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Installing linux

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Simon:
I thought I would take the plunge. I can do most of whati need with Linux and i am getting more frustrated with windows. So i thought I'd just go with the worlds number 1 and ut ubuntu on my machine.

Well I don't think the graphics card was playing ball as I got random coloured pixels on the boot up screen and it failed to boot. On restarting my wifi dongle would not work so I had to power off and start again so it was obviously trying to do something wit the wifi dongle that did not work.

Is there a Linux distro out there that can boot on most machines without hardware issues?

Nominal Animal:
I take it that was using a Live USB stick?

I think your computer has a relatively new Nvidia graphics card, which means that your Linux experience will be fraught with driver issues.  Not fun.

I would recommend you try Ubuntu 18.04 LTS first, using a fast-ish USB stick; booting to a Live version without installing.  If it does not work, it is unlikely Linux supports your hardware, and it is better to stick with Windows.  The proprietary Nvidia drivers are not worth the effort, even if they work fine for some.

Simon:
It was a Live DVD, I would boot to the live disk first to see that it would work on my machine, obviously not, if it had of worked I would have initiated the install from the live DVD.

My card is a Quadro P400.

Do AMD cards work better?

Nominal Animal:
For AMD, support varies.  Ubuntu LTS versions ought to have good support, but switching to a non-LTS version or a different distro is harder, as you may have to recompile the drivers yourself.

Due to a few posts elsewhere (people doing Tensorflow and such), I thought that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS did have Quadro P400 support via the proprietary drivers.  It could also mean your EFI BIOS (motherboard) is one of the "uh-nuh, I don't like Linux" versions, with incorrect ACPI tables and whatnot that their Windows drivers just ignore.

Keeping strictly to the latest Ubuntu LTS version, and upgrading the Nvidia proprietary drivers whenever released) would be the only way I would use it, if I had to do some Cuda stuff, so if the Live DVD wasn't the 18.04 LTS version, you could give that a try.  Any other distro versions are iffy, because Nvidia drivers are binaries, and tend to only work well with a specific kernel version.  (So, trying say Ubuntu 19.10 tells you nothing about how the Nvidia drivers work in 18.04 LTS.)

I am hesitant to suggest using Linux on that hardware, though, because I only run Linux on hardware that has no gotchas or proprietary drivers.  I want my tools to work well, so I tend to pick the hardware I know works with Linux.

I used to have an AMD 780G a decade ago that worked better with the proprietary drivers, but they were nasty enough (overwriting Mesa stuff etc.) that I switched to the then slower/less efficient, beta-quality open-source drivers, and kept updating at least once a month, just to avoid crashes.  Nowadays, the x86-based machines I have all have Intel integrated graphics (this laptop here has Intel HD 620), so I have no first-hand experience on the current state of either the original open-source drivers for AMD, nor the state of the now-opensourced AMD "proprietary" drivers.

Testing with a Live DVD/USB stick/SSD via USB3 is the only way to be sure.

Simon:
Uh, right forget it. I will stick with windows like many others that just want an OS to do work not an OS for the sake of tinkering with the OS.

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