Working. I had reset my BIOS and “safe boot” was back on. Turned it off, reinstalled the driver from “Driver Manager”, Used your commands and followed your instructions and found that the Nvidia driver was working. Opened Nvidia X server settings and it looked the way it should. nvidia-smi showed the whole shebang.
I knew you guys could help me. I could cry.
Seems like a promising answer, I wonder why someone downvoted it. I wish they’d left a comment.
I’ll def explore it
I turned secure boot off a while ago but I did update the BIOS which involved resetting to default and I should check that, thanks.
I’ll try disks, but I think the problem is NTFS formatting. Which sucks, but it’s understandable.
Shoot. I got a lot of stuff on that drive.
I thought about pop OS but I don’t like that it’s owned by some corporation or something. And I thought about Manjaro but it’s Arch Linux and I don’t even want to open that can of worms. I’m having enough trouble in debian, with tons of tutorials and help.
I have used the software manager to install the drivers (didn’t work and the computer froze at login) but it was after a Timeshift not a fresh install. I’d hate to do that now just to find it still didn’t work.
Thanks for the info and the feeling of not being alone 😄
Can’t disable in BIOS, I even updated my BIOS hoping the new one would have that capability, but no joy.
Yes, video drivers got me using Timeshift a LOT.
I installed Linux Mint from a live USB. I have installed applications via bash, software manager, and some even from the snap store.
I’m not sure what desktop environment Mint uses, I’m pretty sure it’s not KDE, and I have no clue about which explorer.
This turned out to be key, along with another comment. I went BACK to my BIOS and sure enough, with all the changes I had left secure boot enabled. Disabled it and everything went so smoothly I felt a little embarrassed.
Thanks friend!