It's not just nVidia, I had hours of fun trying to get an AMD/ATI laptop to give me a display. For some reason, Kubuntu 14.04 worked but Mint 17 KDE didn't want to work even though it's mostly the same. For added fun it didn't like the trackpad either, so I had to plug in a USB mouse to experiment. All working now though, at least until I need to do a significant upgrade...

Can you do ctrl-alt-f2 to get a text terminal screen?