I was tempted to say it was a hardware issue until I tried 18.04 and it worked flawlessly. I guess having it be a certified version does mean something.

I do require CVE patches on this machine so using the old kernel past EOL/ESM isn't really an option. I might have to see if it's possible to extract only the required drivers.

Still getting security patches till May 2028 with the ESM program. https://ubuntu.com/security/esm

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.

That's exactly what I'll have to figure out! Either that or find room in my budget for a newer rugged laptop.