So long, Ubuntu 20.04. Hello, 18.04
Well, I had to finally throw in the towel.
The unfortunate problem of the black screen after booting didn’t seem to go away. In fact, it seemed to be a fluke of the graphics card “co-operating,” when it did work. Otherwise, I lost all hardware acceleration and could only boot if I added the nomodeset option into GRUB.
I did come close to potentially solving the issue. I learned from one commenter (whose post I cannot find at the moment) that one can simply disable Wayland on the login screen. This is done by editing your gdm (GNOME display manager) config file. That seemed to work, but then whenever my computer’s screensaver turned on or the screen locked, the graphics card defaulted back to xorg. So, that wasn’t solving anything.
What I should have done is install lightdm, set it as the default display manager, and reboot. However, I tried installing different drivers first. That was a bad idea, because the drivers I installed totally broke the graphics. There were purple-colored artifacts all over the screen. I wasn’t sure how to undo what I did. I tried a few things, but the artifacts remained.
So, I gave up.
I used rsync to back up my /home/ directory, because I don’t tend to make a separate home partition, then I installed Ubuntu 18.04 over 20.04.
There are a few features I miss about 20.04 already, actually. The theme was sleeker and more customizable. The dark theme looked natural and smooth. Many things I take for granted were activated by default in 20.04, such as emulated mouse buttons.
In 18.04, the user has to install a separate package gnome-tweaks to tell the computer, “hey. When I click on the bottom-right corner of my touchpad, that’s a right-click. Okay?” If you don’t, the default in Ubuntu 18.04 is to have a two-finger tap as right-click and single-finger tap as left-click. It’s so counter-intuitive! Anyway, I figured all of that out now and it’s fine.
I’m debating, honestly, whether or not just to install MATE as my default desktop manager. I was against the idea initially, because I want the layout of my work computer to be slightly different from my personal computer. However, differences may also hinder productivity, so I’ll give it a week or so.