Upgrading the kernel broke my screen

john | Sept. 19, 2024, 9:40 p.m. Programming

Thankfully, Ubuntu, a flavor of Linux, is open-source. It won the server wars years ago, back when Microsoft was slaying the competition, and Google might have existed but wasn’t the behemoth it is today.

The reason Ubuntu sort of "lost" the desktop wars, though, is because it won the server wars. Who runs a server? Mostly not the majority of the planet. I could be mistaken about this. But as the server wars went on, Windows came out, and it "just works."

Of course, that's up for interpretation, but the point is, you're usually not spending days—or at least a full day—trying to figure out what’s wrong with your system.

Feeling brave, I decided to do a dist-upgrade on my new laptop, which had been working great so far. But after rebooting, all hell broke loose. Moving the mouse caused massive screen glitches, and opening the terminal took forever. It was just a painful experience. Since I don’t have an officially supported version of Ubuntu for my laptop, I had to fix it myself.

In hindsight, the stress of solving it was easier once I knew what to search for. But until then, searching aimlessly was futile.

At one point, suffering through the screen spasms, I managed to install things via the terminal. It was hard to quickly find specific kernel versions that were officially supported, and when I did, they wouldn't detect my hard drive. Others would just loop me back to the login screen after logging in.

I even pulled out a USB drive, thinking it might be time to reinstall. But even that failed—Ubuntu just kept looping during installation.

Then I remembered I could switch to a terminal screen. I opened up another laptop and found the exact commands to solve this. Eventually, I found a script that installed Mainline, and I updated to the latest unsupported kernel version.

At least my laptop works now—again. This is why Windows won the desktop wars: you get a blue screen of death, restart, and move on. With Ubuntu, you go through hell, come out alive, and people just tell you it’s a story you read.

After all that, you're just mentally exhausted from having to "read" it.

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