Hello fellow Linuxers, let me take you on my 2-day journey of permanently reinstalling linux:
TL;DR: I had a lot of graphic bugs in Ubuntu and thought my graphics card was dying. Then I installed a lot of distributions with very different bugs and outcomes, just to end at the same distro where I started. lol
Phase 1: Ubuntu 25.10 The Ubuntu installation worked great for roughly 4 months. Then some graphic issues appeared: When the PC was started, and I entered my disk encryption password, the screen turned black. Screen LED was on, but nothing to see. No login screen. When I pressed the power button, the machine shut down gracefully after 1 minute. Ok. As far as I remember, I installed some automatic updates the day before. And there was some “dbx driver signature” stuff on the right corner. So the first thing I figured, update the mainboard firmware. A new firmware was available from 11-2025. Good. FW update went fine. Still black screen instead of login screen. Then I booted into recovery mode by pressing LSHIFT and selecting the GRUB entry. I read something about driver and microcode blacklists. Renamed /etc/modprobe.d/amd64-microcode-blacklist.conf and inserted one that the help article suggested. No improvement. Then I reset the mainboard to factory defaults. Only some fan settings and 2 other settings were reset. Things improved, but not for long.
The login screen was visible again, and I could log in, even play a game for 2 hours. I had a good time, and went to bed with a naive happiness. I didn’t know what was yet to come.
Next day, new old troubles. Again black screen at login.
Now the mainboard factory reset changed nothing. The curse of blindness lasted on me. I entered the grub menu again by holding LSHIFT, then pressing “e” on the menu entry and adding “nomodeset” to it. Then I could boot, but the graphics were scuffed. There were a lot of visual glitches and it looked like my graphics card fails. Lots of green lines and lots of screen going black for 1 sec and reappearing. I turned off the computer again as I was scared that my hardware would break.
Phase 2: Trying to reinstall the first time I was fed up and tried to reinstall Ubuntu. Live boot USB - Ubuntu 24.04 LTS so i’m safe. Safe my ass. The live boot also ended up in a black screen. Tried Ubuntu 25.10. Same black screen in live environment. Changed the cable from DisplayPort to HDMI and tried all slots on the graphics card. No improvement. Then I asked myself, maybe it has to do with debian, and tried to run cachyOS live boot. Also black screen. What the hell?
Then, with tears of torment in my eyes, I loaded a Winbloat 11 iso on my USB boot stick. The iso worked fine and started the Win 11 preinstallation environment without any graphical issues. A little sigh, my graphics card is still working. But I don’t want to install Bloatdows (Winblows?) 11. Don’t get me wrong, I used that OS a long time, Win 7 was a good, stable tool but as time passed it was filled with unneccessary and unremovable programs.
But let’s not dive that deep into the ocean of shit.
Phase 3: Saving my data I wanted to do this in the live Ubuntu environment, but as it failed to display anything on the screen, I had to look for a different solution.
A little research got me to a “systemrescue” iso and that one worked fine. The live environment fired up and I was able to save all my data by mounting the partition via terminal into /mnt/mountfolder/.
Phase 4: Reinstalling, for real now So I searched for a completely different distribution, and came up with a really cool looking “Garuda Dr460nized”. The installation agent was a real pleasure, I used language: English and keyboard layout: German Selected disk encryption and wipe disk completely. After about 20 minutes, the purple login screen appeared and it looked really great. I was happy - no graphic glitches were on the screen.
Then I tried to log in. And it failed. I tried again. Failed. I tried a third time, trying really hard to type the correct password. Failed.
Ok, now you are challenging me? I used the on-screen keyboard to type my password, just to realize: The keyboard layout is still EN-US. Not German. My umlauts have no power here.
I was shattered. How can a setup agent offer a keyboard layout just to laugh you in the face with ONLY en-us at the login?
Also, the former mentioned screen keyboard overshadows the password text field so you are basically typing blind and can’t see your progress. Seeing these inconveniences, I got annoyed and decided, if I have these issues at the login screen, the experience won’t improve even if I could log in, so decided to reinstall right again.
Phase 5: Reinstalling CachyOS A distribution that is often mentioned, is cachyOS. It is Arch based, has the pacman package manager and overall seems to be a stable choice. I gave it a try and was a little overwhelmed what to pick at the desktop environment selection screen. It seems they have 10+ desktops available to pick.
Back to researching and picking the first DE. Lots of people saying “tiling designs are the best” so I gave it a try. Tried to use i3. The installation was painfully slow. Really slow. After nearly 3 hours I was able to restart and see the result.
