12 hours later: I’m out of even nonsense ideas. PC is ewaste, be a year or two before I can afford a cheap one from Walmart or smth. I sometimes amaze myself, followed a straightforward installer so wrong it killed my PC. That’s actual talent, really.
Least I still got the phone.
Installed Nobura so wrong it killed my windows install, isn’t installed, and I can’t install any os to any drive
If I get my computer back up I am learning the lesson I am too incompetent for linux
This is a total replacement of original title and body text
I’d recommend you test Bazzite, Nobara and Solus and see which one you like best.
As far as I know screen resolution issues usually comes down to outdated drivers and/or kernel, at least for newer hardware. Using a distro that’s very up-to-date usually solves that, any of the 3 ones I cited above are regularly up-to-date.
I’ll briefly explain the differences between them.
Bazzite:
“Atomic” distro. Basically means it updates like Android, where it downloads an image of the system and uses that to update, instead of updating every single package individually when you try to update. It also means some parts of the system are read-only, making it impossible to mess with the more critical parts of the system, which helps a lot to mitigate user breakage and issues.
It is Fedora based, comes with KDE Plasma and a lot of of useful gaming stuff pre-installed. Just use the software center to install anything you need. It has a forum and Discord server if you ever need help with something. Also, it auto-updates on the background by default and only applies the update once you restart you computer.
I use it daily since the last 3 months at least and has been the smoothest, most plug and play experience I ever had on Linux. It is also the only one of the 3 that I recommended that supports Secure Boot and easy TPM2 setup, both which I need because of an external drive with Win11 I barely use and because I encrypt my system.
Nobara:
It’s not Atomic, so it updates “normally” and doesn’t have the read-only protections.
It is Fedora based and comes with KDE Plasma by default, but have options to use other Desktop Environments. There’s a Discord server to ask for help if needed.
I used it for a year before I moved to Bazzite and it’s pretty good. The only 2 caveats is that on major upgrades you need to upgrade through the terminal following specific instructions, and I had to manually intervene in the system a few times, which I only knew about because I was in GE’s Discord, otherwise it would be a pain to find how to fix the issues I had.
Solus:
It’s not Atomic, so it updates “normally” and doesn’t have the read-only protections.
It’s not based on any other distro, it is it’s own thing. Comes by default with Budgie but there’s also a KDE Plasma option. There’s a forum to ask for help if needed.
Used it for at least 4 or 5 years I think. Was the first Linux distro to actually get my attention and one of the best computer experiences I’ve ever had. I only ended abandoning it because of some issues with the team behind it that resulted in months of downtime without a single update, to the point I thought the distro was dead. It ended up coming back after some restructuring, but I never tried it again. I still recommend it because of how good it was, I found nearly everything I needed natively on their app store. The biggest problem other than the one I already talked about was outdated apps here and there.
Tried nobara, broke my PC somehow lol. Can’t install an os on any drive even after formatting them
do you have another computer around with a spare slot to pop one of those drives into? that would allow you to use cmd to clean the drive and give it the correct formatting for installing Windows
Nope
If you still have windows on the drive you can use a windows boot drive and potentially might be able to recover it and the boot files.
Otherwise the drive can be wiped and setup again using diskpart https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-to-format-hard-disk-during-installation-of/cc409a0a-5c64-4fa4-951a-061b8a4215b6
I hope there isn’t important data in the drive. If you have something to backup your data with I’d suggest that first
Already tried wiping the drive with gparted usb, tried installing to a backup empty drive with all the rest disconnected. Tried the cmos button.
Prolly just have a wrong boot usb but can’t make another. I’ll see about buying one in a few months
What happened exactly? It broke after installation and wiped everything? Or did you manage to actually boot into Nobara before realizing it wiped everything else?
You said below that you also tried gparted and it still fails. You could try wiping one of your storage units in gparted, then use it to format to ext4 or btrfs and then try to install Nobara again, if it works then at least you get your PC back and can reinstall everything. It’s a pain but at least will be something.
Also don’t weight in yourself so heavily, I also got frustrated a lot the first time I realized I ended up wiping everything too lol, I did that multiple times in different PC’s and smartphones trying to install different OSes.
If you manage to get it booting into Nobara I could assist here with setting up dual boot correctly comrade.
Edit: Since you were using Windows, do you have Secure Boot enabled in your motherboard BIOS? It might be why you can’t boot into Nobara if you successfully installed it but it doesn’t work currently.