this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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I tried last week. Bunch of stuff in my system didn't work out of the gate, trying to use fixes that were meant for slightly different hardware/distro combos broke it further. Ultimately it became trying to start over or going back to the default Windows install.
So anyway, I'm using Windows on that machine now. How's your week been?
At least you tried! And annoying that you stumbled upon hw issues.
If you ever want to try again what about getting hold of an old drive, or try dual boot, then you can swap back to windows easily and there's less pressure for Linux to work out of the box.
As you say the guides you used didn't match, try and research more about what is the correct distro for you, and maybe start with one that looks like a sure bet.
Guys, seriously, I know how to do this. I've installed Linux on random PCs for decades. It's not my first rodeo.
Once you turn the century it starts to get annoying when people's default stance to legit compatibility issues becomes to affect condescending patience at you. I knew how to set up a dual boot (I chose not to, instead directly booting from an external drive, which works just fine and allows you to revert by just yanking it out), I knew how to find support (the guides don't match because the laptop family I was using needs specific libraries and kernel modifications and my model is relatively rare so the tutorials aren't meant for it specifically).
I swear, the Linux community, such as it is, thinks that everybody backing off is some technically illiterate rando and mostly scared of UX differences and typing terminal commands. That's really not the case. All available Linux DEs are extremely easy to parse for both Windows and MacOs users, being able to copy/paste text to take semi-complex actions instead of digging through the visual interface saves some time and the total normies that could use this type of feedback aren't trying to do this in the first place. It's fine.
I'll try again next time I have a disposable computer that has some specific plug-and-play distro ready to go. Maybe. If I feel like it. And if I need tech help with it, I'll gladly ask. For now, though, this particular machine is back to Windows because the troubleshooting is more of a hassle than the transition is an improvement. That's the beginning and the end of this conversation, really.
No problem, it just sounded like you needed help.
To avoid getting advice then you better mark your comment, with rant or something.
People who are mad at the "Linux community" amuse me. It just makes you sound like a baby.
I mean, call it what you want, that's why I qualified it in the first place.
I'm not mad at them, but it's been long enough that I do find it frustrating that you can't share any degree of a technical problem or UX issue without having a bunch of people crawl from under every rock to share with you the same three pieces of Linux 101 advice.
Your problem is that people want to help you "wrong". That's my point exactly.
Nah, I don't have a problem at all. That's my point. I never asked for help and got a bunch of condescending, inapplicable, very basic advice regardless.
You sounded angry and childish to me. /Shrug
You could've just said "I'm knowledgeable and have tried those things" but instead you wrote a tirade against the whole community
The third time.
I shrugged it off the first couple of times. Which, if I say so myself, was big of me, considering this has been going on for twenty five years. I'm exceedingly patient, if anything.
Look, it's the age-old story of social media: your well-intentioned post with basic anecdote is the first time you bring it up, but the hundredth time the person you're responding to has been in this exact conversation. They're not snippy at you because they're trolling or arrogant, they've just been having a dozen people tell them the same obviously wrong exact thing every five minutes for a while and are increasingly unwilling to go through the motions.
That's a big, important lesson when you're trying to make an online space grow, if you want to be constructive about it and bring this little spat back to topic.
It was also easy to just not respond.
I mean... yeah. Wiser, too.
Welcome to social media. That ship sailed like a decade ago. Also applies to both of us equally.
You're like a rogue, misunderstood Guru on a journey of 'I know leave me alone, I was describing the meta-woes of seeming to carry a dearth of knowledge, not the lack itself'.
Just pointing out from a passing ship; yeah, I see the semantic headaches and agree it's a silly maritime tradition.
Nah, my point is there is no "dearth of knowledge", there is a genuine lack of support and I said so at the off pretty openly in far less florid language.
But also, if it took a "guru" to get this stuff done that'd be a good argument against this stuff being viable for the mainstream, and about how useless the basic advice being provided would be, so it works for me either way.
You still have Windows? Well there's your problem, you're supposed to format the entire drive when installing Linux..
Oh, that was absolutely not my problem. The "crashing whenever it was put to sleep" part was my problem. The distro I tried was pretty good about wiping and repartitioning the drive I gave it without messing with anything else, actually. Gotta give it to Linux devs, at least at this point they fully acknowledge that "just checking this out to see if I like it" is a major use case.
