[kwlug-disc] laptops with Linux preinstalled

[Ron Singh]

Ronald,

Given that I had very limited time to play with the P17 equipped with a 4K
display and an RTX3000 vid and i9-10x CPU, my experiences are glancingly
meaningful at best.
Some quick notes in no particular order:

- Ubu Mate 20.04.02, went swimmingly, everything worked, even the installer
recognized the 4K display and scaled up 200% during(!) the installation
process. The Nvidia driver did not engage even after I installed
V460(tested by Ubu), it kept on using the Nouveau driver. I popped into the
BIOS and set the vid as <discrete>, meaning RTX3000 only, not <hybrid> and
then the Nvidia V460 driver was used.  Smartcard slot was not recognized. I
ran the 5.8.x kernel after initial install, no better, no worse.

- KDE Neon STABLE - In <hybrid> mode and in <discrete> mode, I was greeted
with a black screen after the initial installer page(no scaling, tiny
text!), laptop had to powered off hard.  Tried again in <safe graphics>
mode, got a bit further, but Calamares hung up hard after accepting install
parameters and clicking to start the install. Hard to do a hard power off.
I tried this twice in <hybrid> and <discrete>. Abject failure.

- Kubuntu 20.04.2 - Works a treat in <hybrid> for sure, that's all the time
I had, no scaling during install or after(tiny text), but was able to
easily 200% everything after install. All works lovely after that.
Everything recognized except for Smartcard slot. Nouveau was the only
driver seen even after installing Nvidia V460. Had no time to try it in
<discrete>. I ran the 5.8.x kernel after initial install, no better, no
worse.

Mint 20.1 - in standard install, laptop hangs, blank screen, flashing
cursor. In <safe> graphics mode, laptop shows what is being installed and
hangs on a error to the effect, "buffer I/O error on NVMe". I gave up on
that.

I should have tried KDE Neon Testing Edition and some sort of Arch thing,
but my time was up.
On the next batch of these beasties, in some 3 weeks, I will have a go at
Arch-based ISOs, testing editions of Debian-based ISOs and Ubu 20.10 to see
how the P17 fares.
God, what a beast these things are, ran some 4K/60fps YT game runs and man,
that 230W AC adapter got real warm, the fans went up hard, but not
annoyingly so.
For me, I am sold on the 4K display, but will stay with an i7 and the
Nvidia T2000 vid. The config I played with is fantastic for content
creators, gamers and the like, for business use and older eyes, yeah, 1080P
or 4K(w/200% scaling) and a regular T2000/i7 profile is more than enough.

To sum it up, Ubu Mate/Kubu 20.04.2 is where it's at for now it seems,
though my testing was very limited.
FWIW.

Thanks,

Ron S.



On Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 1:50 AM Ronald Barnes <ron at ronaldbarnes.ca> wrote:

> Ron Singh wrote on 2021-02-27 6:14 p.m.:
>
> > Personally, when the deals comes back up again, I will pop for a 4K 100%
> > gamut display and big up the fonts by some 150% which will give me about
> > a 2.5x increase in actual real estate and not kill my eyes. Well, we
> > will test that theory when I try Kubuntu on said unit Tues next week. I
> > am starting to feel left out when the world is using these new platforms
> > and I am still on the older stuff.
>
> I am feeling the same about always being "on older stuff". My Thinkpad
> was a purchase for my KW area visit - in 2016.
>
>
> Also, Ron, I'm very curious about your KDE experience with whatever
> modern display hardware you throw at it. I'm a dedicated KDE user.
>
>
> However, may I suggest KDEneon?  It's Ubuntu 20.04 plus KDE from the KDE
> crew themselves, so one can choose "stable" or "dev" and get *much*
> earlier access to KDE goodies from an official source.
>
> i.e. I'm really, *really* liking what I'm seeing with Plasma 5.21 for
> the past week or two. Kubuntu probably won't get that 'til, when, 21.04
> or 21.10?
>
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> rb
>
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