Unfortunately sometimes you do need to pop open the hood to see whats going on. Regarding ubuntu or rather its derivative mint for example I had to fiddle with xorg.conf to allow me to manually set the fans on a card because the desktop was overheating even with reasonable cooling in a small apartment with no ac in the middle of summer.
In case you didn't know nvidia driver doesn't let you manually set the fan without enabling this in xorg.conf or drop a file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d Not knowing about xorg.conf.d at the time I merely set xorg.conf and was very confused to find that it continued to overheat and further that my file was not modfified but gone. This happened periorically seemingly at random.
Turns out their driver manager mints gui for installing proprietary drivers had installed the optimus package to enable a laptop with dual gpus to work properly on a desktop and that the post install script for this package was helpfully removing /etc/xorg.conf every time it was run when said useless package was updated.
Moving the snippit to xorg.conf.d was helpful as was finding and removing the useless package but we are still looking at an issue on a relatively recent machine that couldn't be fixed without grep and a xorg config file in a recent version of a ubuntu derivative.
