In T26736#187698, @kislinsk wrote:

You can also test an MITK 2016.11 installer as the requirement of a newer OpenGL version was introduced in MITK 2018.04 with VTK 8.x.

Thank you for your efforts. I completely understand your decision with regards to Ubuntu as the main Linux platform. When I have time I'll try to start MITK from an Ubuntu live CD on this machine and report my findings here. One remark: if the issue in MITK is due to an issue with an upstream version of MITK dependencies (or system libraries), then we might encounter this issue in future versions of Ubuntu.

Note: on another computer (running Ubuntu + 1080ti's with nvidia 430.50 drivers), MITK with newInstance also falls backs to a non core profile but the second instance does start successfully.
I'm thinking that maybe my system is missing a library or that it is related to the MESA drivers for intel's UHD?