12 hours later: I'm out of even nonsense ideas. PC is ewaste, be a year or two before I can afford a cheap one from Walmart or smth. I sometimes amaze myself, followed a straightforward installer so wrong it killed my PC. That's actual talent, really.
Least I still got the phone.
Installed Nobura so wrong it killed my windows install, isn't installed, and I can't install any os to any drive
If I get my computer back up I am learning the lesson I am too incompetent for linux
This is a total replacement of original title and body text
The difference between most distributions can be summed up in plumbing (irrelevant as far as you're concerned) and frequency of updates. They'll have different package managers (all of which could be told to "install this" or "uninstall that"), and slightly different versions of software available (some newer, some older). So, stick with what you've got. You may decide to switch one day, but you should do it for a compelling reason (e.g. "I like the philosophy behind this project") rather than something superfluous (e.g. "this one thing is broken, maybe wiping my hard drive and starting from scratch with a different distribution will make the problem go away.")
Video on Linux can be a bit confusing, because there are a lot of moving parts. If you have a modern AMD card (up to somewhere around 10 years old), it should be supported by the amdgpu driver, which is part of the Linux Kernel and should be included out-of-the-box in any distribution. The driver is probably working fine. The graphics libraries (Mesa3D in the case of AMD cards, this provides the OpenGL / Vulkan APIs used by games and graphics software) are probably also fine.
There are two major display technologies present on Linux. X11, and Wayland. X11 is the classic method, with a lineage running all the way back to 1987. Wayland is a newer system, introduced in 2008, but only gaining traction somewhat recently. Your desktop environment (KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, Gnome, etc) ultimately needs to use either X11 or Wayland to put graphics on your screen. Over the past decade, there has been an ongoing migration. Many distributions default to Wayland unless there is a good reason not to. Considering your hardware, you are probably running a Wayland session. You can check by running
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPEin a terminal.Xrandr is a tool for configuring displays on X11, if you are running a Wayland session, it probably won't work correctly. A lot of distributions still allow you to choose an X11 session in the display manager (the graphical log-in screen).
I'm running Plasma X11. Xrandr let me add a custom res/refresh setting it just didn't actually do the thing. I thought it did cause the refresh went up but I think it jsut put me on 1080p instead? Should prolly try following the guide from the beginning again, maybe I just had a typo or skipped step I missed.
wanna share the guide? Also, is there a reason you're using xrandr and not the Plasma system settings app?
https://askubuntu.com/questions/330293/how-do-i-set-a-monitor-resolution-that-is-not-available-in-the-display-settings
Most "user error" caveat possible here, I stopped after step 5 and before step 6 cause it seemed to just put me back into 1080p at 120hz when I tried to go from 2160 30hz to 60hz.
Also I tried using the display config but the native res at 60hz isn't available (max 30) and no 1440p is available double checks that display config in system setting sis the same as the shortcut in right click desktop Yeah I tried the right thing, just doesn't have the option. Windows 10 and 11 do.
Edit: Live disk of Nobura has the res setting I want, just installing that