I did not find any setting for GPU in the boot menu, unfortunately.
So my situation is: all installations of a linux operating system on this laptop, with nvidia drivers, fail except linux mint 20.3.
Additionally it is worth mentioning that before I could update to nvidia-535, 20.3 crashed THREE TIMES, but after the driver was installed there were no further crashes, going on four days now. There is no doubt in my mind that driver conflicts were my problem.
The fact that my HDMI port failed to connect and was disabled exactly after installing this system and this driver was either a coincedental hardware failure or a system error that is preventing me from using the HDMI port. I consider it highly unlikely that a hardware failure that is already improbable, should be the cause of my HDMI being disabled.
When searching for solutions to this problem, every post I encountered at least partially indicated that driver conflicts were causing this problem, including this post:
viewtopic.php?p=2352520#p2352520
Maybe I'm taking this out of context, but SMG said:
Additionally, the dpkg output shows you installed the Nvidia-525-open driver which is a problem.
I did not install the open driver, but that seems to indicate to me that driver incompatability can cause this problem.
Fortunately, you have been helpful and responsive, so I am hopeful that with a better understanding of my problem you may have some more ideas.
Anyway my BIOS/UFEI did not appear to have any option to get into GPU.
Thanks for all your help and I hope I have explained my methods, logic, and conclusions and hope that you can now correct any of my errors or misconceptions that may be hindering me from enabling my HDMI port.
One thing is certain-- I can not upgrade to mint 21, it absolutely will cause system instability and failures. That failed with both the default generic drivers and the recommended nvidia drivers.
And to be clear, I have used linux mint since v-13 and only experienced system failures for the first year and a half. Other than that, linux mint has been stable, reliable, and bulletproof to anything but USER ERROR. After upgrading my device to a system that uses nvidia drivers-- NOW SUDDENLY I am having issues.
As about three different sources recommended, rolling back to mint 20.3 solved my problem. All of those posts included comments by numerous users that 21 and nvidia drivers are not working well together. Hopefully in the year and 9 months until this system is put to pasture, whatever problem there is that makes 21 crash will be corrected by the time this build becomes unsupported, either in an update of 21 or in whatever the most recent version will be at the time.
More to the point, when I installed Garuda and Ubuntu I was going by the recommendation of a friend who has far more experience and expertise than me. When I decided to try it my way instead, I found that my installation was stable and did not crash. My friend and I both researched the problem and both of us came to the same conclusion-- the proprietary nvidia drivers are an issue and have been causing system failures for more people than just me.
Typical for me, with my half baked shoot from the hip hunches and sophmoric logic, I will solve a problem only to find that my solution causes another problem-- thus my disabled HDMI port.
Thank you for being patient with me.
to think all those hard resets could fry my motherboards and that the problem was caused by microsoft-biased coersion (although that may not be an accurate way to describe it).
