i chose the nuke it strategy, just burned it to the ground from frustration, then eventually made it to bazzite

I’m not familiar with the brand, but general ideas that come to mind to troubleshoot are:

• Disable secureboot if enabled. Understanding you’ll lose that security feature of course.
• See if there’s an option to mark your storage as removable in the installer (–removable flag in grub iirc). My (pretty old) motherboard does not seem to respect attempts to add uefi entities but it happily boots off a “removable” uefi install.

Quick q: do you use all the space available or partition your disk?

I had a similar problem with an NUC where the install would work but was unbootable after. In my case the USB showed up as both a BIOS and UEFI boot device and the mobo was picking the legacy mode. This made the install a legacy boot install which was not bootable.

To fix it I had to manually choose to boot the install USB’s UEFI mode.

What’s the model number?

And specifically windows recovery partitions enjoy nuking grub at every step.