Linux really has come a long way
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.
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
Cats are just as trainable as dogs, just takes longer and different incentives for them.
Exactly right!.... It's like saying dogs are dumb because they don't learn words like a parrot would
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.
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.
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......
Feels like people tend to like dogs more because they find them more submissive and easier to control.
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.
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.
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.
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.
well yes... Windows specific stuff is not usually available in Linux... unless we are talking about gaming which is catching up really quick
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
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.
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
I’ve used linux for twelve years and am still surprised at how easy some things are, not that things were really even that hard before. The improvements to gaming on Linux are pretty well known now, but even things like recording audio are dead simple now. Outside of the super expensive DAWs, I’d say linux is on par with Mac and windows now, especially with things like yabridge.
The moment that shocked me was when printers, network cards, and even motherboard integrated Ethernet didn't work on Windows without driver downloads but Linux was plug and play. Full reversal of the situation.
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
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.
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've used Linux since the mid 00's and, well, I've seen some shit. But nowadays? It's the best desktop OS I've used. I recently had to start using a Mac for work and realized just how far DE's like Gnome and KDE have gotten. It feels like I have to fight MacOS every single day to get it to do the absolute basics, the things that Gnome and KDE does out of the box. And the most ridiculous thing is that the app ecosystem for MacOS is so heavily focused on monetization that if you purchase enough apps to customize the MacOS DE to an acceptable level, you'd likely have spent enough money to buy another laptop. Madness.
TL;DR: Turns out that this year is actually the year of Linux on the desktop!
No surprise it feels a lot snappier. You only run the shit you have purposefully installed, and not endless layers of telemetry, candy crush silent installs, game bars that somehow make the performance worse, and mandatory online service accounts
They're possibly running KDE, but other than that you're right
Linux is boring. In a good way. It is so boring that each of my computers use different distros. I have Debian, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Endeavour OS installed across 4 or 5 computers right now. Some of them still dual-booting Windows 10/11. Now each time I boot into Windows is fun. In a bad way.
Yes it literally has come a long way, all the way from 1991 to 2024, I think the only other OS that has managed that is Windows.
I know that's not quite what you meant, it was just a thought I came to think of reading the headline.
But apart from that, it's also become quite good, but IMO it has been for more than a decade now.
It kind of was what I meant. My first Linux experience was in 93 - I wanted to run X on my 486 so I could use maple and other Unix programs from the mainframe in college. Thank god for my comp sci roommate-I don’t think I could have figured it out on my own back then.
Flash forward through the decades and here I am running all the games I want through steam and bottles. Win10 updates are crapping on themselves requiring a reload - I try linux on it expecting it to mostly work, but having a few annoying issues that will be a bear to solve. Nope, it just worked.
It’s impressive to me. A bunch of nerds on the internet mostly volunteered their way into a better OS than the big boys have made.
Yes it is absolutely cool. 😎
I tried Linux earlier, but didn't find it really useful until 2005 when I switched to Linux as my main OS, but games were a huge problem, so I had to dual boot for a couple of years, before I dropped Windows completely.
Also the various BSD-based OSs. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD etc. are still around, and MacOS is based on BSD too. And since BSD (1978) is a Unix, you can trace these all the way back to 1969.
That's kind of true, but MacOS and Mac OSX are 2 different things. What is based on BSD is the MAC OSX that came out in 2001 AFAIK.
And BSD was interrupted for 2 years because of copyright disputes with AT&T. If that hadn't happened, BSD would be the longest continuous OS today, and probably way more significant than it is.
I don't consider MAC OSX as part of BSD, just like Android isn't part of Linux Desktop, but only uses the Linux kernel. OSX took parts of BSD and shielded it behind a proprietary wall, because the BSD license offer no protection from that. So they become separate projects the moment they enter the Apple domain.
Problem here is when people mix up the use of the word Linux as an OS with Linux the kernel. I am 100% sure OP meant Linux as a Desktop OS like GNU/Linux or something like Free desktop according to freedesktop.org. Using his experience with EndeavorOS as an example.
But you are right, it can be said Unix/BSD has an even longer running time, but it has been somewhat problematic and interrupted because of AT&T and SCO and Novell.
Check : What happened to the open source Apple Darwin OS then ?
tl;dr : Darwin OS is kind of obsoleted.
