Libra

I have to hit F11 to choose to boot the linux partition, at which point I get a grub menu. I don't recall anything that says Plymouth on it, and I normally don't get a text screen at all unless I boot into recovery mode, at which point I get the usual linux text-spam on boot.

Booting looks like: POST, F11 Select Linux to boot from (it's listed as the 128GB SSD because that's where the MBR/etc is, but linux is on a 1TB NVMe SSD) Get grub menu. Select Ubuntu. Wait a lot on a black screen. Get a brief Ubuntu logo that lasts a couple seconds. Black screen again for a few more seconds. No signal.

Remove other drives: no, that would be a significant pain in the ass. But also Pop worked installed on the same NVMe SSD with the same other drives in the system, so I'm pretty sure it's not a drive/BIOS-related boot issue.

I'd be happy to chat, though I have no idea what matrix even is. Feel free to DM (does lemmy even do DMs? I'm still kinda new) if you want to try to get something like that set up tho. I'm on discord if that helps?

Man fails to read the part where i said:

Yes, Israel has a powerful lobby in AIPAC. Yes, they spend a lot of money trying to bring our politicians in line with their goals. But we are already extremely well-aligned for cultural and geopolitical reasons, so what the claim that Israel is controlling US foreign policy amounts to is saying that a kid sticking his hand out the window of the car is materially affecting its course.

But I'm going to choose to assume that wasn't a failure of reading comprehension on your part, just that you're a troll making wild-assed statements with nothing to back them up with or you'd have made well-supported arguments instead, so I'm going to go do something more productive with my day. Have a nice life.

Probably re:Pop nvidia driver edition.

Monitor: HDMI cable straight into the #1 HDMI port on my GPU. Probably have a DP cable around here somewhere but haven't felt like fucking with it since it worked fine on an HDMI cable on Pop. It's a standard desktop setup, not a laptop with a docking station or anything.

Wayland/xorg: no clue, it never asked and I never saw even the first pixel of graphical anything.

Yeah I thought so too re:Pop/Ubuntu, part of the reason I tried Ubuntu is because it was similar but I hoped it would have more stable drivers or the like. shrug

Secure boot: I don't remember (and can't reboot to check bios) - I think I remember having to disable it when I installed Pop, but that was several months ago and my memory is shit.

Boot: Yes, the windows boot drive (an old 128GB SATA SSD), but I hit F11 on boot adn selected USB to boot to that to do the install just like with Pop. But again the install worked fine at least on the older LTS version of Ubuntu. And it booted on USB correctly with the later version too, just as soon as it went graphical it b0rked.

Spare laptop: nope. Closest I have is an old headless NAS box that's running an old version of RedHat I think?, but also it's been in my closet for ~5 years because I don't really have anywhere to set it up. So mostly no.

Distros; I mean a lot of years ago i messed a lot with RedHat and before that Slackware, but nothing on this hardware. I have not tried Mint, and I've heard good things about it, but I mostly wanted to go with a main-line distro like ubuntu because a lot of the forum posts and such I found talking about how to fix random things seemed to be for ubuntu so it seemed like it'd be easier to get help on.

And no problem, I'm happy to answer if it means I can make this work.

I hope you'll understand why I'm not going to take my opinion on douches from the guy trying to pick apart my helpful comment with a flood of pedantic bullshit.

Two things:

1. Lolwut? I already did in my previous comment.
2. Here, I'll do it again:

Israel isn’t some puppet dangling from Washington’s strings, it’s a sovereign state that has always done exactly what it wants, especially when it comes to killing Palestinians. From the beginning Israel was built on the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians, and ever since it's made policy decisions based on its own goals. This current assault is just a continuation of that same logic — expansion, control, elimination — with or without (and the latter is frequently the case; see: Biden's numerous attempts to push for a ceasefire being flatly ignored until he was leaving office) America's support.

Israel had a direct hand in the rise of Hamas, supporting it in the '80s to undermine the PLO. That wasn’t the US telling them what to do — that was Israel making a calculated move to divide and conquer the Palestinian political landscape. And now, decades later, they use Hamas as the perpetual excuse for mass killings in Gaza. Israel created the conditions for this war — the siege, the blockade, the decades of systemic violence — and now it's using the fallout as justification to finish what it started.

Yes, the US plays a role: billions in aid, endless weapons shipments, UN vetoes, all of that makes the situation worse. But that’s not proof that Israel is pulling the strings. It’s just standard-issue imperial policy: the US backing a regional ally that helps secure its interests. Israel doesn’t need to control the US to get what it wants, it just needs to be useful enough that the US keeps looking the other way. Israel has shown again and again that it doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks about this war or any other; it believes that it's fighting for its very existence and has shown no reservation about doing whatever it believes is necessary to win, no matter what we or anyone else think about it. What’s happening in Gaza is the logical outcome of decades of colonization, apartheid, and unchecked power — power that Israel wields on its own terms.

So that's not just one explanation of the Gaza genocide that doesn't require kooky antisemitic conspiracy theroies, but TWO.

in the words of The Heavy: How you like me now?

