Windows 11 has finally annoyed me enough with the pushy AI, schizophrenic half-classic half-"Modern" (aka TIFKAM*) interface, and generally not being the greatest performance wise, even though I'm on reasonable hardware (a Lenovo Legion Legion 5P 15ARH05H). So I decided to go on an adventure back into Desktop Linux. My distributions of choice to try this time - Linux Mint 22.1 Cinnamon, and Bazzite, for a pure gaming distro. I figured I'd document the good and the bad here.
First things first, I tried doing a Refresh My PC on Win11 to reinstall a minimal version, because some games just plain don't work on Linux yet due to anti-cheat. (Looking at you, Destiny 2. (Call of Duty MW2 is in the same boat, but that's degenerated into a complete crapshoot now - I used to love playing DMZ, but it's very much dead and full of cheats. C'est la vie.) That decided to keep cancelling on me every time I tried, so I eventually gave up, created boot media, and just blatted it with a SHIFT-F10, diskpart, and clean on both drives, creating a couple of dedicated partitions across the two drives in the laptop. Easy enough, and simple enough to get back up and running. I'm under no illusions of what definitely won't work on Linux, as I've got a Steam Deck. But I digress.
Things I knew I was going to have to work around: Missing Phone Link on Windows 11 (I figure I can use KDE Connect or something similar on both Windows and Linux), the aforementioned games, and a few bits of software that was probably going to grumble about being run under Wine or a VM.
So here we begin the journey. As I knew I was going to be doing a dual boot with Bazzite (because why not, might as well try out a dedicated gaming one. I'll probably regret that, but not like I can't delete it later). Installed Ventoy on a flash drive, and copied on the ISOs for Mint, Bazzite and Gparted Live (because naturally Windows' disk management is often a git about shrinking partitions). Rebooted, forgot about the joy of Secure Boot, and promptly got a mokutil screen - something I'm familiar with. Easy enough, just go in, install a key from the flash drive (in a folder conveniently labelled "VTOYEFI" followed by an "ENROLL_THIS_KEY_IN_MOKMANAGER" entry). At least, it would have been simple had I read the instructions about Secure Boot on the Ventoy website in the first place, but let's pretend it all went smoothly like it did the second time round. 🫠So far, so good. Fire up gparted live... and watch it crash horribly because I've got both the CPU integrated AMD graphics and the discrete nVidia graphics enabled. Good start. Head into EFI setup, disabled the onboard GPU, and off we go again. Re-partitioned up, all fine so far, and then back into setup to re-enable the hybrid graphics. (Also, another minor annoyance, no USB keyboard support in GRUB via USB3 ports it appears. I'll have to look to see if there's a legacy keyboard enable option in the BIOS like on my old PC at some point. Maybe rEFIt will be more sane.)
Booted off the USB again, and into Mint. Worked fine, picked up the two displays connected (laptop and one external on HDMI at the time). Hit the install button, manually partitioned it up with a view to throwing 75GB on the system drive for Mint and starting with 375GB for a /home partition on the second SSD, both ext4 - boring but reliable. Chose to encrypt the home directory, mostly to see Did consider setting up ZFS - I'm a big fan of ZFS - but it seemed like a lot of hassle for an initial install. So far, so good. Installed up fine. Went through the welcome screen setup, chose a dark theme, set up system snapshots (nicely done with hardlinks via Timeshift, that's cool), installed the latest proprietary nVidia drivers via the Driver Manager, installed updates and configured local mirrors, so far so good. Was weird installing via a GUI, my usual method is all CLI, but it was pleasant enough.
Then decided to uninstall Thunderbird (I use Gmail at the moment, I can consider TB if/when I finally migrate away from that), and added a couple of packages. Added the Mozilla Nightly repo and installed Firefox Nightly, KeepassXC and Dropbox. First two went fine. The third, the Dropbox native client, it turns out isn't at parity with Windows and doesn't believe in online-only storage and caching on demand, and promptly decided to try and download 400GB onto the 375GB home partition. Erm... nope. Promptly signed out and deleted the Dropbox folder - guess I'll be finding an alternative client or method for that then.
