I met with Brian for a bit this afternoon to look at the X problem he had. I think the main issue is that this machine dates at least from an ubuntu 12.x installation. In the course of all the upgrades and the superposition of window managers and underlying widget libraries the various config files got confused, and some binaries just plain don't run. I started with an immediate snapshot of essential files, then experimented with config files for the various desktop environments and display managers: rsync -av /home/loginname/ /mnt/whereImountedtheexternaldrive/backup-home-loginname The only one I could get to invoke properly was the lxubuntu display manager lxdm, so I installed it, enabled it with a "sudo dpkg-reconfigure any_dm" and picking lxdm. That allowed us to log in properly because it did not inherit weird guest account setups and did not use fancy widget sets. I then recommended that it would not be time-effective to restore all config files (some experiments with --purge and --reinstall did not help). The advice I gave was to use the backup we made and install 16.04 from scratch. I left Brian with a script to pick that rsync up again. Lots of other weird things about the system -- it had been patched up a bit inorganically and possibly off-paradigm for package management, but the data was recoverable. Being a 3.5gig machine it should work well with a new install and firefox quantum.