Disk partioning has been around since the 60s, it’s not really a new feature to be able to install a distro without wiping the whole drive and has nothing to do with Linux.
I'm... not impressed with the concept of disk partitioning, what a weird way to read that.
I'm impressed with the interface smartly picking up on what you're trying to do, shrinking and growing partitions and setting up things automatically to specifically support a non-destructive install to coexist with other OSs because the idea that you'd be just testing a distro alongside Windows or something else is a specifically supported use case.
What distro did you use? and what gpu?
Nope, we're not doing this.
I used distro "ShouldWork" and GPU "ShouldBeSupported". And given that it didn't work and wasn't supported, I didn't keep troubleshooting it, because I already have a OS install that works and requires no troubleshooting.
I would love a one click install for each of my specific devices that is reliable out of the box, but that's not the world we live in, so in this timeline that computer is back to Windows now.
Because I know that nvidia is not really good on linux, you can try using pop os because they have pre-installed nvidia drivers
Seriously, you guys need to stop trying to troubleshoot Linux's shortcomings at people. I know. Everybody knows. If you don't, that's the first thing any tutorial will tell you. I'm not looking for technical help, just sharing an anecdote.
If you're curious, no, I couldn't do Pop because I needed some specific libraries and kernel modules to support this particular device's power management and I/O quirks and those were only officially supported in a handful of distros, so I picked one of the ones with better documentation, and even that wasn't meant for my specific hardware.
Not that it matters, because it's a laptop with a iGPU and a dGPU, and the Intel iGPU was just fine out of the box, so getting the Nvidia dGPU to work well was way down my priority list for this exercise, since the device was meant mostly for web browsing and media consumption. Instead, I had issues with sleep mode, since that was related to those specific modifications, and I coudn't figure out a way to make it wake from boot without locking up, which is a pretty big dealbreaker for a device on a battery. Plus the embedded audio controls had some issues, the touchpad was flaky and eventually trying to go through the process of getting that dGPU running exposed other compatibility troubles.
I was ready to roll back to Windows once I noticed the touchpad acceleration was messy out of the gate, honestly, that's my bar for troubleshooting tolerance. So no, I didn't fail to do a cursory Google search in 2020 and find out that Nvidia support is messy. I knew that my slightly nonstandard device was going to be a bit of a challenge, but was hoping to get lucky. Didn't get lucky and went back to what works on it. It's not a call for help, it's just a thing that happened last time I tried to switch a device to Linux.
Something doesn't add up. My guess is you're using a MacBook but don't want to tell us for obvious reasons.
There's literally no reason for "specific libraries and kernel modules" when installing Linux on any x86 PC. It makes no sense.
If they said that they went “back” to Windows, why would you assume a MacBook?
Hah. Nope. There's a ton of custom features on hardware that need tweaking all over Windows laptops. There are entire forums dedicated to specific brands out there. None of this was much of a surprise, I had put off giving this a try because I had read about the hoops I'd have to jump through and been too lazy to try.
Huh. I've installed Linux on anything from an old 32bit netbook to a Fujitsu convertible that both had such a fucked up UEFI implementation they couldn't even boot a standard Windows ISO without Ventoy in grub mode, as well as a cobbled-together Workstation with Nvidia graphics, and never ran into issues like this.
To each their own, but I can tell you I found people flagging all the issues I encountered online.
What is this mysterious device that requires specific libraries and kernel modules? So I can state the fuck away from the device and the brand
obvious troll is obvious.
Believe what you want. I actually would like to move some (more) of my devices over. I'm just not so married to any one OS to try super hard. I just use whatever works.
It's kinda nuts to me that not everybody is on the same page with that.
I laughed. This is the perfect response. Look at the triggered people!
Linux evangelists, man... They're insufferable. I love Linux, but it's not the only OS worth having in 2024. Like, I actually hate Apple but I still have a computer that boots it in my place. It's okay to have lots of options!
Like I told the guy accusing me of trolling, I'm not even trying to "trigger" anyone, it's just that people will walk you through the same three basic troubleshooting options whenever you point out you bumped into a compatibility issue and it gets annoying after a while.
Agreed on the other thing, though. I actively want Linux on desktop/laptop to be better. I actively like many things about it already, which is why I was trying to set it up on this thing in the first place. I use it on other devices that have specific support for it, from SBCs to the Steam Deck. And I definitely also have issues, concerns and pet peeves with Windows, Android variants, MacOS, iOS, iPadOS and every other alternative out there.