Said result was a black screen with a cursor on the top, saying: “username: _” I entered my credentials and the terminal started. My heart broke. All this waiting for nothing. I tried to use CTRL+ALT+F1 CTRL+ALT+F2 CTRL+ALT+F3 in hopes to see a desktop environment on another terminal session. No. They could have also thrown ash in my face and rubbed it in. What a timewaste.
Phase 6: Still Reinstalling cachyOS Eager to make cachyOS work, I booted into the USB iso again and now selected hyprland as my DE. The installation went fine, I could even log in, and after login, I was greeted with a lot of quests. Alright, playing games before I even install any games? What a meta.
The quests demanded an authentication agent, pipewire (whatever that is), some launcher, and amongst others, a clipboard service. After all these things were installed from the terminal, I gave it another reboot. Just to get greeted by the same quest page again, saying the authentication agent is missing. I installed the hyprpolkitagent again via the terminal and pacman. Rebooted again, but no improvement. Somehow it wouldn’t recognize that this package is installed. The experience seemed cool overall, I activated some windows, sent them to another workplace via SUPER+SHIFT+2 switched workplace with SUPER+2, changed the tiling from horizontal to vertical with SUPER+V / SUPER+H. It looked fine, but this service was missing.
I couldn’t wrap my head around how to make this authentication agent work, so I reinstalled again. Sad too dumb for hyprland noises.
Phase 7: It’s still cachyOS Again cachyOS, but always a different desktop environment. Niri seemed good, so I gave it a shot. The installation worked flawlessly and everything technical was fine, I guess.
But when I logged in, I realized this DE is not for me. I couldn’t close the default opened terminal with my mouse. There was no x in the corner to close or any other hint. I couldn’t launch any other program. Tried CTRL+Space, CTRL+ENTER, SUPER+Space, SUPER+Enter, SUPER alone, nothing happens. It’s not obvious what I can do except use the terminal. And that is too much of learning things that just work somewhere else for me.
Phase 8: cachyOS? cachyOS. Now trying with Cosmic. It installed fine, and I could log in, everything seemed cool. And then I tried to install the software I want (steam, discord, thunderbird). The software center just didn’t work. It was an icon without an image, and when I clicked on it, nothing happened.
Then I tried to use the file manager, mount my 2nd disk. There was an admin prompt to enter my superuser password. I couldn’t type the password at all, no character I pressed on the keyboard led to any input in the password field. Very disappointing. I can’t use that.
Phase 9: So it was Ubuntu? - Always has been As it was such a big disappointment with a lot of DEs under cachyOS, and especially the cool looking dragon distro, I moved back to Ubuntu 25.10. Surprisingly, the live USB boot worked again and I could see my display again. Why? I have absolutely no clue. I didn’t change anything in the mainboard after Phase 3. So I installed Ubuntu with disk encryption, installed my programs, and now everything is running again like it has a month ago under the same Ubuntu version.
At least now I know what I value in a desktop environment:
- Consistency (I’m looking at you, dr460nite and your keyboard layouts)
- Easy access to the launcher (Ubuntu only has SUPER key and then you can switch via mouse between all running programs aswell as start any installed app by typing)
- See all background apps at once (next to the network and audio icon)(important for VPN, steam, discord)
- see date and time in a convenient place (top of the screen)
- working file manager (I don’t know how Cosmic bugged out so hard)
- good package manager (I don’t really like the mix of snap and apt, that’s why I wanted to try an arch based distro with pacman but it failed in so many other ways…)
Feel free to send me suggestions what I could try to install next, so I can shorten the life of my SSD a little more. ;-)
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that’s a lot of yolo distros
There’s hardware that works under Linux, hardware that doesn’t work, and hardware that sort-of-works or is marginal. Lots of graphics cards are in the marginal or don’t-work category. I always try to avoid them. Maybe that’s not much help. If you’re on a desktop PC, your CPU is likely to have some graphics support of its own: can you bypass or pull out the graphics card? They are mostly for gaming. For normal desktop stuff you should be ok without it.
I would run the lts versions of Ubuntu, 24.04. they are more stable
While you’re still in reinstalling mood, you could try out something with KDE, Xfce and Cinnamon desktops to see if you like those better than GNOME (you wouldn’t be alone if you do). However this part in particular:
Easy access to the launcher (Ubuntu only has SUPER key and then you can switch via mouse between all running programs aswell as start any installed app by typing)
Sounds a lot like you actually just want GNOME. While we have a lot of choice for Windows clones, there’s nothing that does the Super workflow quite like GNOME does.
