Yep. Intel i5-8350U from 2017 in this case.

Seems like a fairly common issue that I can't find a solution to. Intel iGPUs around that generation just not playing nice with the newer drivers so you have to add "nomodeset" in grub to bypass them. But then you're stuck not being able to adjust display brightness (horrible when you have a sunlight readable display glowing with the power of a thousand suns) or run anything that requires a gpu. (Tried accessing my foundryVTT instance and got 1fps and web videos would barely decode at all) everything else pretty much worked fine if you ignored all the boot errors lol (without nomodeset in grub the OS crashes within minutes if not seconds)

I'm sure there's a way to make it work but that's a future me problem. I just needed a rugged thin client since I can't rely on local hardware on a sailboat anyway.