Will either of these work?

my1987toyota wrote: hey tommylight do you recommend Mint19.3 over Debian for general experimentation.

I do, i use Debian only on industrial retrofits that do only machine work and nothing else.
For everything else i use mint. For older PC/Laptops use the XFCE version of Mint, it is a bit lighter on resources.

then I guess that is what I will use then. My new SSD should come in a few days.
Do you recommend sticking with 19.3 or is it better to install the 20 ?

I am sticking to 19.3 till 20.1 gets out, then slowly upgrade.

WOW Amazon must have had my SSD at a local warehouse . I ordered it yesterday and got it today. Looks like my to do list just got longer.

well I am currently installing Linux Mint xfce on the lap top. Looks like I need to get it a battery. I will install Linuxcnc on it in a few days
and try the max jitter test ( and probably cringe at the results ). I will let everyone know the results when compleated.

well this is going to be harder then I thought . I can run the Mint 19.3 install disk in safe mode and all is fine but when I try to load in the regular mode the screen shows overlapping images and the side edge alignment is almost in the middle of the screen .
It probably doesn't help that this is a 2008 lap top with AMD and Nvidia graphics . as an aside the same thing happens when I tried the Debian wheezy install disk.
To me this looks like a graphics driver error, however I don't know what the regular mode runs that the safe mode does not.
at least I can get linuxcnc 2.8 loaded

There might be hope, if you blacklist nouveau. would be interesting to see pre and post blacklis latency effects.
Also: check your bios settings. there might be an option to play with regarding grafics

I will defiantly check into that

There might be hope, if you blacklist nouveau. would be interesting to see pre and post blacklis latency effects.

Are you aware, that nvidia-x-server does not work with realtime kernels?
If you want to use realtime kernels, you need to use nouveau x-server.