I know you have been getting a lot of suggestions but have you tried Fedora or any of the rpm based distros?
Basically all Linux distros can trace everything back to three major ones: Debian, Arch and RHEL. (Also slack ware is a thing and there are many non major one). Since you tried Debian and arch families without success, I suggest you give the RHEL family a go. In my experience RHEL based distros have the best hardware compatibility.
There are a few ways to investigate, but for that we would need a bit more info. Firstly, what distro do you use ? Try using a different bootloader than GRUB to see if it solves the issue. Otherwise you could also try to use Linux’s UEFI stub.
Fedora requires less maintenance which is important in a university scenario. But then you have those Exam Safe Browsers which don’t run on wine anyway.
If you’re going to miss AUR-levels of package count, my advice is to grab openSUSE (preferably non-Leap), get familiar with zypper and yast, then add the Packman repo. Combined with the OBS (basically the openSUSE version of the AUR), you’ll have pretty high package availability.
openSUSE also requires less maintenance than Arch.
But generally, I recommend EndeavourOS, just add the chaotic-aur so you don’t spend hours compiling, and have fun!
On windows I think you need a HDMI dummy plug as others mentioned here before but Linux has to have a way to run headless. You can run Linux in Qemu without a connected display. If you find anything on why it’s not booting please let me know!
I was new to Linux, I made the not so calculated decision to use manjaro as my daily, deleted xorg to in an attempt to reinstall xorg to then hopefully fix the stuttering. Everything went wrong, no display obviously, /boot/ files where corrupt. I now use arch and am wiser
My own classic was fiddling with the nvidia PRIME config to try and get rid of some very mildly irritating screen tearing. No graphics output at all. Now this is fixable of course, but it’s a pig.
And I’d decided to do this 2 hours before an incredibly important progress review meeting for my PhD.
Got it back with about 10 mins to spare and decided just to leave the driver config alone after that.
Bonus round
Also a friend managed to bork his ubuntu 16 laptop by trying to switch from unity to gnome and ending up with sort of neither. That was reinstall territory right there.
Not the installation strictly speaking, but my most “funny” fuckup was setting up xfree86. There was a configuration for crt monitor scan frequency that you had to setup. I messed up something and the monitor started to squeel like crazy and quickly hit hard reset in panic.
The monitor didn’t die, but it had a slight high pitch noise to it after.
Back then I was testing modelines to see the maximum I could push to my 14" monitor. I then backed it with a 1200x1600 virtual screen.
My girlfriend got sick from watching me scrolling around and bought me a 19" display which could do that resolution - and ended up frustrated when I added a larger virtual screen.
Yeah, monitors were somewhat dumb, just received and did what the vga output asked to do.
The noise most likely came from the semiconductors that controlled the magnet field that directed the rays onto the screen. These components are selected for a specific speed that the monitor can handle. So going under or over it’s spec can make something resonate in the audible range, and could even destroy the components if stressed too much.
The thing is that for each resolution and refresh rate you had two values to configure, one for the vertical speed in Hz, and horizontal speed in kHz. These values were usually specified in the owners manual. Typos can happen, and this was quite a risky operation.
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