When a Driver Turns Your Life Into a Rollercoaster

I decided to give Linux another shot as my primary operating system after years of using other OSs. Since I’m particularly fond of XFCE and because of Ubuntu’s popularity, I chose to install Xubuntu 14.04 on both my laptop and desktop.

On the laptop, everything worked perfectly. However, on the desktop, every time I tried to shut down or reboot, I kept seeing the message mount: / is busy, and the system wouldn’t shut down.

Initially, I suspected that the proprietary AMD drivers for the graphics card were the issue, so I switched to the open-source ones. Unfortunately, the problem persisted.

Eventually, I discovered that the culprit was the WiFi drivers (Broadcom chipset). I solved the issue by running the following commands:

sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree

As suggested by drphysic in this post, everything is now working perfectly.