A very fair decision! Dual booting can be a huge pain, and, for the average user, it really isnāt all that necessary anymore ā Linux has come a very long way!
My problem turned out to be something with the BIOS. I donāt know if a switch got flipped somewhere along the way or what, but when I reset the BIOS to factory default settings in the boot menu I no longer had issues with boot looping and a CPU I could fry an egg on.
Interesting. Iām curious what the setting was. But, Iām glad that it worked out for you in the end!
I do believe that GRUB was initially installed on sda2 and not sda
I refer back to my previous comment ā sda2 refers to a partition on the drive named sda. You could have a drive sda, sdb, sdc, etc. If one was given some partition sdc3 that means it is partition 3 on drive sdc. Everything gets installed into a partition on a drive.
Windows was just taking precidence over grubx64.efi upon startup
This can certainly happen ā especially if Windows is installed after Linux. I woud refer you to this answer to fix it.
less a few graphical funnies with some larger proprietary software I use.
Yeah, Iām not too surprised about that (depending on the speicfic graphical issues that you are referring to, mind you) ā especially if you are using Wine. If you donāt mind me asking, what software are you wanting/needing to use?
Funny enough, I tried to do a clean install of Debian with KDE on my system and I went back to having boot issues, mainly where it would just open to GRUB CL and I couldnāt get it to initialize Debian, when I was certain it was a good install.
Hm, this is strange. I would err on the side of a layer 8 error, but there could certainly be some other fuckery afoot.
So Iām just going to stick to Ubuntu for a good while and learn it.
Thereās no problem with that! Ubuntu was the first distro that I used, as well, when I first got into Linux. Granted, I didnāt stick with Ubuntu for long, cause I got mildly annoyed with how it worked.
Once I feel very confident in filesystem maintenance, command line navigation, snap/flatpak/.deb/whatever, all the major things, Iāll start shopping around for another distro again.
Sounds like a solid plan! When you do decide to move on from Ubuntu, Iād recommend Arch LInux š