Tried with "rEFInd boot manager". Computer booted to rEFInd and gave a list of bootloaders: windows and linux. If I chose windows, the computer booted fine. If I chose linux, I got a blank screen.
If usb media is booting into linux but the linux bootloader in question fails to boot properly, my guess is the fault lies with the bootloader. In this case, grub2. So I don't think an acer firmware update or linux kernel update will help us here.