Last night, when I should have been getting ready for bed, I instead decided to fix my grub bootloader, which was displaying Linux Mint as Ubuntu. Easy to do in Linux Mint itself, as I already had previously installed a grub customizer.
I rebooted from Windows 11 and the grub menu came up, showing Ubuntu, as expected. I selected it and Mint loaded…but something was wrong. My second monitor stayed off and when the desktop loaded, it was locked to a resolution of 1920×1080 instead of the native 2560×1440.
Before diving into troubleshooting, I opted to just restart again first. This time, the grub menu correctly listed Linux Mint 22.2, which I was not expecting. But the one monitor issue persisted. The second monitor had just been working in Windows 11, so I didn’t think this was a hardware issue.
Again, I avoided troubleshooting (it was late, as mentioned, and I didn’t want to start going down rabbit holes), and instead went into the Driver Manager and did a very Windows thing in these types of situations–I updated the drivers, specifically the Nvidia drivers for my RTX 2070, sticking with the newer (and recommended) set. I rebooted again. The grub menu still said Linux Mint 22.2 and the monitors worked correctly when the desktop loaded. I had to tweak a few settings, like refresh rate, but everything was otherwise back to normal.
Then I went to bed, forgot about technology, and had a good sleep.
This morning, everything is still working as expected.
Hopefully this is the last of my PC drama for a while. I’m going to start speccing out a new system again. This one is closing in on seven years old, and I think it’s trying to tell me something, the computer equivalent of “duct tape can’t fix everything” or something like that.
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