Then Windows 3.0 and Windows 11 are two different things, so by that metric you can't include Windows either.
Good catch, I guess that's mostly true, but Windows NT was an evolution of Windows that mainly got rid of the DOS legacy. Which after Windows NT ran on a compatibility layer, where Windows 3 ran on DOS directly.
It's a bit of a grey area. But I'd say windows NT was a continuation of Windows that shared almost the entire API from Windows 3.0.
The old "System n" OS was also called MAC OS. And the switch to OSX was a completely new OS where the old MAC OS software ran on a compatibility layer.
I guess it can be seen either way.
I'd agree with that.
I think the windows NT lineage should be considered separately from the MS-DOS based ones (pre win 2000).
So I'd say MS-Dos family died with windows 2000. and the current windows lineage traces back to the early windows NT business oriented stuff - not back through windows 95.
Did you mean Windows Me?
2000 was NT-based.
yeah, that's what i meant; 2000 killed off the old one.
I forgot about Me though - never used it.
Let's get even more technical with MacOS X then. Which, btw, doesn't exist anymore as macOS 11 was released in 2020 (tho it still maintains the BSD-legacy in the same way Windows 10 does the NT legacy). It is based on the NeXTSTEP operating system from NeXT Computers, who Apple bought in the 90s to famously also bring Steve Jobs back into the fold. The initial release of NeXTSTEP occurred in 1989, pre-dating Windows and Linux...
Or if the GNU project had used the BSD kernel instead of deciding to make their own from scratch.
Yes BSD just hasn't had much luck, I have no idea why the GNU project didn't use the BSD kernel? They say the Linux kernel was the final piece to make it a complete OS. But AFAIK BSD existed with a kernel way before that.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200330150337/http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050727225542530
Stallman wanted to use TRIX initially but it was considered too limited for the goals of GNU.
BSD was considered too but some of the Berkeley crowd were uncooperative because they secretly planned to make a commercial version (BSDi).
In the the end he compromised on Mach.
Thomas Bushnell:
From "The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin" by Dr. Peter H. Salus.
Interesting, I just don't get that last line, Linux came out in 1991, so how is 1991 way before Linux?
I'm not sure either, that if the GNU project had managed to make a decent kernel, that it would have made the world a different place today. At least not for the better.
The Linux kernel is the most successful piece of open software ever made, and it's GPL like GNU. I am far from sure another kernel would have been equally successful either technologically or in benefiting all sorts of computers.
Linux started in 1991 but initially it was just one student's project. It was only considered mature in 1994, by which time there were over 100 people working on it, lots of software was ported to it, the first distributions came out, and it officially hit version 1.0.
A working, established kernel in 1991 would have given the GNU project a 3 year head start. I'm also unsure if the combination of GPL userland and BSD kernel would have been ideal but 3 years can mean a lot in tech.
I haven't hurd much about that
It's easy to forget about MacOS when it only has 15% desktop market share.
Operating systems that started before 1991 that are still in active development (had a release in the last 12 months):
Multics (1969-)
MVS (1974-) via OS/390 (1995-) -> z/OS (2001-)
VMS (1977) via OpenVMS (1992-)
BSD (1978-) via 386BSD -> FreeBSD, NetBSD -> OpenBSD
HP-UX (1982-)
SunOS (1982-1994) via Solaris (1992-)
MacOS (1984-)
AIX (1986-)
RISC OS (1987-)
Almost made it:
That's an impressive list, 👍
I admit I forgot AIX, but the others there are reasons I didn't consider, I have explained in other posts why on BSD and MAC OS. Same arguments are true for most of your list.
But it's still an impressive and interesting list. And yes AIX absolutely qualifies.
Windows only has more support because it is 10 years older but of course the shareholders will destroy its market dominance.
Windows became popular with Windows 3.0 that came out 1990, And the Linux kernel came in 1991, but the first distro which is a better comparison came in 1993.
So Windows had a 3 year advantage.
But that wasn't the more crucial thing, the real advantage was DOS compatibility, which everything legacy ran on. So with Windows people and companies could still run their old DOS programs, they could even run them better than in an old fashioned DOS system, because Windows was brilliant for multitasking DOS programs.
When you say that the keyboard works: do the brightnesss, mute and volume controls do what they're supposed to do?
