After my new 525gig SSD had been sitting idle in my computer for 3 weeks I decided to migrate to it. To this end I backed up everything, exported system config with aptik and went to download an ubuntu ISO.

16.04 or 16.10 ? well with 16.10 I wont need to keep a manually built cmake around - so why not!

After struggling for several hours with the live DVD going black as soon as it boots ( classic or EFI both ), even when it was just doing the commandline self check I came across a post suggesting that my graphics card migth be too new and that I had to use custom bootparameters to cuircumvent it.



Ok one problem solved, next up repeatedly failing to install the boot manager;

Long story short; it turns out that Ubuntu doesn't bother marking /boot as bootable,efi even if you choose the 'delete everything' mode and the manual partition tool doesn't even have the option - you need to launch gparted, reboot and try again. That's quite possibly the most user hostile linux install I've ever encountered and that includes the first gentoo I ever installed (2004.2) !


Finally I got it to install and boot successfully - aaand blackscreen; yep gtx 970 is still not supported even with the most updated packages from canonical, you need to enable modeset 0 for nouvea to even get a console. -.-'

after installing ppa, re-importing my packages with aptik and desperatly trying to combat the 'lets make ubuntu look and act lika macOS' trend I finally got it working to the point where I could re-import my steam games from the old disc.

Time to sleep

Next day boot up, update the system, go though a stack of old cds & dvds to figure out what could be erased or thrown out, power off the system to prepare lunch for the kids.

later I boot the system;

"no disc detected"
(reboot)
boots to Ubuntu 16.04 on the old disc.

I check and the disc along with all it's data is there, okay thats odd..

I reboot the system to check again, still doesn't work.

boot back to Ubuntu 16.04:

mouse & keyboard stops working as soon as the login manager comes on, sshd isn't responding.

dafuq?

several desperate reboots later I boot up the 16.10 livedvd to try and sort out the problem

googling for 'repair efi boot' got me

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

'nothing ventured...'

I follow the commands up to the point where it tells you to paste the commands in a shell, except I cant see that I'm supposed to do that because it's not visible at 800x600 resolution...
moving the window around I spot that and paste it.

it doesn't work - --force-yes is deprecated.. -.-

https://bugs.launchpad.net/boot-repair/+bug/1647726

okay I modify the commands

still doesn't work because grub is still installed

fukit

*reboot*

the 16.04 disc now has a grub menu offering 16.04 and 16.10

I boot to 16.04

Unity crashes everytime I try to log in, .xsession-errors just says it gets killed - no amount of of apt magic can fix it.

Desperately I try the 16.10 option from the grub menu - because maybe just maybe it will work.

sure enough it boots and I can login.

At this point I don't dare rebooting and I've quite frankly had enough of ubuntu, I hate Unity with a passion the only reason I didn't switch back to gentoo when they introduced it was that the Leadwerks developer refused bugreports that wasn't from ubuntu lts with unity. but since I no longer have anything to do with that I can choose any other distro - but I need a bit of help, since I don't really have the free time to test out hundreds of distros to figure out which one is the best match.