Figured I'd play around with Linux for the first time. I followed instructions to create bootable flash drive. I then proceeded to lose an hour just trying to get Ubuntu to do something after booting from it. The welcome UI becomes unresponsive every time.

Also, this happens after I try to boot from it any time after the first time.

Solutions to some common errors:
- disable secure-boot
- disable fast-boot
- use legacy instead of uefi
- try another "based on Ubuntu"-distro, with eventually better driver-support, eg. PopOS, Mint...

I managed to get farther along doing the OEM setup. I cancelled out of it, though. I'm going to try the regular one again with greater patience.

@sergiolarosa89 yes, with Rufus.

@sergiolarosa89 and, my setup is a bit unorthodox. I have 2 Nvidia cards with SLI, for starters. Intel i7, 24gb of ram.

Disable secure boot and fast boot.

@systemctl total Linux noob here. How does one do that.

Check your motherboard model, and follow instructions on their website. It is a Bios setting.
Usually you'll find that under the "boot options" or "advanced options" in the bios that you can access by pushing F7/F12 when you turn on your computer.

@pwar gotcha. In the sea of unknown I was assuming it was a command line thing in Linux, ha. I've never had to bother with that part of the bios before.

Your error message (the one mentioning "nouveau") is indicating that there is an issue with your gpu driver.
In the Linux world, "nouveau" is the open source driver for Nvidia gpus, and "nvidia" the official one. The latter usually has greater performance and I expect that "nouveau" might be struggling with your SLI setup as shown in this post:

https://techpowerup.com/forums/...

So you probably should disable the sli in the bios just for the install process to complete.

Ah, N-fucking-VIDIA

Use Arch. No GUI, no graphics problems.

I finally got it to install, but I had to use the OEM installer. There were issues encountered that stack overflow solved.

New problem: I can't boot into Ubuntu. It goes straight into Windows 10. They are each on different drives.

Any ideas? The small amount of googling I've done seems to give answers that range all over the place, some of which tanked some user's ability to boot into either one.

@duckWit That's a classic one. Unfortunately it might be more or less difficult depending on your motherboard manufacturer again.

1- Make sure that the safe boot/secure boot is actually disabled.
2- Make sure that the boot order in your bios is correct. You should point to the drive Ubuntu is installed on. Or more precisely the drive Grub had been installed on (which should be the same unless you changed something). Grub will allow you to boot windows later.

If you still struggle with this after checking that I could send you a screen of my configuration parameters.