I just installed EndeavorOS on an HP Spectre360 that’s roughly 2 years old. I am honestly surprised at how easy it went. If you google it, you’ll get a lot of “lol good luck installing linux on that” type posts - so I was ready for a battle.
Turned off secure boot and tpm. Booted off a usb stick. Live environment, check. Start installer and wipe drive. Few minutes later I’m in. Ok let’s find out what’s not working…
WiFi check. Bluetooth check. Sound check (although a little quiet). Keyboard check. Screen resolution check. Hibernates correctly? Check. WTF I can’t believe this all works out the box. The touchscreen? Check. The stylus pen check. Flipping the screen over to a tablet check. Jesus H.
Ok, everything just works. Huh. Who’d have thunk?
Install programs, log into accounts, jeez this laptop is snappier than on windows. Make things pretty for my wife and install some fun games and stuff.
Finished. Ez. Why did I wait so long? Google was wrong - it was cake.
which DE?
Gnome
Happy to see you picked a great DE. Things will work out of the box. Install extensions out of these to improve your experience.
I just installed EndeavorOS on an HP Spectre360 that’s roughly 2 years old. I am honestly surprised at how easy it went.
I don’t get your surprise. With a decent laptop like the one you have everything will work properly. You can even load something more stable like Debian into that and it will work just fine on the first attempt. No changes required.
The issue with stuff “not working out of the box” is usually related to people using unbranded potatoes or very old hardware with modern distros.
On the contrary, it’s often new hardware that causes the problems because the drivers won’t have been reverse-engineered yet
A lot of hardware has first party support
But plenty doesn’t e.g. Broadcom wifi cards. If you just buy whatever new hardware and expect Linux to work out of the box, you’re likely to have problems ime.
There are always options of course, but you have to shop wisely!
Broadcom hasn’t made laptop WiFi cards in a long time.
Ok, fair cop, I’m misremembering things — I had issues with a realtek card recently though. The point is that, as good as first party support is these days, you can’t just buy anything and expect it to work, especially if it came out in the last couple of years.
Funny enough, I also flashed my (probably much older) HP Spectre X360 to endevourOS last week, works good, feels more responsive then PopOS was on it.
I then tried Bazzite on my desktop and the experience went much worse, seemingly because of Nvidia driver support still being pretty bad on linux. Oh well.
NVIDIA will be great OOTB experience in a couple of years, but the official driver will get much better in just couple of months from now.
Why will it be better in just a couple months? Something on the horizon?
Edit: Appreciate the responses!
Long term NVIDIA might be going into either upstreaming their nvidia-gpu-open driver into Linux kernel, or they will help Nouveau+NVK development, which works relatively well with modern NVIDIA cards already (and NVIDIA just hired long time Nouveau maintainer)
Why will it be better in just a couple months?
Explicit sync. It’ll fix most of the issues with Wayland on Nvidia CPUs. Wayland landed support for it in April, and Nvidia recently released a beta driver that supports it. I think every graphics driver will implement explicit sync eventually, since it’s a lot better than implicit sync.
Some great information about why it’s important here: https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2024/04/05/explicit-sync.html
Actually already usable solution, but the driver is in beta and you need bleeding edge compositor, like kwin_wayland from Plasma 6.1 that’s also in beta as of now, plus new Mesa, Xwayland, maybe something else. Everything that’s required is in AUR
on nobara, nvidia drivers have never once been an issue for me.
What about in steam specifically, seemed like a bit of a steam issue as it was very buggy, flicking graphics and such in Steam client and big picture mode was godawful, even tried the render fix mentioned online and it didn’t help at all.
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Did you use the Bazzite image with the Nvidia driver? They have separate images for that.
I did yes lol
It really has come a long way since the old times.
Yeah, 2 hour kernel recompiles to get a sound card to half work were not fun.
They kinda were for me. But then, I was young with plenty of time to spend.
I agree, installing old linux was a great way of learning unix commands and how computers works, plus you got really good at administering linux computers. But of course, that only works out if you have a vested interest in computers already and quite a bit of free time, so I’m also glad all “normal” folks nowadays can get an awesome linux experience without having to put much effort at all.