HP laptops--at least business-grade ones--are notorious for sending nonstandard scan codes and requiring custom drivers.
They do! I checked all of them. I couldn’t believe it!
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.
Yah, I'm not buying that.
I left I alone, it went off. I came back and wiggled the mouse, nothing happened. I pressed the enter key snd it came back to life -same behavior as my desktop.
Did it again, this time I tried closing the lid and opening it - it sprung to life when the lid opened.
You’re right - not the most thorough tests, but that’s what I did/saw.
Sounds like sleep. Hibernate is when it turns completely off, such that you can leave it unplugged for a weekend and still have battery when it pops you back into your session. It takes longer to save and restore the session than sleep does.
That sounds like sleep. Not hibernate. Hibernate is the process of moving your working ram onto disk. It's similar to a full power off except your current state is saved. Hibernate doesn't usually work oob. Sleep does.
It was a couple hours. Just like on my desktop, wiggling the mouse wakes it from sleep, but not so in whatever that second state is when it’s left for longer. It definitely was something other than sleep. What it was - I’ll let you guys decide. Whether it behaves long term with fans in a laptop bag, that I don’t know - I haven’t had enough run time with it.
I’m just sharing a positive experience. If I see it misbehave I’ll be sure to update the thread with reality. But so far, it really is behaving much better than I expected.
Wake from hibernation usually requires to press the power button, because the computer is off.
Sleep is not disturbed by wiggling the mouse because this trigger is usually disabled on laptops, as it would happen involuntarily.
I did some more digging on this last night. I’m more confused now than I was before, and I don’t know what it’s doing.
The arch wiki defines three states, suspend to ram (sleep), suspend to disk(hibernate), and a hybrid suspend(presumably what my steam deck does).
First there is the “turn off the display” behavior. Doing anything brings the monitor back alive and I’m presented with the Lock Screen.
Second is what I believe to be sleep. This happens when I select “suspend” from the menu or leave it alone for a very long time. This mode doesn’t happen soon (maybe at all) if the computer is doing stuff. It appears to be in a lower power state-but I can’t say why I think that (maybe it’s just because the fans aren’t running? I dunno). Wiggling the mouse or doing anything wakes it back up.
Third is another state. It’s just like the above state, except it will not wake up with mouse movement, or clicking keys on a Bluetooth keyboard. I must push a key on the keyboard, the power button, or open the lid. It’s weird because it responds to things other than the power button.
Interestingly, my desktop behaves exactly the same way. But what’s interesting on the desktop is that I can hear a power relay clicking on from this third state. It’s distinctly different than the 2nd state - exhibiting power cutoff, but still responding to the keyboard.
Neither computer enters any other state even after days of being left alone.
So I dunno. Are modes 2 and 3 like two versions of sleep, and hibernate never activates? Or is state three hibernation but it responds to things it shouldn’t?
I have no idea. But now that I’ve played with it some more - I don’t want to say hibernate is working because I don’t know what it’s doing. All I know is that it has the above three behaviors which are consistent with my desktop machine.
See what happens after actually running:
systemctl hibernateSystems don't normally enter hibernate automatically unless they are at low battery. There is something called modern standby or s0 sleep, versus traditional s3 sleep. The "third state" you describe sounds very much like s3 sleep. I doubt it would switch between s0 and s3 sleep though, normally one or the other is enabled. Maybe it's going to hybrid suspend? In fact that would probably explain it. I believe hybrid suspend involves using s3 sleep state.
Also there are no power relays in modern ATX PSUs to my knowledge, you are describing something else. They use transistors to do all of the switching I believe, aside from the physical switch on the back which also isn't a power relay.
Excellent, that makes sense. I’ll try that command tonight at home, see what it does, and report back. I kind of want to know what it’s doing just because I’m curious.
I say a relay, but I agree with you - I couldn’t imagine a relay being used. But whatever it is on my desktop, it sounds just like a traditional ice cube relay clicking - and it’s quite loud. But I have no idea what it is. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a computer that made that noise before. My laptop makes no such noise obviously.
Could be the transformer, or the inductors. Those can move when in use and they can also make sounds like coil wine.
Hibernate never works. On every work laptop and distro I've used I've always found the laptop spinning and overheating in my bag when I get home. Eventually I just made sure to turn it off completely when I quit work.
I have no idea what you have to do to make that. Hibernation on hardware level is regular shutdown.
