For posterity:
I got this all working and it wasn't easy.
tl;dr Enable legacy, update Kernel.
I'll preface this by saying that I started this endeavor with the intention of creating a solid React.JS project development environment. First I tried Virtualization of Ubuntu using VirtualBox and found the virtualized machine just couldn't keep up with the screen resolution. Everything was laggy and terrible, and it definitely wasn't a place where I would want to spend all of my time working my day job. I tried setting up a standard Windows environment for React.JS. Our project wouldn't compile, so I decided to try a dual boot on my machine, and that process was the biggest pain of them all. But right now I'm writing this from inside of a smooth working Ubuntu environment, so I figure I'll pass the knowledge down the line.
The trick here is to go into the BIOS (by pressing ESC during startup) and change the setup so Legacy is enabled. Note that in doing this, you will trip a security setting in windows and so you should make sure that you have your BitLocker hard-drive key on hand, or else you will get locked out of your Windows machine. If you did all the login stuff with your microsoft account you should be able to access them online on your Microsoft account (Help Docs for that).
After legacy mode was enabled, I was able to proceed with the install option. It looked like it wasn't doing much when I told it to start the installation and gave me a spinning circle for my cursor for several minutes, before it was ready to actually start the install.
During install tell it to install those sweet sweet proprietary graphics drivers. The install process took about an hour, but that might be because I told it to do an update during install, and the network connector is mega bad. More on that now:
So if you get this far, you'll be like: "Great everything is running mega smoothly and I'm happy! Time to start installing software and getting set up. Oh wait, why is the Wifi so slow?" And the answer is this: your network card is too new and Ubuntu's stable release is 6 months behind the times and you need a newer Kernel version to get your networking to not suck terribly. Here's a Reddit PSA about running Ubuntu on machines with this network card. At this point you are either going to want to find a way to hard-wire a connection to your machine, or get access to another computer and a drive, because until you change the Kernel your internet will be unbelievably slow, so even downloading the new one will take a whole day. (I was getting ~20kbps at best before updating.)
Here is a resource about changing your kernel. You'll have to download some files from that site and run some
Code:
sudo apt-get install ./<package name>
. But be warned: first I downloaded the newest kernel (4.20.something) and while that fixed my networking issues, it broke my trackpad and mouse. I ended up installing Version 4.19.8 and that did the trick.
After that I was able to get my dev environment up and running as intended. Hope this helps somebody down the road.
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