I just thought I'd record my experience of Linux Mint 18.3 and a new budget PC I put together for myself based around the AMD AM4 platform, the problems I encountered, and how I solved them.
The hardware is a Gigabyte AB350M-D3V motherboard, an AMD A6-9500E APU, and 8GB of RAM.
I started by booting the 64-bit MATE edition of Linux Mint 18.3 from a USB stick. I had to boot in compatibility mode, or I just got a blank screen with no apparent sign of booting actually taking place.
Once loaded up, I installed in the usual manner, then rebooted.
No luck with booting, though. As half-expected, I got no sign of the usual boot process, so I rebooted by pressing the reset button on the PC case, and held down the 'shift' key to interrupt GRUB from loading. In the advanced boot options, I couldn't see 'compatibility' mode, but there was 'recovery mode', so I chose that.
That seemed to work like compatibility mode, and got me to the desktop, presumably with generic drivers.
I then waited for the Update Manager icon to appear in the task bar - I mean, MATE panel. I cleared all the indicated updates (there were many!), and ticked only those items with security updates, and anything related to the kernel. My reasoning was that the kernel probably needed to be newer to cope with the reasonably new AM4 board, and fairly new APU. For good measure, when those updates had taken place, I went to the Control Centre, and in the Driver Manager I ticked the option to load AMD CPU microcode.
Then I did a normal reboot, and was greeted by Linux Mint 18.3 loading up normally.
Then it was just a matter of uninstalling software I didn't want, refreshing the update manager and then allowing it to update everything I'd not previously updated.Looking back, I probably could have installed the necessary updates right after installation, before I rebooted.
I'd previously read that LM was incompatible with AMD Ryzen systems, and even with the earlier generation of APUs. Well, that seems to be fixed, now, at least for Bristol Ridge APUs.
Hopefully this may help someone out!