I installed gimp2.8 from this ppa: ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp after that, my system began having problems. This is my thought process in trying to fix what's happened and the order in which it happened: I noticed the menu bar at the top changed from an opaque black to perfectly clear and the titles of applications and the hidden buttons reacted slowly. No big deal, restarted to see if it fixed it.

It didn't, in fact, when the logon screen came up, the password field was grey and boxy like a default windows 98 theme (that's the best I can describe it) as were all the option buttons for gtk programs. I open terminal to try and reinstall gtk, but the terminal is just a black screen with no ability to input commands. I go to a tty and I reinstalled gtk3 and gtk2 (I have both on my system. I don't think they're in conflict, they hadn't been before hand). I restarted.

Nothing doing. Log in, nautilus isn't placing icons on my desktop. I click the launcher. It flashes, but no window opens. Try to open by Alt+f2, nothing.

I purge ubuntu-desktop, restart, reinstall ubuntu-desktop. Nothing.

I have no clue what to do at this point so I'm asking for any help diagnosing the problem and fixing it.