In the meantime, I'd tried running updates from the Update Manager, and it started whinging about 403 errors from one of the mirrors. I rolled my eyes, and changed mirror, then promptly closed the update manager and went to the command line, and did a straight "apt full-upgrade". Cool, that did what it was supposed to do. Attempted to reboot, and was faced with this:
Now there's the desktop Linux experience I remembered. Quick web search suggested it was wifi related. It wouldn't go away, I shrugged, hard powered down, and rebooted. Remembered how ugly the Grub default boot menu is, and made a note to install rEFIt later.
Booted back into the desktop. Noted the complete lack of any other monitors than the built-in one. Guess that nVidia driver worked well then. Peachy. Guess I'll be going to search for why that is then. Did spot an option in the nVidia settings called "PRIME Profiles", which I'm guessing is the "use the built in GPU unless we're doing something beefy", but changing the setting and rebooting did nothing. Plus side, that lockup I saw earlier around the WiFi card didn't happen this time.Maybe because I'd connected to the wifi network on the laptop, or maybe it was the system update. I was just happy it went away.
Ahh. Of course. A bit of investigation suggests the issue is, unsurprisingly, my old friend Secure Boot from earlier. I don't know why I bothered trying to keep it enabled, it's an absolute pain in the arse. Should have known really, I've been arguing with secure boot and CrowdStrike modules today at work with a very similar outcome, and my response there was also "kill secure boot". I did spot a mokutil screen appear when I booted earlier, but didn't really know what to do with it at the time, so I suspect I just exited, and promptly failed to sign the appropriate driver. I do remember it asked me to add a password for signing... derp. Back to Nouveau I go and reinstall it then I suspect, it's likely the least painful option. Time to reboot again...
Yup. That got me back onto 5 screens. Set the left one to portrait, and got greeted with this, which I'm hoping is just an anomaly with the driver.
Bit borked, that. Let's try installing the nVidia drivers again... time to reboot. Hopefully I get said signing screen.
Spoiler: I did not.
Another bit of hunting on the web, and the data seems to suggest I need to sign it with a .der file that is on the laptop. Found one that looks suspiciously like what I'm looking for - /var/lib/shim-signed/mok/MOK.der, and a corresponding private file. Running it through openssl suggests it could be it.
Found a page on how to install nVidia drivers in Mint via the Mint forums. Noticed the following command on there: sudo update-secureboot-policy --enroll-key. Went through a very similar process to the one I went through earlier via the GUI when I first installed multimedia codecs. Looks like that might be the thing that forced mokutil to re-prompt. Let's try giving it another reboot and see what happens.
Behold! The mokutil blue screen. Went to "Enroll MOK", checked the certificate (matched what I'd seen previously from OpenSSL), enrolled it, rebooted, and I have all my screens working. Complete with a non-flickering portrait monitor. Cool, that's a good start. It'd have been nice if I'd been told what I needed to do before I got to that screen previously - maybe one to comment as a feature improvement later to the Mint folk - but at least we got there in the end. Thankfully I'm a pretty seasoned Linux user, or I'd likely have been banging my head against the wall for a bit there.
(I have to say at this point I'm beginning to question my decision to install two distributions, but I've started, so I'll finish.)
Okay. So far so good. Sound works. Doesn't appear to have the dual speaker / line out option that Windows does, but I don't care terribly much, as I'm generally using one or the other anyway. Time to try and connect to my Bluetooth headphones. Double click on Bluetooth Devices, turn the device on, and look confused as to how I'm supposed to do so. Ah, of course, the entirely intuitive Adaptor->Search. The same Search on the toolbar that is greyed out, by the look of it 🙄 Okay. Let's connect to the WH-1000XM3s. "Pairing failed." Tried right clicking on the headphones and clicking get info, and this happened:
As a side note, I just discovered that I have to install an Emote package to be able to pop up the equivalent of windows+full stop emoji picker to insert the above rolling eye emoji. The hotkey defaults to CTRL+ALT+E, but happily remapped to Win+Full Stop. - or, in UNIX parlance, Super and Full Stop - but weirdly, I have to press it twice to make it pop up with that combination. Meh, I can live with CTRL+ALT+E, it does make more sense.) I don't mind having to manually install the extra functionality though, it was somewhat the point of this exercise to only install the software and functionality I specifically wanted.