Yeah I guess it was kinda fun. Especially for nerds like us. Getting x-forwarding to work over a 14.4 modem was pretty awesome, albeit painfully slow, at the time.
you shouldn’t need to disable tpm
On my surface I still need to :/ fuckin Microsoft
Surface wasn’t meant to run linux. Its a struggle to get it working on them.
/owner of 3 defenestrated surface devices.
Defenestrated is the best way to say removed Windows and I’m using that forever, thanks
Don’t thank me, thank Stallman. I stole it straight from straight him ;-)
So far the surface pro 3 been working great for me. Still no secure boot or tpm but I think I just did something wrong when I followed the guide
That’s good to hear. I assume the normal- and IR-cameras aren’t working? The latter is nice to have, the former is a bit of must-have in today’s remote work environment.
Front and back cameras work perfectly. Not sure about IR, didn’t even know it had it
In my experience the VAST majority of people that say things are hard on Linux have never actually tried it …
Same with people that complain cats are not LoYAl lIkE DOgS… They have never had cats
I guess a lot of it depends on the hardware you’re using.
I now use a Surface Go 1 and it suits me really well.
But getting it to boot on a usb drive was difficult and I would have given up if it was just to try Linux.
Fortunately, I had already used Linux on many other devices and I knew that the reward was worth the struggle and that the difficulties were not related to Linux.
Feels like people tend to like dogs more because they find them more submissive and easier to control.
Cats are just as trainable as dogs, just takes longer and different incentives for them.
Let me know when you can train a cat to herd sheep or train one to hunt and retrieve game on command. I’ve got 3 cats and 4 dogs here. The cats make nice and often amusing lap warmers. But beyond catching the odd mouse, they can’t do work.
I’ll say it. Cats have bad work ethic.
Well, I’m not sure a cat can have a bad work ethic if they just don’t have one to start with…
Most pet dogs don’t do work either… Show me a herder chihuahua or a fox hunting mastif
But again this is a dumb comparison… Why doesn’t your dog repeat words like my parrot? It it dumb? Is it inferior? Or perhaps it’s just another species?
Cats are naturally very effective as mousers, humans used them centuries in ships and they were so valuable because they preserved food stock and prevented disease… Show me a dog doing that specific job it was not bread for… No? There you go, dogs are inferior
Most pets don’t work because their owners don’t bother to train them to do any work. And interestingly enough, I have indeed seen a Chihuahua herd cattle. There was No Fear. It was amazing to see that little toothed monster chase a 2000lbs bull around a pen and into another and then into a barn on command from the farmer that owned him. And a Mastiff will gladly hunt fox, cougars, wolves, and even people if you want them to. They will also happily Netflix, popcorn, and chill on the couch with you after chewing up that human also.
Why don’t my dogs talk? Well, they just don’t have the physical voice box to form the sounds of human speech, (as you well know). But that doesn’t mean they don’t communicate with people. Actions, like tail wagging, barking in various tones and volumes, rolling on the ground all communicate emotions and situational reports. And us humans understand them just fine. My little Russian Spaniel does her best to “talk” to me with a near continuous stream of moans and groans, and erffs when she sits with me in my recliner. It’s almost annoying when she doesn’t shut up. And they understand my communications. My dogs understand verbal, whistle, and silent hand signals and respond correctly and instantly to them when I’m afield with them. Parrots, have a natural physical ability to mimic other sounds, (as do a lot of other birds). So they are doing what comes naturally to them - a human is not required.
There are lots of dogs out there that do jobs they were never bred for. Seeing eye dogs, dogs trained for deaf people or assistants to people confined to a wheel chair. Turns out Labrador Retrievers are really great at this kind of work. And I have trained retired Springer Spaniel hunting dogs to work in a hospital as therapy dogs. But that’s not why or what those breeds exists for. Ever see a trained animal act at a circus? They are often what most people would call “mutts”. Mixed breed dogs doing amusing things like ride bicycles and drive little cars around and jumping through burning hoops of fire. And you can often see little Chihuahuas preforming in those acts. All doing things none of them were bred for.
