Ubuntu 15.04
Radeon R9 380 GPU
I finally realized nvidia and Linux simply don't work well together, so today after a lot of research I switched to a Radeon card which is supposed to have much better support.
Booted into ubuntu OK, in low graphics mode.
I selected the proprietary driver and rebooted, and now can get no further than "Starting Version 219.
What now?
edit
OK, I tried all of the options from grub, the only change there is that in low-graphics mode it boots to a black screen with a flashing white cursor at the top left, but will not go past that.
Ctrl/Alt/F1, F2, etc does nothing at all.
Alt Tab, Ctrl/Alt/Del, Esc, Alt/F4... I'm not sure of all of the keys I tried, but I'm convinced it hangs when it boots, to the point that nothing from the keyboard is being registered.
Fortunately, I'm set up with a small Windows installation that I can choose from Grub, and just like with the Nvidia card I pulled out, it works with absolutely no problems at all - the new card is detected and the drivers downloaded and installed flawlessly and it is working perfectly.
So what gives with Linux? I've got ten years of dicking around with all of the Nvidia issues from multiple systems to get it working, so I'm pretty good at that - but based on all of the issues and general hatred for Nvidia from the linux community at large, I honestly expected a radeon card would at least get me to a desktop. But as this is my first experience with radeon/linux, I really have no clue how to go about getting it to work at all.
And I honestly don't think I can return a $250 video card because "it works fine in Windows but not in Linux."
Any assistance at all would be very helpful and greatly appreciated.
edit2 Gave up and tried reinstalling from the 15.04 iso (fortunately I learned to keep windows! )
It installed, but complained about "held packages"
Rebooted to a desktop just fine, but now no mouse or keyboard lol!
Recovery mode from grub also had no mouse or keyboard, but the keyboard works in grub!
Now I'm just doing a complete wipe and install from scratch. Fingers crossed.
Shouldn't there be an easier way to switch video cards?
edit lmfao!
Installing alongside windows 7 from the live cd results in it sitting at "creating ext4 file system" for 90 minutes. Rebooting at that point skips grub altogether and takes me to a purple screen with 5 orange dots and then nothing at all for 15 minutes. System is hung at that point.
The install error as it turns out is not a new problem,it is apparently from something called ubiquity, and no solutions are listed anywhere that I could find. Terminal will not run at all, and Rebooting does not show grub at all, so no way to get to windows to try and fix it.
I'm 6 his into this so far today, plus another 4 last night.
Would putting my nvidia card back in fix this? I hate to think so, because it worked fine in windows before ubuntu took away that option.
final update
OK, I finally got 14.04 to install, I'll just use my laptops for Windows since 15.04 removed it from our desktop. The new card is now working perfectly with the vesa driver. I had hoped for higher resolution, but so far it has not given any system problem errors, so it is definitely better than the nvidia.