@epidiah I know that these days Mint prompts you to set up TimeShift and back up old versions of the operating system you can restore to. I suppose you've already tried backing up to better days, that way?
You gotta love the lack of obsolesence in most musical instruments. You still have repair and upkeep, but buy an upright piano and you're set for life.
@epidiah
Oh no!
Hopefully the Mint forums can help?
(And yeah, Linux definitely requires reboots. That myth stems from the fact that /technically/ there are ways to keep a server up through updates, but it's hard and a reboot is much simpler for desktop systems.)
@epidiah This sounds a lot like the grub problem I had following a Mint update that trashed my Windows partition I was using for work. That was the beginning of the end of my use of Linux as my main desktop system.
@epidiah
looks like others are having the same experience, potentially related to graphics drivers. The thread here has some suggestions for rolling back, and seems to be working towards a solution maybe? https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=421441
@epidiah I'm really unimpressed with Ubuntu for letting that out there in the world. :( They're a Big Important Distribution, and they're pushing kernel updates that blank screens?
On the other hand, they stopped giving a shit about desktop users long ago.
(I'm blaming Ubuntu because standard Mint is based on Ubuntu)
@epidiah The Mint people are distrustful of Ubuntu these days. They're working on an alternative version of Mint that's based on Debian instead of Ubuntu (Linux Mint Debian Edition) in case they eventually decide they need to just give up on Ubuntu.
Unfortunately there's not really any possible direct upgrade path from the one to the other. :(
@epidiah
I'm glad you got it working! (And yes, you're saying it all correctly.)
Usually kernel updates are fine, but clearly something went wrong here. There are ways to freeze certain packages so they never update, though I don't know how off hand. Maybe someone else can say, or I can look it up later.
@epidiah I've always had trouble with major version updates in Linux. To the point where I'm scared to do so on a computer I care about. Come to think of it, my issues have always been with Ubuntu, though that's usually the distro I use, so
@epidiah I had exactly the same issue… twice on two different computers. Dropping support for old graphic cards is a terrible decision. It undermines one of the strengths of Linux, i.e. old computers that could never run modern Windows can still be run Linux for years.