I like the cats that we have. One, a grey and white is an excellent mouser. But he comes from a very long line of barn cats and has a wild streak in him. The other two, are far more interested in cat toys and sleeping in laps and beds than in any mouse - and that’s fine. A warm kitty in the lap purring away is a calming and enjoyable thing to have on a cold winter’s day. But I’m under no illusion that cats or most other pets can be trained to do all the things my dogs can do.
Dogs are humans oldest and closest companions and co-workers for a reason.
You may have misunderstood my point… All I’m saying it’s stupid to compare species based on the attributes of one.
Exactly right!.. It’s like saying dogs are dumb because they don’t learn words like a parrot would
I’m not having a great time with DisplayLink driver support, personally. Various applications I use with mixed levels of support too, along with missing out on Windows specific GPU features.
This has been my most successful round of Linux adoption, but there are still niggling issues and confusion. The biggest difficulty is that my accumulated support knowledge of like 20 years is useless and I am relearning basic issue identification and resolution processes.
The internet being a raging dumpster fire, support is kind of patchy on more niche topics. All the good, useful discussions are largely happening behind closed doors at this point on everyone’s Discords and whatnot.
I’m not having a great time with DisplayLink driver support, personally
We used this for work and I had a bit of a hard time setting up 4 years ago when covid hit… I eventually was able to but later on moved on to a different set up.
We still use it on Windows when I go to the office (once a week) and it still shit there
If you post specifics I may be able to help you.
Various applications I use with mixed levels of support too, along with missing out on Windows specific GPU features.
well yes… Windows specific stuff is not usually available in Linux… unless we are talking about gaming which is catching up really quick
The biggest difficulty is that my accumulated support knowledge of like 20 years is useless and I am relearning basic issue identification and resolution processes.
Yes, it’s a different OS… not sure if you were expecting any differently but this is the power of the walled gardens… you learn to live in them and then find it hard to do anything differently… IMO the transition was worth it for me… I hope it is for you
The internet being a raging dumpster fire, support is kind of patchy on more niche topics. All the good, useful discussions are largely happening behind closed doors at this point on everyone’s Discords and whatnot.
This is what I disagree with… that has not been my experience AT ALL. The worst I can say about online support for Linux is that, some communities, are a little caustic (looking at you Arch support, although you do have great online help posted).
If anything, when I can’t seem to find anything regarding something I am looking for, I have defaulted to realizing I may not be asking the right question… RARELY discussions for Linux support happen behind closed doors… it’s just not even in the spirit of the Linux communities. Again, if you’d like to post specifics maybe we can help
I’m going to try to take this in the spirit that it was provided, but you’re using a lot of "…"s, and a lot of implications that what I’m saying is obvious, for a person trying to provide earnest assistance. I wasn’t requesting technical support or expressing surprise at these things, I was merely expressing that these were the things I was generally encountering difficulty with my transition to Linux as a daily driver.
The DisplayLink driver for instance is running, and basically functional, but ends up running slowly, with distortions, and instability. It also isn’t signed, so my plan to still run Secure Boot with the distro I’m using alongside Windows is out (without a lot of faff), but that largely won’t matter excusing some specific work setups that I don’t currently have to worry about. Having useful AMD specific driver level tools on Windows that don’t exist in Linux isn’t a surprise, it is a discouragement.
Forum content and non-Reddit content are a pain to locate, especially when you don’t know how to frame your problem in Linux syntax, as you say. Communities are either open but in specific places that I will never find without already knowing about it, or happening in places that aren’t accessible without having already joined, like the Discord of the specific software I need guidance on. My experience has been that there is basic info and there is advanced info out there, but intermediate info that lets you bridge the gap is a challenge to locate, especially with subtle differences in certain steps that are distro/package manager specific. Yet I press on.
I’m going to try to take this in the spirit that it was provided, but you’re using a lot of "…"s,
No ill will intended. You must be young and I’m old, my kids constantly complain about my abuse of the “…” They say I always sound ominous
The only part my intention was to sound like “well, yes that’s obvious” was the part where you missed some windows specific GPU functions
For the rest I was meaning to say that I recognize those problems but didnt find them insurmountable at the time I had to face them.
