This is the continuing story of my elementary OS 5 Juno installation, and fixing rEFInd again.

And this, is a really good blog that explains doing all this stuff much better than mine 🙂

https://aroman.github.io/elementary-on-a-mac/

That does a great job of reinstalling rEFInd, and luckily everything was still there.

elementary OS 5 Juno still doesn’t boot to a login screen or desktop, and I was simply getting a cursor and sometimes a few menu bar icons in the top right-hand corner. Had to be something related to the graphics drivers, but no idea how to fix.

So it was back to the USB stick and another go at installing Juno with some different options. I unchecked downloading updated and 3rd party drivers during the install selected the EXT partition for the boot files and tried again.

Still stuggling with a black screen and flashing cursor, although I was back to a GNU GRUB boot loader, so tried the advanced options and eventually managed to get to an elementary desktop. I used the App Centre to install the nvidia-340 drivers and restarted.

Agh, now I don’t even get a cursor! And in the wise words of Yoda ‘and this is why you fail’! I’m not sure that in relation to my technical skills, or why Linux is never going to replace Windows as a desktop operating system for the masses.

No, I’m beaten! Tried another few times but I can’t get elementary OS 5 Juno to a desktop reliably whatever I’ve tried. I can still get to all the other OS’s installed, albeit they are pretty out of date now:

  • macOS 10.12.5
  • TrueOS 12.0
  • Mint 18.2

I’ve posted a comment on Reddit and hopefully, someone has a solution, but for the time being, I’ve no elementary on my MacBook Air. Not the end of the world, but a little disappointed that one of my favourite Linux desktop distributions is broken 🙁