> Did you format the drive first? or dual install it alongside windows?
Neither. The laptop came with a M.2 physical format SSD card with Windows 10 installed. I removed that and saved it, should I ever have to have factory service done on the hardware. Then I installed a fresh M.2 SSD card, and installed Ubuntu 18.04 on it.
Since I only run Windows as a VM these days, after getting Ubuntu stabilized on the hardware, I installed VMware Workstation Pro 15, and created a new VM of Windows 10 release 1903.
The combination works well.
I’
m wondering why only a recent version of ubuntu woudl run on it? Seems like all version should run on it- but then again i don’t know about these things- maybe the older versions have trouble with hte newer M2 SSD’s I’m guessing? My SSd is a regular one, not an M2 type- so maybe it was more recognized by older versions of linux-