I still have to deal with windows today because of work and I find the amount of orphan issues (or issues with no solution 3 years after reporting) saddening because I rarely see that in the Linux community
True, I may be “over the hump” in terms of the initial learning curve but I encourage you to keep at it, you’ll find it enjoyable in no time
BTW, told my kids about your comment on my abuse of the “…” and they choked laughing for like half an hour. So there is that hehehehe
Things are also constantly improving over time as well, so its very possible that OP’s setup was somewhat problematic a while ago but have since been resolved.
Which would also make sense if the hardware itself was super new at the time, and didn’t have proper kernel modules for it when it was originally released perhaps.
This was the first time I tried to install on this laptop. I expected more issues because of the online comments about HP and this laptop series in particular (janky keyboard, the pen, touchscreen, folds over to a tablet, etc.) Over the years I’ve tinkered often with different distros, and on all the machines across all the attempts - there were a handful of annoyances or driver issues preventing me from having that smooth “it just works” experience. If I put in more effort or was smarter, I probably could have made that printer work, or get bluetooth working, whatever.
The last time I built a new desktop, I specifically bought components I knew would behave in Linux so I had a good experience. But I didn’t realize things had progressed to the point they are today where “it just works” applies to a much broader range of devices such as my laptop.
It’s nice! :)
Same with people who say solar panels can’t ever work. They haven’t tried them in the last few years.
We may need a new forum: when Google is RIGHT about a search.
You’ve given me some interest in Endeavor. My current installation won’t hibernate & restore.
HA! True. Remember when Google was always right and always exactly what you were looking for?
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
I 'member
Long ago. Check this one out if you want something that actually works and I think it’s open source
Endeavour is great, I daily it and as a Linux noob it’s been very forgiving. My only annoyance is that I’ve been having some issues with the display where sometimes I’ll wake it up and will only get a black screen and no means of doing anything to fix it. My laptop also really doesn’t like me using any other DEs besides Budgie.
my experience with hibernate issues is that its either a swap partition issue or there’s not a cmos battery, but also idk my current system is like 7 years old so it could be something else broken
My system is even older. Still, everything was fine until I transitioned from 20.04 to 22.04.
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Since the day secure boot became the standard on motherboards, about once every quarter a new research paper popped up, describing a new way to hack or bypass it …
And there are distros where it works out of the box with no extra steps needed: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE IIRC
Worth noting that on Fedora this is true, UNLESS you use the proprietary nvidia drivers. Then no secure boot
Interesting. Do you know if it works with an existing LUKS-encrypted installation?
It does, I used to set it up during the time I used Arch, it takes a bit of reading to understand how it works, but works flawlessly once you set it up.
I mean if you dont have secureboot or TPM support some people would say crucial security features are broken.
TPM is only used for “prevent local tampering with device” but could be used for way more.
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On my machine it says that soft disabling Intel ME would disable the TPM functionality.
But not too sure about that so not spreading any rumors.
It is dasharo coreboot from Novacustom. Very cool project.
As long as your pc is a little bit behind its gonna be ok (unless you have a certain wifi chip)
I’ve had issues with iwlwifi just panicking but I think that’s just Intel being a bit shit, to be honest. Everything else - even the RGB on my system - works perfectly fine.
I think the bigger issue is software support. Even the “Linux desktop” is good. But if people prefer an app that’s exclusive to Windows or Mac, and the native alternatives aren’t cutting it for them, then adoption will become an issue for them. I’m in that camp because of MusicBee, it has these random bouts of lag on WINE that does not exist on Windows and has font redirection problems, so I’m stuck to Windows until WINE improves (though I have considered becoming a maintainer on WineHQ for that…)
Yes, if you don’t have a computer that literally came out this year, don’t have 2 separate graphics cards and don’t need HDR, or specific Windows-only software, Linux generally just works.
Dual graphics cards worked fine already 10 years ago for me. What issue are people having?
And HDR has been working for me for over 6 months with Plasma 6. I wish people wouldn’t upvote this stuff that gives the wrong idea.
