I just finished building my new desktop which has a NVIDIA GPU. The Ubuntu installation went well, but I noticed that the launcher was off. When the dash was opened, I only saw a solid color and nothing was behind the dash.
I came to the conclusion that the system was using the default video driver which did not support 3D features. I tried to install an NVIDIA driver via terminal (added a repo, then did an update, then installed a driver with it, no .run file). Once I restarted the system, the display looked odd, I did not have the regular Ubuntu boot. The resolution was off, and once I logged in, I saw some code, then it put me back into the log in screen.
I currently use Ubuntu 15.10 and the "xorg-edgers" repositories.