You can also try the PopOS Shell or PaperWM extensions to try out some tiling functionality. You’ll have to spend a few minutes fixing up some key bindings, but you’ll still be running GNOME and won’t have to worry about desktop portals or authentication agents or notification daemons. You also won’t have to reinstall if you end up not liking it, you can just remove the extension, reset the key bindings and you’re back to the default experience.
I don’t really like the mix of snap and apt, that’s why I wanted to try an arch based distro with pacman but it failed in so many other ways.
Unfortunately it’s not that easy to stay on just one package manager unless your expectations for available software are very low (or you are willing to jump into NixOS, which I would not recommend). Even on Arch you end up with two because pacman does not pull from the AUR. You might get away with running a Fedora Atomic Desktop (or a derivative like Bazzite) and just pretending that Flatpak is the only thing that exists though.
I would tentatively suggest Fedora Silverblue actually, because while it isn’t without issues (missing codecs, Fedora Flatpak vs. Flathub, etc.) it is designed with the non-technical user in mind (which, with no offense intended, you are). That’s not true of Arch or any of its derivatives. Debian and Mint are also good options. That being said… there’s not really anything wrong with Ubuntu either. It’s not “cool” and of course Lemmings (like Redditors) will always recommend their own favorite distribution you’ve never head of, but if Ubuntu works for you, you can just keep using it.
NB: If you do end up trying GNOME on a non-Ubuntu distribution, you will want the AppIndicator extension. Ubuntu installs this by default, but Fedora doesn’t. Without it you won’t have Steam or Discord in your panel.
Dude … just install Debian(stable or testing) and then distro-surf using VMs in kvm/qemu. Just reading this all makes me tired for you.
Try Manjaro.
Hmm, if not straight Arch then EndeavourOS or CachyOS first.
Bro fears normal distros
they never heard of Fedora Atomic
I have stuck with LinuxMint since 2018 or so. None of the surprises I previously had with Ubuntu despite it being Ubuntu based.
What is your hardware setup and are you using non-free drivers?
Throw Pop_OS on and see if that fixes literally everything.
I feel your pain. I tried Fedora 3 times but had graphics issues every time. I switched to Bazzite and haven’t had any issues since. Bazzite is Fedora, so it was definitely a skill issue.
What GPU?
Nvidia 4070 ti. I know AMD has better open-source drivers but I had the card before switching.
The quests demanded an authentication agent, pipewire (whatever that is), some launcher, and amongst others, a clipboard service. After all these things were installed from the terminal, I gave it another reboot. Just to get greeted by the same quest page again, saying the authentication agent is missing. I installed the hyprpolkitagent again via the terminal and pacman. Rebooted again, but no improvement. Somehow it wouldn’t recognize that this package is installed.
Just to check, did you actually enable it? It needs to be run via a
exec-oncein your hypr config. https://wiki.hypr.land/Hypr-Ecosystem/hyprpolkitagent/I wouldn’t reccomend using a tiling WM like i3/Sway as your first experience at all, they need a lot of previous knowledge to operate properly, they’re purposefully left incomplete for users to fill exactly what they want to fill it with.
From what you described GNOME seems pretty good for your use case, but the problem you described on COSMIC could be an isolated problem on its own and could be fixed if you installed a different file manager.
As for the distro, fedora could be a good choice, but if you liked arch based distros you can go with them too.
Just use cachy with KDE and you should be set. You’re picking all the esoteric DEs and even I’ve switched back to KDE from niri because I can’t be bothered to tinker with my system anymore.
I agree. Most of my graphics issues were related to my DE choice. KDE plasma has been by far the best in this regard.
It took me awhile of using Hyprland to figure out why I didn’t like it snymore.
You dont use hyprland to daily drive, you use hyprland to create a daily driver.
people really just want a no effort feature rich daily driver
Yeah going for a tilling window manager and expecting to see “A cross icon” to close programs is an indicator here IMO. Don’t base your image of what you want your setup to be based on what you see on youtube. If you want something simple that works out of the box I would recommend going to Gnome based system. Easy, everything you ask for it is there and looks good (been using gnome for long time, though now switched back to tilling after pretty much 10 years of gnome cause I felt I need change).
Choose simple distro while still with relatively new packages like fedora or some archlinux clone that makes things easier (can’t really advice on that front since I just use arch for like really really long time).
Go for simple stuff and dont feel preasured by your peers that you dont use that awesome tilling manager etc. Go for simple, learn the basics and setup your workflow. Once you feel like experimenting, install another one (fluxbox ftw :P), and venture a bit, while still being able to switch back to gnome (linux allows multiple different evnironments, so why not make a use of it). Most importantly have fun using it!