Pretty sure HDR is “working” in the sense that KDE went ahead and implemented unfinished specs, so that the very few apps that also went ahead with it can do HDR, but only on Wayland which breaks other things that are behind, and also often requires very recent versions and specific obscure parameters to be passed to enable HDR support?
Yeah, it’s a great step forwards and great for enthusiasts, but unless I’m very behind on the state of HDR myself, it’s still something I’d consider “coming soon” and not proclaim it’s just “working for me”. It certainly feels like a “year from now” kind of thing - something to anticipate, not try to force just yet.
I don’t know when the last time you used Wayland was but in Plasma 6 I wouldn’t say it “breaks other things.” Before Plasma 6 I had plenty of problems and stuck on X11 but now it’s great. So give it another try if you haven’t recently. Every issue I used to have with it a year ago is gone.
As for the obscure parameters, as of Plasma 6.1 all you have to do for games is add
gamescope --hdr-enabledto the launch options for the necessary games. I don’t think that’s particularly difficult or obscure. You can also set up Steam itself to run in gamescope with --hdr-enabled and then every game will have it.For HDR movies/TV/YouTube you can copy/paste the necessary options into your mpv.conf and then forget about it. It’s a one-time thing and then it works forever.
The biggest place HDR is missing is in Firefox, but Firefox doesn’t have HDR on Windows either so that’s not a Linux thing that’s a Firefox thing.
In my opinion, HDR on the desktop isn’t really there yet in general. Not just on Linux but on computers as a whole. HDR right now is really only for enthusiasts. The only monitors that properly support HDR1000 are $500+ for the entry level ones and $800+ for the decent ones. And you have to choose between miniLED with local dimming that don’t have enough zones yet or OLEDs that get burn-in after a year.
I use Wayland exclusively, and I’m on up to date Arch. I’m talking about issues like screenshare issues with software, XDG desktop portal screenshare randomly breaking, steam notifications started positioning wrongly, steam’s search stopped working (not 100% sure if those two are Wayland)…
I also tried running a game in game scope with HDR enabled, experimenting with options and env cars I found online, but it just didn’t work. It was a sample size of one, but it was one game I wanted to play with friends, so I gave up in favor of just playing.
I also don’t use MPV - I tried testing HDR with it, and it probably worked fine, but I don’t have the right media to test it. (Side note: I should try mpv more seriously, but I haven’t needed a video player much in general)
An extra annoyance is the fact that the LDR colors are quite off with HDR enabled on Plasma. I suspect this is the fault of the display or configuration, but it’s still something I’d have to spend time researching and fixing, only to barely get any use out of it.
I haven’t tried setting up steam itself in gamescope, but wouldn’t it be limited to one window then? Could try it just to experience an HDR game, but otherwise it’s a bit of a deal breaker.
You might be right about it being for enthusiasts in the first place, but I feel like there’s a lot of people who will just pay up for a good screen that includes HDR, and on Windows I’d imagine you can just turn it on and start getting HDR from various sources - something that will surely become possible on Linux, but will take a while longer.
All that said, I’m not saying this to shit on Wayland or the developers’ work on HDR. Not long ago HDR was something that just wasn’t possible, and people were whining it’ll take another 10 years at this rate. I’m excited to see the next update on this, as well as stable wider adoption, but that’s the thing - that’s something I’m anticipating, not something I’m gonna be using now.
I also tried running a game in game scope with HDR enabled, experimenting with options and env cars I found online, but it just didn’t work.
To be fair I don’t play a lot of games so I have only used HDR in Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring but it worked perfectly in both so I am 2 for 2.
An extra annoyance is the fact that the LDR colors are quite off with HDR enabled on Plasma. I suspect this is the fault of the display or configuration, but it’s still something I’d have to spend time researching and fixing, only to barely get any use out of it.
Plasma is supposed to be able to display SDR content correctly while HDR is enabled (which Windows 10 can’t even do) but I can’t actually test that properly because my monitor doesn’t allow you to disable local dimming while in HDR mode so desktop stuff is completely unusable anyway. But if it doesn’t look right it is probably something you can fix in your monitor’s OSD.