RAM configs and weird BIOS settings from Dell is my bet. I never managed to solve it so I am unsure. I have tried several Ubuntu and Debian flavors and have had the same issues. Gonna run some Fedora-based distro and take more care of RAM configs on my next one I think.
Check kernel args for
resume=parameter. If you don't see it, then either it is handled by init(or initramfs) or just isn't enabled. Try addingresume=PARTUUID=and then partitionuuid(not just uuid) of swap partition.Sadly I cannot check this since I do not have the laptops anymore. Will be sure to look into it on my next one though.
Thanks for the info!
It's Linux kernel feature. It's done purely in software.
Which is why I'm saying I don't buy it. Hibernate is notoriously terrible in every distro because it's not working right for most cases because the kernel doesn't do it well. And I know that's really not the kernels fault, because every manufacturer has some stupid implementation of S4 (and S3, frankly) that makes it fail.
S4? Hybernation on hardware level is regular shutdown. Then regular boot happens, kernel sees swap partition marked as hybernation state and restores it.
Hardware shouldn’t matter. Hibernation requires big enough swap to fit all of memory and kernel needs to start with
resumeparameter that points to the swap space it uses for hibernation. Some distros (including mainstream ones like Ubuntu) don’t configure that by default assuming most people don’t want to use it.I don't know about others here but I manually hibernate with
And it works pretty well. I set up 16gb swap for my 16gb ram (Which I know is overkill) but it works. I am on Fedora 40
This has been my experience since 2009 :) I've been using Linux for 15 years now, across four laptops and two desktop PCs, and I've only had a few rare hardware issues. (Sleep not working properly, BIOS update overwriting GRUB, and Wacom tablet mapping needing to be fixed. That's it.)
The hardest part is almost always the installation, and that's almost always attributable to Microsoft Bullshit.
I'm happy you're having a good time :)
EndeavourOS has been a wonderful experience for me, can't recommend it enough.
for me it was very unreliable, I have an i7 7th gen hp envy from I think 2018 and I dual booted Windows and linux for more than a year now jumping distros every now and again just to get to know them better.
I first started with zorin OS and it was good, snappy, long battery life, stable I then tried popOS! and it was even better, I loved it until a few months in I started getting sudden crashes for some reason so I installed endeavourOS as it seems to be very popular and everyone was recommending it, but I immediately after installation started getting crashes every 30 or so minutes which was weird as no other OS linux or windows did that so it didn't seem hardware related I'm now using linux mint and it's wonderful so far
TLDR I daily drove half a dozen OSs and the only one that gave me trouble from the beginning was endeavourOS, which is weird because it feels like I'm the only one...
You're not alone.
I probably have the same Envy as you. It is just an unreliable piece of shit. Open it up and see if it is full of little metal chips, which is how HP "deburrs" the holes on the bottom metal plate.
opened it up a few times mostly to fix the frickin hinge and I didn't see anything wrong visually, and I doubt it's that because the problem only exists on endeavorOS
now that I think about it I think it's the only arch based distro I installed on my laptop and that was a big reason why I tried to use it, it might be an arch problem with my stupid HP
I had the opposite experience. I have been using EndeavourOS on my desktop since November, zero issues. This weekend I've been distro hopping on my old MacBook pro and almost every distro had a problem. Some didn't boot, other had wifi issues, trackpad issues, keyboard volume keys not working, high CPU usage... EndeavourOS was the only one I tried that just worked out of the box with no issues
that's what I hear everyone say, which makes my experience with it all the more weird... I'll just blame HP
Secure boot is still problematic, but it has also become much easier thanks to
sbctl; in the best case you only have to delete the keys in the bios and run 3 or 4 generic commands.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
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 ...
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.
Installing Linux is really easy these days.
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.
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.
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 🙂
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)
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.
While Nobara was great at NVIDIA drivers, they seemed to have completely gotten rid of WACOM drivers, and that was a dealbreaker 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.
Did you use the Bazzite image with the Nvidia driver? They have separate images for that.
I did yes lol
EndeavourOS is easy to install but unclear how to maintain.
pacman,pacdiff,yay,eos, AUR??? The Complete Idiots Guide did not clear things up for me, either. AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.What GUI package managers are you referring to? EOS doesn't supply any.
