Okay, so I was trying to set fish as the default shell instead of bash. Did some research and found one way was to execute the fish command in .bashrc
# other configs
exec fish
This worked beautifully, every time I opened up the terminal, fish launched.
Nothing could go wrong, right... right, NO. When I shut down my machine for the day and when I tried to power it back on the next day, it wouldn't boot up but kept flickering.
After a few hours of detective work*(google and reading the *logs)*, I realized that the flickering had something to do with gnome.display. Used the tty for the first time and commented out the exec fish line rebooted and everything went back to normal.
Now if it was that single line that brought my machine to its knees or gnome just being out to get me, or something completely different, I'll never know, but I was so close to doing a fresh install. Guess you really shouldn't give that easily.