I actually suspect the colors are correct and your normal colors are the incorrect ones. If your monitor has a wider gamut than sRGB you need to either A) set it to sRGB mode or B) use a calibrated ICC profile. If you aren’t doing one of those then all of your colors are oversaturated. When you switch into HDR they are correct but it looks dull in comparison because you’re used to them being wrong. It’s a pretty common thing people experience on Windows as well. Not a lot of people realize their colors are horribly inaccurate by default.
Also, most people only turn HDR on when it’s needed. You can add a keybind for it in Plasma’s shortcut settings. The commands are
kscreen-doctor output.1.hdr.enableandkscreen-doctor output.1.hdr.disable. You may need to change the output number to the correct one.I haven’t tried setting up steam itself in gamescope, but wouldn’t it be limited to one window then?
Yep. I don’t like it honestly. It’s just an option if you want to set it up once rather than on a per-game basis.
but I feel like there’s a lot of people who will just pay up for a good screen that includes HDR
That’s the thing, even if you pay up there aren’t actually any “good” HDR monitors. At least not in the same way as there are good HDR TVs. That’s why some people use 48 inch TVs as monitors instead of actual monitors. There’s a few monitors that are “good enough” but I wouldn’t call any of them “good” right now. I am one of those people who considers anything below HDR1000 to not be real HDR. If you look at the rtings.com monitor table, out of 317 monitors they’ve reviewed only TWO of them actually hit the 1000 nits of real scene brightness needed for HDR1000. And both are miniLED with local dimming which have haloing and blooming because there’s not enough dimming zones.
I have a feeling that by the time genuinely “good” HDR monitors exist (maybe 2-3 more years) that will be enough time for Linux programs to seamlessly support it instead of requiring launch arguments.
I do have my screen set to sRGB, and it is possible it’s simply incorrect in SDR - when I enable HDR, everything looks greenish IIRC. As for color profiles, I think there might’ve been a built-in profile that was automatically enabled in the settings? It’s possible I’m looking at horrible colors and not realizing, but at least I’m not doing things like a friend, who “optimized” his colors to improve gaming performance, and keeps complaining about colors being weird 😅
Color management is annoying, since you need a correct reference to verify anything, and I never looked into that.
As for the monitors, I specifically meant good screens, not screens with good HDR - I feel like if you go for a good screen these days, it’ll likely have some HDR support, letting people simply try it out with little effort on Windows.
My issue is family control. I haven’t found a way to get Microsoft family type control yet on Linux, since my sibling uses my computer. The syncing time allowed across devices is the hard part.
Create separate user?
But I can’t remotely set their allowable usage time and access list. Maybe dual booting would work though.
There’s plenty of laptops with 2 separate graphics cards (mine included) and I’d say it’s the ideal experience if you need an NVIDIA card. Everything related to your system is done in the integrated Intel/AMD GPU (which works perfectly) and games and GPU intensive work (like CUDA) gets done in the NVIDIA one.
Hopefully HDR can get crossed off that list soon
Hdr in games is the last frontier from me totally dumping windows.
It looks like it works in KDE 6, albeit a bit janky. Might be worth seeing if it works now, and if not come back in a year or so. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
Yeah I’m using 6, it works well for desktop but not in most games yet
You should be able to get most games to work with some extra tinkering.
Got Armored Core running in HDR with this.
Also, I found it was enough to run the just the game in gamescope, no need to run the entirety of steam in a gamescope window. Just set the launch options for the game you want to enable HDR on.
Yeah I can get HDR to enable w game scope but it looks way off in stuff I’ve tested like elden ring or Tekken 8. Gets kinda blown out looking.
You probably won’t be able to run an LTS kernel on a brand new PC that just hit the market. But using the most recent kernel for arch or a derivative like endevorOS should work after like a week maximum.
I did have an issue like this on Ubuntu and its what made me actually start distro hopping since it worked fine on fedora and Arch using the latest kernels.
Huge shout out to the people working faster than some do at their jobs and for 100% less pay.