I just don't particularly care to stick to a single thing and will use whatever the path of least resistance is for each application. Anything else seems nuts. An OS is a utility, not a sports team. It's like rooting for an AC manufacturer.
Maybe that's because of your extremely niche hardware vendor not providing appropriate drivers for their hardware?! Honestly, I read your salty comments under this post and your kind of attitude really pisses me off. Don't like the experience? Totally fine, don't use Linux and move on. Linux, for the most part, is FOSS software so feel free to contribute to it instead of complaining about things being broken. Linux is also free in terms of cost. So quite frankly, the developers of your distribution of choice owe you nothing.
But I do like Linux. That's a really silly thing to say. That's why I was trying to get it in there even though I knew the support wasn't all sorted. Screw that "if you don't like it, leave" attitude.
And no, I won't contribute to fixing the issues because I lack the technical skills to do so and the skills I can contribute they don't need. That's also silly, you can't be arguing for mainstream adoption of a thing and simultaneously saying users should be out there fixing it themselves if they encounter an unaddressed hardware incompatibility.
And yes, it's absolutely down to the manufacturer not making a Linux version of their drivers and dumb dedicated software. Absolutely. What am I supposed to do about that? It's not a niche manufacturer, either, it's a pretty popular one. As far as I know, none of the big corporate laptop manufacturers offer official Linux support (at least not Lenovo, Asus, MSI or Dell, that I know of). In fact, the indie manufacturers tend to offer better support, what with using less custom hardware and software and sometimes offering a built-in Linux install as an option to serve as a workaround for OEM fees.
Look, if you don't want to hear about the issues people encounter with your OS of choice... fine, I guess. I don't know why you're emotionally invested in utilitarian pieces of software, but you do you. But if you hope that you're going to be online having a fanclub about an operating system, of all things, and nobody is ever gonna show up saying "hey, I tried it and it kinda didn't do it for me"... eh... maybe make it a private Discord channel instead, because that's probably not gonna happen otherwise. That's probably a reason why you don't get Windows or MacOS fanclubs out there, because let me be clear, I would have just as many objections to dump into those, albeit for different reasons.
Windows runs my laptop harder, uses more battery and the fans are spinning a lot of times whist it runs almost silent in Linux. I've settled on EndeavourOS which has given me a headache-free experience for my hardware (lenovo yoga pro 7 7840hs). Only keep widows for BIOS updates otherwise I'd have nuked that hodge podge of software melange.
If you're really set on windows you could try tiny11 to remove most of the bloat.
In my experience that is because Linux (or whatever part of it that’s responsible) will only start cooling if it absolutely has to. Otherwise it’s happy to cook my laptop at 92°C.
I’ve just finished reinstalling mint after applying a fix that was supposed to let me control the fans fucked up xOrg beyond repair. Multi-monitor setup is broken. On Ubuntu I couldn’t even get the Wifi to work. Manjaro refused to update packages because after installing a usual 300+ package update surge, suddenly everything was in conflict with each other. On all distros I needed to edit a config file so external speakers wouldn’t hum at full volume when no sound was playing.
Even with the supposedly ‘easy’ distros, Linux still isn’t an everyman’s operating system.
I had issues with Manjaro and WiFi disconnecting. Also, Manjaro dropped hardware acceleration for video codecs. Eventually got too annoyed to deal with the Manjaro direction and moved to EOS. Everything is working fine barring a script to get the headphones volume to work (recognised as bass speaker in alsa paths). So far, EOS has been the set and forget type of OS for me.
Linux seems to be really weird like that. I run it on every computer I can get my hands on, from an old netbook to a modern convertible, to a gaming PC with Nvidia graphics, and haven't had any major issues with any distro I tried (I tried all the independent ones, not a fan of derivatives).
But on the other hand, some people seem to run into ALL the issues.
Beats me.
Yeah, no, not doing that either.
I mean, yeah, Linux ran leaner and felt a bit snappier in the OS and in like-for-like loads on Firefox, but the difference is a few dB, I can certainly live with it.
I'm not "set" on anything here, if I hadn't had issues with compatibility I would have stuck with Linux on it. I really, really don't mind either for most tasks.