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.
Yes, if you don’t have a computer that literally came out this year, don’t have 2 separate graphics cards and don’t need HDR, or specific Windows-only software, Linux generally just works.
Hopefully HDR can get crossed off that list soon
Hdr in games is the last frontier from me totally dumping windows.
It looks like it works in KDE 6, albeit a bit janky. Might be worth seeing if it works now, and if not come back in a year or so. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
Yeah I’m using 6, it works well for desktop but not in most games yet
There’s plenty of laptops with 2 separate graphics cards (mine included) and I’d say it’s the ideal experience if you need an NVIDIA card. Everything related to your system is done in the integrated Intel/AMD GPU (which works perfectly) and games and GPU intensive work (like CUDA) gets done in the NVIDIA one.
My issue is family control. I haven’t found a way to get Microsoft family type control yet on Linux, since my sibling uses my computer. The syncing time allowed across devices is the hard part.
Create separate user?
But I can’t remotely set their allowable usage time and access list. Maybe dual booting would work though.
I just did that with hdr on alderlake n95. Easy as hell with NixOS.
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.
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
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.
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
you shouldn’t need to disable tpm
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.
all the way from 1991 to 2024, I think the only other OS that has managed that is Windows
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:
- Minix (1987-2017)
- Genera (1982-2021)
- AmigaOS (1985-2021)
- NeXTSTEP (1987-1997) via GNUStep (1993-2021)
- IBM i (1988-2022)
- SpartaDOS (1988-2022)
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.
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!
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 :)
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.
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…
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
Hibernate works
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.
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!
I don’t know about others here but I manually hibernate with
systemctl hibernateAnd 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
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.
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.S4? Hybernation on hardware level is regular shutdown. Then regular boot happens, kernel sees swap partition marked as hybernation state and restores 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.
Installing Linux is really easy these days.
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
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.
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 …
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)
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
Did you use the Bazzite image with the Nvidia driver? They have separate images for that.
I did yes lol
