So I just installed onto a slightly older laptop, but the problem I have is, after booting to what appears to be the menu screen, it comes on in black and white for maybe 1/10th of a second. After the 1/10th of a second, it immediately brightens so significantly, that I can no longer read any of the options on the menu, effectively making it unusable. Anybody seen this before?
I just tried installing on an old Centrino 1 laptop and the menu is always flat white (no flash of black and white as you described, though). Launching a game directly–that is, skipping the menu entirely and going straight into a game–works fine, but the menu is flat white again if I hit F1.
In my case, I believe it’s a driver issue. Can you try launching from CLI to see if you get the same behavior?
I think I sent my reply to the wrong place 
So just in case it deleted the whole thing, I will recreate a synopsis of what I just typed.
-I am installing on a Gateway 4530 to turn it into something useful -If I hit escape, it reloads to a black screen letting me see the ui again briefly, then back to blinding white -I can interact with the user interface and see it moving, but it’s so bright I can’t tell what it says because of how bright it is. -If I hit the / key in the UI, it brings me to a message that asks what I would like to search. This screen is no longer white, but instead black, and entirely legible. This leads me to believe it is not a driver issue. Any other ideas? -This is my first time tinkering with an OS other than the dozens of windows OS’s, so I do not know how to access the command line interface. Any advice on that would be amazing.
Ah, I just assumed you were using Windows. Are you using Lakka?
In that case, it could be that you’re just missing the menu assets, though that usually ends up with blocky white text on a black background rather than white-on-white.
If you are using Lakka, try posting in the Lakka subforum (instead of ‘general’) and someone more familiar with that setup may be able to give you some tips for working it out.