Eat the rich, baby.

This. Whenever you have a question about why some organization does something it's generally a safe bet to start with 'because money.' In this case, holding onto the verified fundraising power of incumbents and not offending rich donors.

The idea that Israel is dictating US foreign policy in the Middle East comes from a place of fundamental misunderstanding of the geopolitical and cultural realities of the situation. The US government will have significant geopolitical interests in the region as long as they have cheap oil (so, for the foreseeable future), it will always need friendly locals willing to share intelligence to keep an eye on things, especially someone who opposes and is willing to work against Iran, it will always need ports, airfields, and infrastructure to grease the wheels for military operations in the region, and it doesn't need Israel's encouragement to do any of this.

It also fails to understand the motivations of the right-wing segment of the government/population and how much power they have in US poltiics. There is a wide and deep streak of evangelical fundamentalism within American Christianity that has a disturbingly intense focus on biblical eschatology, including actively trying to fulfill the prophecies that are supposed to herald the return of Jesus. Israel features prominently in these prophecies so these true believers will never not back Israel 100% of the way regardless of their politics, atrocities, etc.

Yes, Israel has a powerful lobby in AIPAC. Yes, they spend a lot of money trying to bring our politicians in line with their goals. But we are already extremely well-aligned for cultural and geopolitical reasons, so what the claim that Israel is controlling US foreign policy amounts to is saying that a kid sticking his hand out the window of the car is materially affecting its course. Even if it wasn't a borderline-antisemitic (and I use that term VERY hesitantly when talking about Israel, because they don't) conspiracy theory it just doesn't make sense: there are far greater forces at play.

Nope, miss it. My bad ;-)

Fair enough.

I think that this depends on how much this system can really “produce”.

True. And I did just recently learn that power prices per kWh in California are about double what I'm used to here in Texas, so maybe it's more viable in that market. This just seems like a more complicated, more involved, more demanding version of pumping water into/out of a reservoir on a hill which we already have several examples of that are working great (there are more in the UK) without requiring complex and expensive maintenance and without subjecting pumps and turbines to highly corrosive salt water. I guess pressure in the ocean is easier to come by than hills big enough to create reservoirs on, but..

I've tried PopOS 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS and 25.04.

PopOS mostly worked but almost none of my games worked, they acted like they weren't being hardware accelerated by my GPU when they launched at all, and every time I tried to update the driver the install process hard-locked my system and when I rebooted it it came back up with no video driver at all. I was finally able to get one driver version to work, after doing about 10-15 install/reboot/unfuck cycles (the 555-server closed source driver.) I tried a couple versions of the open source drivers and they didn't work either. I also had this weird issue with (I think it was) pipewire where my sound would cut out at random and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle between speakers and headset repeatedly. I noticed this especially when joining a voice channel in discord, but it would just happen out of the blue too.

Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS installed fine but whenever it boots the monitor goes into standby with a no-signal notice. The system seems to be running, ctrl+alt+del reboots it, but I can't even us ctrl+F2-6 to get a curses terminal where theoretically the video drivers shouldn't matter at all? When I tried to install 25.04 (on the assumption that it would have a newer video driver) I booted on the USB key and even the installer didn't work, same issue: monitor goes no-signal.

In case it matters, my specs are: Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9GHz 8-core Gigabyte Vision OC 12 RTX3060 w/12GB VRAM 32GB DDR4-3200 RAM Multiple SSDs, some SATA, some NVMe in M.2 slots, but I've only ever installed linux on my BPX Pro 1TB NVMe drive that's ~4-5 years old.

That's not it at all. You don't think accountants who juggle numbers and Excel formulas all day couldn't learn? Lawyers whose entire job involves absorbing and filtering vast amounts of information? Doctors who diagnose machines that are far more complex than computers (people)? Of course they could; I worked around these people in IT for 20 years, I can tell you that despite how stupid these folks seem around computers they feel the same way about your capabilities in their field of expertise, only they don't have the arrogance to assume that everyone should learn to be a mechanical engineer or dentist in order to understand their job.

What they are is too busy doing other shit that they care more about. They don't have the time or interest to be farting around with a computer to do anything more than the absolute minimum requirements needed to do the shit they actually care about. Human society functions because people specialize, and people who don't specialize in making computers go just don't care enough about them as anything other than as a tool and maybe an occasional source of entertainment to waste their time learning. Just like you don't waste your time learning about how to run a nuclear power plant.

And I say this as someone who used to love tinkering with computers, turned it into a career, and slowly grew to hate it (never turn your hobby into a career if you want to keep that hobby.) I too no longer care about optimizing or fiddling or tweaking, I just want the magic box to work so I can do the stuff I care about (writing, gaming, etc.)

Did you not catch the part a couple comments ago where I agreed with you? Yeah, of course it's cheaper to not send divers down. All I'm saying is cheaper cheaper doesn't mean cheap. And my larger point is that it's probably not cheap enough, not least because they're planning for a 20 year part replacement cycle on metal bits exposed to high-pressure seawater and that just doesn't seem plausible to me.