I experienced this when installing my AMD Radeon RX 7600XT, it was released two weeks prior to me installing it, back then, and Linux Mint and games in it were clearly running off software rendering. Turns out LM uses a more tried and true LTS kernel by default, luckily ot easily allows you to switch or manage kernels through the GUI updater, so I got that fixed easily.
Or a Mac ime. I tried to run mint OS on a 2016 intel MBPro and it was a disaster. I got it up and running but the Touch Bar didn’t work, the Wi-Fi didn’t work, all kinds of issues.
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I got it up and running but the Touch Bar didn’t work, the Wi-Fi didn’t work, all kinds of issues.
That’s because Apple doesn’t release drivers for all those components.
Running anything but a Mac OS on a Mac is a nice pet project, but you can’t expect Linux to work.I know that now but I had a bunch of people encourage me to do it as if it was a reasonable thing for a novice to crack lol
It depends. I installed mint on a 2011 MBP a couple of years ago and it was a breeze. I installed arch on it recently and the only snag was having to install the proprietary Broadcom driver to get wireless. It runs great though — which is just as well because it would actually be more difficult to install OSX on the bloody thing, seeing as they no longer support it.
A 2016 MBP is still a bit recent, but, as a general rule of thumb, by the time a Mac stops getting software updates, Linux will be ready for it.
I hate to break it to you friendo, but 8 year old hardware isn’t recent. It may still be usable, but that doesn’t make it recent. It’s ok though grandpa, let’s get you back to bed
Learn to read.
I can read, and a 2016 MacBook pro is not even a bit recent; It’s from 8 years ago :-)
Just a bit of light-hearted leg pulling, nothing to get worked up over
8 years is recent if it’s apple hardware and you’re expecting Linux to work flawlessly out of the box. Maybe things were different back in your day though
You should check out what the Asahi Linux project has been able to do with the ARM Macs already, it’s pretty impressive.
I do check in on it every now and again, and it is impressive! I reckon they’ll be able to offer a seamless transition once Apple stops servicing M1 Macs, which is really good going. But, depending on your use case, making the leap now would mean sacrificing some functionality
NixOS on an M2 Air here. Works fine, other than the fingerprint reader.
Apple doesn’t support Linux
I mean I got mint OS running so it depends on what you mean by “support.”
Surprisingly it was really easy to install fedora on my wife’s MacBook Pro from 2012.
The only thing I had to do for everything to work perfectly was to install the RPM fusion repository and accept that the @ is gonna be mapped to the wrong key.
It’s the easiest device I’ve had for installing Linux in quite a while…
If it is a mapping issue you can manually change it
I’ve found some tutorials online, but I’m always cautious with these things because the more I tinker, the more I break my systems 😅
The 2016-2017 MBP are unusually bad. Devices on either side of that? You’re fine. But the 2016-2017 devices? No wifi (except in some extremely unusual cases) is the big problem. Even then, it amazes me how much does work, with zero configuration, with a simple graphical install. The problem with this vintage MBP isn’t that it’s hard to get running–it’s that it’s (almost) impossible, but the parts that aren’t impossible are as smooth as they can be.
Yes, that’s cold comfort. But I’m speaking from the POV of an owner of a 2017 MBP who desperately wanted to keep it going.
The coda to the story is that my wife used it for a while with her business but it fell victim to an absolutely bizarre heat issue where the heat sink vents hot air directly across the controller cable for the display, leading to inevitable failure. Again: not an issue on either side of this model year. It’s sad because it could’ve served for another 4-5 years, making the initial purchase price substantially more tolerable.
I just did that with hdr on alderlake n95. Easy as hell with NixOS.
The dual GPU problem has actually for the most part also been solved; Optimus rarely poses a problem these days
Yup. Fedora on my laptop defaults the internal GPU and you can run any program with the dedicated card with a right click. Pretty nice compared to last year where I had to throw my laptop across the room 😂
What is the issue with laptops this year? I was planning to upgrade.
They are fine with newer kernels
If you follow general newbie advice and install Mint, the kernel is older than your laptop and may not support everything.
Fedora, EndeavorOS or Manjaro would be a better choice then.I use endeavour os so fine I guess.
