Can you help me understand? I bought a new motherboard in 2014 (MSI). At the time I had no troubles installing pretty much any distro. After a Manjaro fail last fall, I installed Windows - mostly for work. Now I want to have a dual boot setup. After installing new versions, Grub2 won't load the Linux install (tried 3 distros), but loads Windows fine. I have an old OpenSuse disk and it installed just fine. So my question is why? Is there some advance in linux that makes my system obsolete? Would a new motherboard solve the problem? Thanks.

what do you mean by this give details. Do you get a grub menu? What errors do you get, an uefi or legacy system?

Using an install disk, linux (Debian, MX, Manjaro, Mageia, Tumbleweed) installs successfully. Upon restart and every time afterward, choosing the distro or distro Safe mode leads to an attempted start, blank screen, computer restart, and back to the bootloader menu. This cycle repeats as long as I keep trying either option. HOWEVER, when I choose Windows 10, it starts right away and runs perfectly. Same thing with OpenSuse 13.2. All Secure Boot options are disable in BIOS.

Motherboard: MSI A78M-E35
BIOS: E7721AMS v30.6

Just in case it might be helpful:
Boot Override
- SATA2: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH22N550
- UEFI: Builtin EFI Shell
- SATA1: ST1000DM003-ISB102
- WD 1600BEVExternal 1.02
- UEFI: WD 1600BEVExternal 1.02

are you installing the Linux distos to an external drive?

No. I do have an external drive attached to the computer USB.

Have you tried to boot the Linux distro with the usb drive removed?

Just did. No difference. One thing I noticed is that the new Tumbleweed does not restart - it just stalls on a black screen.

at the grub menu press e for edit and add nomodeset to the end of the line that begins with linux. What is your video card?

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OMG It worked!!! I'm so happy.

I have Radeon Graphics 3.6 GHz on a AMD A8-5600K. I did notice a message during load: "No UMS support for Radeon"

Many many thanks!

There are some issues with some distros. Early "atom" chips didn't have opcodes (CMOOV?). In my dad's case, ubuntu would fail, debian would not. There's also 64 bit versus 32 bit (" lm " in /proc/cpuinfo and it's 64 bit capable). And various other CPU "extras" that might be default for many distros and not available on your hardware. Media extensions, virtualization, and such. Theres also many firmware's that need loading and might not be installed by default. Debian buster needed some amdgpu firmware (firmware-amd-graphics) or it didn't activate the external monitor (not part of the laptop) to login on. Granted that I start with minimal installs and not curated experiences.

So what is true for OpenSuse Tumbleweed is not necessarily what would be true for other distros. Thanks for that.

One last question: Editing within Grub doesn't save the change. I have to edit every time I go in. Is there a command to Save? Otherwise, do I use the terminal to edit and save?

Thank You

You can edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg

But many distros will overwrite this file (new kernel version / upgrade / and other instances). So there's some /etc/default/grub to have certain things happen when a new grub.cfg is auto-[re]generated (update-grub). YMMV.

add it to this line in /etc/default/grub
then run
I think that is the correct command for opensuse.

Thank you. You've bee so very helpful and I appreciate it.