[sambe]

I recently had an SSD failure and tried using Ubuntu 20.10 to fix my (heavily tweaked to get things mostly-working) older Ubuntu installation. After many hours fiddling with startup settings I still cannot get the live USB to boot to anything other than a black screen. This is a ~2008 graphics card with mature open source drivers. I can get a console if using safe graphics mode but then no network connectivity either. Who knows about sound, haven't got there yet. All the same issues as 15-20 years ago.

When I was last using this machine regularly, most biannual upgrades broke one of these three things anyway (and, no: the tweaks were not obscure things that caused the breakage, and several failed attempts were made to revert them, report them, or look into the causes, and they obviously don't affect the live USB).