You can always install a newer kernel, or move to something Fedora or Arch based. My son has ZorinOS on 6.8
I know. But I wouldn’t consider that “just works”.
It would mean installing the most popular beginner distro, finding out it doesn’t work, and then first having to google what is even a kernel…True. PopOS has pretty current kernels, and is very beginner friendly. What I mean is that there are options, regardless of hardware (unless your on an m3 Crapple chip).
And sometimes the Windows only software is more “Windows only” and works with Wine
Windows 3D Builder though is firmly in the Windows Only category though. Which is a bummer because in my experience it’s the best at repairing 3D models for 3D printing that have errors like holes, redundant geometry, inverted faces, etc.
Surely there are alternatives
Lychee Slicer (slicer used for resin printing) is usually pretty good but sometimes it’ll still fail
Which basically means I’d have 2 choices, go in there manually with Blender or fire up Windows 3D Builder and let it work it’s magic
I haven’t fully given up on trying to find a way to get it to work on Linux but I’ve had to take a break from trying purely due to frustration
However, some older programs may actually behave better in Wine than say on Windows 11.
Oh, it also supports ancient 16 bit programs which Windows doesn’t anymore.I didn’t know about the 16-bit support, which is really cool to say the least
I see myself as still somewhat of a noob to Linux
“Generally” is the key word. I’m a linux user since slackware on diskettes. My daily driver is Mint, because lazy. I have 2 VMs with kali and kinoite.
A couple of days ago a kernel update borked my install. A problem with the Ryzen graphics driver.
For me it was trivial. Boot into the previous kernel, timeshift roll back, and back in business, but I can see how a newbie woul go into panic.
A satisfied “customer” will recommend you to a friend. A pissed off one will tell 10.
Yeah I had an MSI gaming laptop that had a lot of proprietary stuff that was a pain to setup. Everything from display brightness to volume to internet to keyboard lights to headphone jack took special workarounds to setup. This was in 2018 and Ubuntu 18.04. Then 19.04 rolled out, and I didn’t have to do the speaker workaround anymore. 19.10 rolled out, and i didn’t have to do the keyboard lights workaround. This way, little by little, every Linux kernel upgrade added one or another of the components, and after a couple of years, everything on that laptop worked out of the box. That’s when I was truly impressed by Linux.
I agree, and I love it. Sure there are some iffy aspects of it that may give trouble, but for the most part a lot of those problems I’ve experienced can easily be solved by a quick search or are “would be nice but i’m sure it will work soon” features, and I can’t even think of any recent examples with the latter. So I’m left with a great learning experience to how my computer works, another win.
Linux has also taught me to make good references. You get a very different experience to your computer than with a regular windows machine that ‘works’.
I like to point out how I can update installed apps with a simple command (e.g., sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade).
No bloat, no ads, open source and the communities are just amazing and helpful.
What’s there not to like?
I don’t think I could ever use windows again, and it makes me proud.
Did you get your audio volume fixed? My ThinkPad is so quiet on Linux (Silverblue) that it’s hard to use it for anything with media.
Not with the volume buttons on the keyboard. Alsamixer helped a little - it was set to ~70% (whatever the line between white and red is). But it’s still quiet. But you can drive it way beyond 100% through software. The problem is pushing the volume button stops at 100%.
The lazy way is to open pulseaudio, grab the slider bar and put it to say, 150%. You can also do it with a terminal command. Somewhere close to the top of a Google search somebody mentioned they bound their volume keys to that terminal command/script where each press resulted in a 5% increase or decrease in volume - allowing the button presses to go beyond 100%. I may or may not do this.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t work - merely one of the annoyances I was expecting. Except I expected many of these and this is the only one I encountered.
I know about those “workarounds”, but it’s ridiculous that the regular UI (including media buttons!) is more or less useless 🙂
I recall that at least on KDE, in the audio settings you can enable the ability to go WAY past 100% volume.
Does this then also work for the media buttons? Then maybe I should try to rebase…
Yes, but you have to enable the checkbox “Increase maximum volume” in the audio widget on the taskbar panel.
