I recently purchased an HP desktop (with Nvidia GPU) with pre-installed Windows10 (UEFI). I wanted to install Ubuntu as a dual boot option. I started with the latest Ubuntu20, but the PC won't boot even from the USB. After some searching on Google and Stackoverflow, I learned there could be many reasons for this but I narrowed down few possible causes. First, setting nomodeset or nouveau.modeset as an option (in the boot menu) didn't help. One option that did work was setting acpi=off, but after boot (from bootable USB drive) and installation, there was only one processor in the System monitor (instead of 16 logical processors). In fact, even during installation, GRUB failed to install, which then I had to resolve using the boot-repair utility. Also, I learned that setting disabling ACPI would interrupt many other functionalities.
Then I tried to use Ubuntu18.04 which booted without any problems from the USB drive. The installation also went smoothly. However, the PC won't reboot again after the installation. It was stuck on a blue/ violet screen with 5 dots and the Ubuntu logo. I again searched for the probable causes and came across overwhelming suggestions. I tried a lot of them but then each solution led to a new problem. One breakthrough solution which helped me was to boot into the Recovery version of Ubuntu where I saw options to boot Ubuntu from two different kernels. This brings me to the core of the issue. I identified that Ubuntu was booting normally with the older kernel (4.18) but was unable to boot from the default kernel (5.something).
After replicating this process, I was sure that the problem was neither ACPI incompatibility nor missing Nvidia drivers. It was simply that the older kernel worked, but the newer one didn't. Now my question is:
- Why is it that the newer kernel failed to work on this PC.
- Considering I am just a data scientist who works with Python and few simple tools, What are the implications of using the older kernel?
PS: I wrote the complete story so that someone else might be facing a similar issue and this might be helpful to them.