I have in the past run Ubuntu 22.04 and even 24.04 briefly on this hardware I have (I bought it new from Costco in Sep. 2013 and have only run Ubuntu LTSs on it since), but then I started seeing a lot of issues after Ubuntu 24.04 (Fall 2024) and so I reinstalled Ubuntu 24.04 yesterday. I am seeing a lot of flakiness with the behavior since my re-upgrade. Here are my observations:
- I was puzzled to note that I have to boot things in UEFI mode (advice from another forum). All the other times, I had installed Ubuntu (since putting Ubuntu in the machine over a decade now) in legacy BIOS mode. Is this correct? Or could I go back to Legacy BIOS?
- My NVIDIA drivers are possibly an issue, but I cannot tell. The reason for this is that I was able to boot into my machine twice over the past 24 hours with the Gnome window manager etc. But upon the screen locking, my machine went unrecoverable. I have followed instructions around installing nvidia drivers correctly (I have a GeForce 750Ti, installed driver version 550, checked using nvidia-smi). How can I fix this using a USB install stick (I am now on safe graphics mode using the USB stick, with /dev/sda on the stick and my OS on /dev/sdb)? The current problem is that the screen goes black after I choose the OS on the hard disk (i.e., when I am NOT on the recovery USB stick which I used to install the OS).
Can anyone pinpoint how I can get a stable installation on my decade old machine? It has an i7-4790 (8 threads) and 16GB total RAM and was quite usable until my upgrade.
