Appreciate the support. I just assume people have figured this out well before me and never posted it on the forum. What would have really helped was some more info from CCP about how their damn launcher works.
I have done a couple more runs, at this point it looks like the texture quality is what causes the problems. Oddly, when I set the quality to medium, the in game monitor says the shader is high quality. I got tired of Ubuntu, I put on Drauger OS, but damn that was painful. Would not boot on first install, did an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and then X windows would not log in.
Lenard Potterding was in the news spouting about systemd replacing sudo, which reminded me that while I am happy to use ubuntu to test/help people, at the end of the day ‘my’ computer is ‘my’ computer and not billy g or Lenard p’s computer. In 2025 when windows 11 starts to get installed rectally people should start getting right pissed off, so I am downloading Void Linux to try this all with again.