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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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I actually installed Mint before going through the Windows OOBE. However, the laptop is so new that the touchpad, touchscreen and fingerprint sensor don’t work in kernels <6.5, and the Wi-Fi card in kernels below 6.0. Most distros ship with kernel 5.x and none have LTS versions with 6.5 (which only became stable this week). I am not nearly skilled enough to go with a non-mainstream or unstable distro. My sister will need Windows so I configured GRUB to boot that by default with 0.2 s hidden timeout and now I can't boot to Linux at all. I’ll be reinstalling it anyway in a few months.
That being said, Windows is also terrible. You can't configure the fingers to only scroll and the active stylus to only draw in a note-taking program, the touchpad's horizontal scrolling is reversed while the vertical is not, the handwriting recognition has not improved since my grandpa's 2004 Windows Mobile PDA, there is a shitton of telemetry, and uninstalling Edge caused the fingerprint reader to stop working somehow. Without asking, it encrypted my storage with BitLocker (which I cannot configure because it's not the Pro edition) and I had to enter two 48-digit codes to unlock the D: and E: partitions on each boot (thankfully I removed that). I would welcome encryption if it unlocked on Windows login and didn't completely lock non-Microsoft account users on the same device from the storage partition. NumLock stays lit in Sleep mode or when the display is closed. Also the manufacturer CaReS aBoUt pRiVaCy and therefore included a camera cover but has a fucking persistent app that “monitors the system” and shows extended warranty popup ads, but is required to limit the battery charging voltage.
And the internal PSU makes a maddening coil whine all the time but the company just said “manufacturing is difficult and we screwed up, just use headphones lol”. It could be fixed by some soft glue, foam or rubber around the inductors but I think I would lose the warranty over this.
Sounds like the biggest (only) issue is drivers, then? Most distros (mint too) have repositories for newer kernels,nyou can turn those. Should be fairly easy to setup
I have been warned against using Mainline due to instability. I will wait until a stable release, it’s my sister's laptop anyway and I have another.
Mmm, as long as the kernels themselves are stable you should be fine. Worst case your computer won't boot up and you simply boot back into the previous kernel
That’s asking too much from somebody who cannot fix a screwed-up GRUB config from a Live USB (it took me several tries to successfully
update-grubfrom the Mint installation, and the one time I succeeded, the config is wrong and I cannot boot into it: GRUB menu never shows up no matter what I press, and I set Windows as default for my noob sister). As I said, I’m not the primary user and I will now be mostly debloating and customizing Windows for her, after which she takes it to college. So working Linux is not on the agenda until Christmas at least, and I’ll put up with WSL (or my own laptop) until then.That part is actually really easy, at least if you have a boot menu (most installs should have this)
Did you read what I wrote? I did have a GRUB boot menu before accidentally disabling it. Now booting “ubuntu” or “EFI” from BIOS just boots the default GRUB entry (Windows).
And pen support is a disaster in Windows. It can differentiate the pen from fingers but giving each a different action? Nope. Krita works but the Erase button shows context menu while the Menu button scrolls. GIMP senses pressure but only allows clicking, not dragging (I can draw points, or straight lines if I hold Shift). In Pinta, there is no pressure dynamics and the Erase button does erase but only when the pen is hovering above the screen. This is what I’ll be resolving in the next days so that I can give my sister a decent guide to notetaking, writing & drawing with the pen.