So I installed Mint Debian on a different partition. It failed to use my GPUs. I think 'ok, I'll just chroot into it on my existing installation and update the nvidia driver', NOPE. I have no fucking clue why, but doing that installation somehow fucked up my existing installation's use of the nvidia driver, thus killing my X.org. I'm tired of this driver bullshit, and no Debian-based distro I know of ships with a 3.4 kernel (which is where the shenanigans are finally fixed). And it has to work out of the installer's box because I'm just fucking tired of trying to fix this with only a command line prompt. I'm grabbing my data not already backed up somewhere with a liveCD now and am going to format everything and start new.

I'm open to distro suggestions.