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. ;-)
To add, the most painful points for Windows users switching to Linux are IMHO to transfer data from apps they used. Importing a mail archive into Evolution or Thunderbird (without half of the emails missing).