Posted on 06/03/2021 9:43:57 AM PDT by ShadowAce
As much as I like Fedora, I tend to agree with this. THis new laptop is also running coreboot, rather than the traditional BIOS. I *was* going to try to dual boot with Pop!_OS and Fedora, but Pop! uses systemd-boot and Fedora uses grub. That, combined with the EFI boot partition, makes dual booting tricky. I'm learning my way around apt, so I think I'll be OK as far as work goes.
I never did like Gnome. When running Fedora, I'd install the server edition, and add in xfce. I tried to avoid gnome stuff as much as possible. Even in Pop! I installed KDE and I log into that rather than Gnome.
I've never had an issue with LibreOffice. No one in my office can tell the difference between my docs and theirs. But I don't use overly complicated features either. Mine are pretty basic. :)
Yeah—my work runs a few instances of RHEL on LPARs. it works pretty nice.
You are not at all crazy, and it will be one of the wisest things you could ever do to make the move away from MS. Never too soon. I did it almost 5 years ago now and immediately realized I should have done it even sooner. And it’s free and easy...
1. Use BIOS to detect the new drive of course because it is all new hardware.
2. Set BIOS to UEFI boot and set the boot order to USB first.
3 On a Windows machine use “Rufus” to make a Linux ISO USB stick.
4. Boot into the Linux stick on the new machine and install.
5. Using the Update manager bring all the programs in the system up to date.
6. Using the driver manager have it check the system for any suggested new drivers, such as video drivers.
After Linux is installed it will let you move and folders and files you like from of another machine to any USB stick, and from any USB stick into the folders in linux. Everything is compatible, even the MS .doc files if you have Libreoffice suite in your Linux distribution.
I highly highly recommend Mint Cinnamon as the best and easiest to use full featured turnkey package. It comes with just about every GUI program you are going to need all boxed with it ready to go. You will rarely need to use the Terminal interface with this Distro. Other than labels to interpret, it functions and feels like Win 7 and understandable immediately. You will be pleasantly surprised at how familiar it is right out of the box.
Yep... And what I found with other Distros is that I ended up needing to download and install many of those programs and new dependencies that already come packaged with the Cinnamon bundle all compatible with each other tested and working correctly anyhow.
Everyone keeps harping on the term “light” when a full Cinnamon package is only 2 gigs anyhow. Why worry so much about a “lighter” version than cinnamon when Win 10 is 18 gigs. Compared to Win 10 even the full enchilada cinnamon is “extremely light”.
Just for fun and interest - can you post
cat /proc/cmdline
to see if there’s any special tricks being done there?
initrd=\EFI\Pop_OS-b2504948-3531-4b42-aa83-xxxxxxxxxxxx\initrd.img root=UUID=b2504948-3531-4b42-aa83-xxxxxxxxxxxx ro quiet loglevel=0 systemd.show_status=false splash
Gotcha. Well I guess PopOS (never run into that one before) is doing some kind of magic for you - probably it’s a fork of tge mainline kernel or loading some Nvidia kernel driver using systemd or init scripts or the like or some combo.
I do know that the wifi driver is cfg80211 / mac80211. Need to figure out the iwl package for that for Fedora. Also gotta figure out how to get DisplayPort working. Already got sound working (another gotcha).
The good news is that my /home is one a separate ssd, so I can install an OS rather easily. I've written a script that will install and configure things to my liking as well, so once the base OS is installed, I just run the script, reboot into the new kernel, and I'm just like I was before the experiment. :)
Very nice indeed.
Briefly skimmed over some stuff here: https://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2015/fedora-nvidia-guide/comment-page-1/#comments
It’s not well organized and it’s generally a hot mess but I was able to get at least the gist of
1. Either need to sign the Nvidia blob driver or turn off UEFI secure boot. (I know you said you had UEFI).
2. Need to blacklist nouveau on kernel commandline (which I know remember doing myself way, way back in the day hence my earlier question). (OK obviously PopOS isn’t doing this but maybe they are not building nouveau in either?)
Not sure this helps at all but these two points do resonate with stuff I’ve either done or read about in the past. I do think there is even more to it than just this though.
Yeah—I’ve read those things before as well. With coreboot, though, I don’t think there is an option to turn off UEFI. At least, I haven’t found it yet.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.