Aha. A corrupted splash screen points to a plymouth bug potentially. Not an uncommon issue at all, and plymouth is no stranger to race conditions. Let's see if we can isolate it to that.
Try booting with 'splash' removed from the kernel command line in grub. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/692187 Title: desktop fails to appear without enabling failsafe graphics first -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