Another minor tangent I discovered while searching for said missing emoji picker - the Software Manager will seamlessly often either system-wide installation (classic install) or a Flatpak install, which are containers with a full set of dependencies as a static bundle, Ã la Docker. I thought it was a choice, but it's just showing where it's going to install from. Have occasionally seen issues with Flatpaks - I remember having issues on the Steam Deck with KeepassXC not being able to talk to web browsers via the appropriate extensions due to restrictions with Flatpaks, something that doesn't occur with regular system packages - but this seems pretty seamless.
Hmm. Interesting. Just realised there's only a start bar (or "panel") on my primary screen, not the secondary monitors. And clicking on the Firefox icon when I've 2 windows minimised both, and would only restore one. Had to alt+tab to get to the other one. That's somewhat annoying too. Aha, though hovering over it did present both windows so I could restore the other one. That's something.
Now, by this point, I'm actually starting to appreciate how much easier Windows is to install and get working properly. I'm a good few hours into this, and Windows does have a tendency to mostly Just Work. This feels like it... well, does not.
Back to the Bluetooth setup. That greyed out search button stopped being greyed out, which is nice. Waiting for it to finish its scan, then try and pair again. Realised they'd re-paired to my phone when I switched them back on. Disconnected them from there, tried to reconnect again, no joy (though it did do the LE_WH-1000XM3 thing). Then they appeared as the WH-1000XM3s again - and they actually paired up. Nice, supports LDAC out of the box, and it looks like it auto-switched the audio to the device too. That works. Cool. Good time to install Spotify. Huh, there's also Spot (which was spotted, no pun intended, the other day on a plane on the Steam Deck) and Psst. The joy of many alternatives. Sod it, let's install them all and see what looks better. (Then spotted Spotube, yet another alternative for Spotify and YouTube music... too many choices...) Huh, turns out "psst" in the software manager is the "Power stress and shaping tool". Pretty sure that's not what I was looking for. Whatever, I'll just use the official client right now, can't be arsed messing about.
Oh. Yeah. No working (or at least useful) Dropbox client yet. *grump* I could install the official client and just not sync the giant 300GB folder with Insta360 videos in it, but I'm still feeling irritated about it. And for some reason the Spotify client doesn't have the login with QR code option that the Windows one does. Of course it doesn't. Guess I'll be pulling up Keepass2Android and trying to type this mess of random characters then for now. Yay. Still, it did work, and Spotify now plays.
Hmm. Instant messaging clients. I can have Telegram (or several extended open source versions) natively. WhatsApp? Forget it, they're just a bunch of web wrappers, and you aren't getting voice or video calls through it. That's annoying. One of the things I often do is answer WhatsApp/Telegram/phone calls via my PC (the latter via Phone Link). A bit of research suggests I may be able to do this via an audio gateway feature, but I'm putting that under "to do later", I'm already getting pretty tired and annoyed with this whole setup procedure. Did just pair the phone to the laptop over bluetooth, and it says I'm connected for calls and audio. Does that mean it's working on a basic level? Well, the phone is certainly using the PC's speaker or headphone output. I think it's working for a phone call (albeit I sound terrible), it's certainly not working for Discord on the phone. I'll have to try a WhatsApp and Telegram call with someone tomorrow, see if it works or not. I suspect the answer here may, sadly, simply be "hook the headphones up to the phone in the daytime", and WhatsApp calls on my desktop are a non-starter. mutters something about wanting unified clients
Urgh. Still need my password manager, which means I still need Dropbox. Fine. Guess it's getting installed with a very selective sync for now. Bleurgh. Annoying. Reinstalled it, briefly got the GUI that let me tweak the selective sync... then it's no longer available under preferences on the Dropbox app? What the shit, Dropbox? God, roll on my OwnCloud/NextCloud/whateverCloud install when I set my new server up. (Edit: The answer was rclone, which I couldn't find to save my life at the time.)
Sod this for a game of soldiers for now. I'm going to bed.
(He says - also just spotted https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps to investigate tomorrow. Which I just spent 20 minutes on. Bad Rick, no biscuit. Just discovered rootless Docker mode too. Which I'm pretty sure I just cocked up. Rabbit hole moment...)
2 hours later. Still here. Discovered the Easy Effects flatpak (not the system one, it's more faff than I could be bothered with getting the DeepFilterNet .so to load), and enabling the Deep Noise Remover on the input. Remarkably effective at removing the background hum of the UPS. Admittedly I shouldn't still be awake, but here we are...
* The Interface Formerly Known as Metro, as coined by The Register.
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