MBP back on nvidia 340 but no grub and needs 'startx'

After the 30.12. update and no boot I tried switchIng to the free drivers (usb stick with nouveau and 5.9 works fine on this hardware). I removed the nvidia driver and installed the free driver. After some initial problem I cleaned out etc/X11/xorg.conf.d and left only the keyboard file. I got 1step further but running ‘startx’ then hangs.

UPDATE (since I can’t delete): Switching to the free drivers failed but following the pinned post and installing the nvidia driver worked (surprise, surprise…)!

However,

  • wifi doesn’t work (seems a different issue)
  • lightdm still fails (no grub) and I have to ‘startx’ from console
  • update nvidia-340xx-dkms needs to install kernel 59, 510 or 511, cancelled for now

On to it. More reading to do…

Thanks for any help or pointers.