Shiiit, I really don't want to go back to Google and all their sponsored/AI/tracking bullshit. Any other privacy-focused search engines out there that don't rely on this?

Something something money.

AI is just the latest hype train they're hopping in the hopes of making more money.

A spoofed one.

Please allow me to reiterate, in big letters so you can't miss it this time:

lolwut?!

Only the most pathetic 14 year old (mentally at least) edgelord with a penchant for goose-stepping and blaming people who look different than you for your problems could have possibly construed even a single word of what I said to have the slightest thing to do with skin color. sigh Welp, I won't be the person who makes you realize how patently and inherently ridiculous your bullshit is, so I retract my earlier wish for you to have a nice life. Instead I hope you live just long enough to realize what a complete raving lunatic you look like to anyone with a modicum of sense or perspective and then promptly get the fuck off my planet just like your role model did.

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.