The answer to this developer's install problems are a VMWare virtual machine running on his usual Windows setup. By his own account his actual Linux code works just fine - the only thing that was in his way was his inability to install the OS in the first place. It seems a shame to throw out all that working code over such a trivial & easily solvable problem.
Wrestling with weird stability problems (which might be a hardware fault, might be buggy display drivers, who knows?) for weeks on end before flouncing out stage right promising never to return is the mark of someone who hasn't really thought things through.
VMs just add another dimension to the pain of incompatible or buggy components. I don't know if VMWare provides modern OpenGL support (3.x or better). I have only experience with Virtual Box, and only ever got OpenGL 2.1 (8 years old) without extensions running with hardware acceleration, but with bugs (e.g. vsync never works). Right now I can't update to the latest VBox version because its display driver is incompatible with my Linux version.
I work on Linux running in VMs every day, but can't recommend this setup at all for OpenGL development.
Wrestling with weird stability problems (which might be a hardware fault, might be buggy display drivers, who knows?) for weeks on end before flouncing out stage right promising never to return is the mark of someone who hasn't really thought things through.