If I'm not mistaken, this is all stuff you should also be doing on Arch. The single difference is that EOS provides a button in their "Welcome" app that will helpfully run a command for you in a terminal for some of these tasks.
The welcome app shows several package management buttons, but no clear explanation of what they really do or if & how they relate to each other. What’s a beginner to do, click each one multiple times and hope for the best?
By introducing more package management commands than came with Arch, they’ve made it seem more complicated, not less. Am I supposed to use
eos-updateas well as the other commands, or is it supposed to replace one or more of the other commands? Admittedly I’ve only spent half a day with EndeavourOS—the first Arch-based distro I’ve ever used—but I have no idea.I don’t think it compares well to a beginner’s experience of package management on Debian or Red Hat or Alpine-based distros.
Well that's just it; Endeavour is not a beginner distro. It's not designed to be. Endeavour is Arch with a graphical installer and some modest quality of life improvements for users who are otherwise willing to trawl through the Arch wiki for answers. The welcome app really just seems to be there so that you don't have to memorize all the commands or set up aliases, etc, if you don't want to.
So when you ask "am I supposed to X," the answer is that there really isn't a set-in-stone workflow to accomplish anything on EOS or Arch; what you're supposed to do is read the manual, so to speak, and decide for yourself how you want to go about things.
Unlike some other Arch based distros like BlendOS and Manjaro, Endeavour is still very much a DIY distro.
Since when does EndeavourOS supply a GUI package manager? They don't even have Discover installed out of the box.
I don't think it's more confusing than Arch, if you know how to maintain Arch then you're not gonna have any trouble at all.
I agree that their eos popup is a bit meh but you can just press the "Don't show me again" button and be done with it
EndeavourOS is basically Arch with an easy installer and reasonable defaults. Don't expect it to be more than it is!
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.
I'm glad it's going easy for you. Unfortunately after 3 hours of trying I still haven't gotten mint cinnamon installed yet. Bitlocker has been a pain to disable. I'm determined to get it working though, I'm really tired of microsoft
Maybe I upped the game too much when I decided to run Kinoite on Pi...
which DE?
Gnome
Yep, at this point Linux just does what I need it to.
Linux works for roughly 80% of what I do. The BIG missing piece is audio production. The software is mostly okay, it's the actual audio system that's the problem. Audio on Linux sucks big floppy donkey dicks. Yes, I know all about JACK (complicated and never works the way you think it should), RT kernels, Pipewire, etc. It's all terrible.
I have a Lenovo IdeaPad 3 and this was an issue on every Linux install I've had (Endeavour, Arch, and now Debian). I know it isn't a hardware issue because when I first installed Endeavour, I was dual booting with Win11 and it was, no joke, capable of easily twice the volume as Endeavour, and that was even after maxing everything out in Alsamixer. Really not sure what's going on there. I've been incredibly lucky with audio on Linux the entire time I've used it, this is the one black spot on my record.
As long as your pc is a little bit behind its gonna be ok (unless you have a certain wifi chip)
Maaan, you turned off secureboot and tpm though. Does EndeavorOS not support that?
iirc with OpenSuse or Fedora, Secureboot works quite easily too
My experience has been pretty similar. With Windows turning the invasive crap up to 11, I decided to try and jump to Linux. The catch has always been gaming. But, I have a Steam Deck and so have seen first hand how well Proton has been bridging that gap and finally decided to dip my toes back in. I installed Arch on a USB 3 thumbdrive and have been running my primary system that way for about a month now. Most everything has worked well. Though, with the selection of Arch, I accepted some level of slamming my head against a wall to get things how I want them. That's more on me than Linux. Games have been running well (except for the input bug in Enshrouded with recent major update, that's fixed now). I've had no issues with software, I was already using mostly FOSS anyway. It's really been a lot of "it just works" all around.
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.
Just came back to linux myself, installed and configured nixos on a brand new low power n95 processor with quick sync ect.
Walk in the park for declarative config with very easy rollback. Its done 24hrs later, its working well, i dont have anything else to tweak and I am new to nixos as well as having been away from linux for a long time..
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.
You technically don't have to disable these for Linux to work. It's just that a lot of Linux drivers don't get signed fast enough so you'd have to wait longer to get them with secure boot.
Why he disabled TPM, I don't know. It works just fine on my device, although I don't use it.
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.