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> Don't assume your laptop will work. Agreed. Note though that the Ubuntu live installer has a "Try" mode that gives you a nearly normal desktop experience wit

by rlpb 1y ago

> Don't assume your laptop will work. Agreed. Note though that the Ubuntu live installer has a "Try" mode that gives you a nearly normal desktop experience without installing, and is an effective test environment to discover what will work and what won't. Wifi, graphics and suspend are worth trying out this way.

esperent 1y ago
This is good advice and I should have done that. However, most of the issues I had only showed up after some time of using it. For example, a big one was wifi and it was very intermittent and hard to debug. I think it was going into low power mode in some circumstances and my wifi speed would randomly drop to 100kbs or less. Sometimes turning wifi off and on would fix it, sometimes a restart was required. Thankfully I did fix it eventually but I have no idea which of the many things I tried ended up working. One thing I didn't have major issues with was my Nvidia graphics card, which was a surprise.
- Yohvee7u 1y ago
  Ah, the issues you mentioned are the top 3 nvidia issues :P - wake from suspend - laptop power consumption - poor wayland support - sudden desktop restarts - hidpi, external monitors, virtualization Nvidia's proprietary crap has always worked badly, the re-implement everything and put all their development effort into NIH syndrome instead of playing along with the already existing open source stack.
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    > - wake from suspend - laptop power consumption - poor wayland support - sudden desktop restarts - hidpi, external monitors, virtualization Now I'm a desktop user, so the first two don't really impact me, and the rest has been working fine for the ~2 years I've been in Wayland+Arch+Gnome across 3 different NVIDIA GPUs. Not sure why virtualization is there, but it also seems to work, although via WSL2 is slightly buggy, but I blame that on Microsoft rather than Linux/NVIDIA.
  - esperent 1y ago
    I don't know about that. If you search around you'll find that the two most common problems people have even installing linux (any variety) on a laptop is wake from suspend and power consumption. Very few of these laptops have discrete GPUs. As to sudden restarts, this has never happened to me.

by rlpb 1y ago

esperent 1y ago

This is good advice and I should have done that. However, most of the issues I had only showed up after some time of using it. For example, a big one was wifi and it was very intermittent and hard to debug. I think it was going into low power mode in some circumstances and my wifi speed would randomly drop to 100kbs or less. Sometimes turning wifi off and on would fix it, sometimes a restart was required. Thankfully I did fix it eventually but I have no idea which of the many things I tried ended up working. One thing I didn't have major issues with was my Nvidia graphics card, which was a surprise.

Yohvee7u 1y ago
Ah, the issues you mentioned are the top 3 nvidia issues :P - wake from suspend - laptop power consumption - poor wayland support - sudden desktop restarts - hidpi, external monitors, virtualization Nvidia's proprietary crap has always worked badly, the re-implement everything and put all their development effort into NIH syndrome instead of playing along with the already existing open source stack.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  > - wake from suspend - laptop power consumption - poor wayland support - sudden desktop restarts - hidpi, external monitors, virtualization Now I'm a desktop user, so the first two don't really impact me, and the rest has been working fine for the ~2 years I've been in Wayland+Arch+Gnome across 3 different NVIDIA GPUs. Not sure why virtualization is there, but it also seems to work, although via WSL2 is slightly buggy, but I blame that on Microsoft rather than Linux/NVIDIA.
- esperent 1y ago
  I don't know about that. If you search around you'll find that the two most common problems people have even installing linux (any variety) on a laptop is wake from suspend and power consumption. Very few of these laptops have discrete GPUs. As to sudden restarts, this has never happened to me.