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.
In my experience the VAST majority of people that say things are hard on Linux have never actually tried it ...
Same with people that complain cats are not LoYAl lIkE DOgS... They have never had cats
Feels like people tend to like dogs more because they find them more submissive and easier to control.
I'm not having a great time with DisplayLink driver support, personally. Various applications I use with mixed levels of support too, along with missing out on Windows specific GPU features.
This has been my most successful round of Linux adoption, but there are still removedling issues and confusion. The biggest difficulty is that my accumulated support knowledge of like 20 years is useless and I am relearning basic issue identification and resolution processes.
The internet being a raging dumpster fire, support is kind of patchy on more niche topics. All the good, useful discussions are largely happening behind closed doors at this point on everyone's Discords and whatnot.
I’m not having a great time with DisplayLink driver support, personally
We used this for work and I had a bit of a hard time setting up 4 years ago when covid hit... I eventually was able to but later on moved on to a different set up.
We still use it on Windows when I go to the office (once a week) and it still shit there
If you post specifics I may be able to help you.
Various applications I use with mixed levels of support too, along with missing out on Windows specific GPU features.
well yes... Windows specific stuff is not usually available in Linux... unless we are talking about gaming which is catching up really quick
The biggest difficulty is that my accumulated support knowledge of like 20 years is useless and I am relearning basic issue identification and resolution processes.
Yes, it's a different OS... not sure if you were expecting any differently but this is the power of the walled gardens... you learn to live in them and then find it hard to do anything differently... IMO the transition was worth it for me... I hope it is for you
The internet being a raging dumpster fire, support is kind of patchy on more niche topics. All the good, useful discussions are largely happening behind closed doors at this point on everyone’s Discords and whatnot.
This is what I disagree with... that has not been my experience AT ALL. The worst I can say about online support for Linux is that, some communities, are a little caustic (looking at you Arch support, although you do have great online help posted).
If anything, when I can't seem to find anything regarding something I am looking for, I have defaulted to realizing I may not be asking the right question... RARELY discussions for Linux support happen behind closed doors... it's just not even in the spirit of the Linux communities. Again, if you'd like to post specifics maybe we can help
I'm going to try to take this in the spirit that it was provided, but you're using a lot of "..."s, and a lot of implications that what I'm saying is obvious, for a person trying to provide earnest assistance. I wasn't requesting technical support or expressing surprise at these things, I was merely expressing that these were the things I was generally encountering difficulty with my transition to Linux as a daily driver.
The DisplayLink driver for instance is running, and basically functional, but ends up running slowly, with distortions, and instability. It also isn't signed, so my plan to still run Secure Boot with the distro I'm using alongside Windows is out (without a lot of faff), but that largely won't matter excusing some specific work setups that I don't currently have to worry about. Having useful AMD specific driver level tools on Windows that don't exist in Linux isn't a surprise, it is a discouragement.
Forum content and non-Reddit content are a pain to locate, especially when you don't know how to frame your problem in Linux syntax, as you say. Communities are either open but in specific places that I will never find without already knowing about it, or happening in places that aren't accessible without having already joined, like the Discord of the specific software I need guidance on. My experience has been that there is basic info and there is advanced info out there, but intermediate info that lets you bridge the gap is a challenge to locate, especially with subtle differences in certain steps that are distro/package manager specific. Yet I press on.
I'm going to try to take this in the spirit that it was provided, but you're using a lot of "..."s,
No ill will intended. You must be young and I'm old, my kids constantly complain about my abuse of the "..." They say I always sound ominous
The only part my intention was to sound like "well, yes that's obvious" was the part where you missed some windows specific GPU functions
For the rest I was meaning to say that I recognize those problems but didnt find them insurmountable at the time I had to face them.
I still have to deal with windows today because of work and I find the amount of orphan issues (or issues with no solution 3 years after reporting) saddening because I rarely see that in the Linux community
True, I may be "over the hump" in terms of the initial learning curve but I encourage you to keep at it, you'll find it enjoyable in no time
BTW, told my kids about your comment on my abuse of the "..." and they choked laughing for like half an hour. So there is that hehehehe
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!
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.
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
Worth noting that on Fedora this is true, UNLESS you use the proprietary nvidia drivers. Then no secure boot
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 :)
As long as your pc is a little bit behind its gonna be ok (unless you have a certain wifi chip)
EndeavourOS is easy to install but unclear how to maintain.
- Don’t use GUI package managers, but here, have some GUI package managers.
pacman,pacdiff,yay,eos, AUR??? The Complete Idiots Guide did not clear things up for me, either. AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.
Don’t use GUI package managers, but here, have some GUI package managers.
What GUI package managers are you referring to? EOS doesn't supply any.
AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.
If I'm not mistaken, this is all stuff you should also be doing on Arch. The single difference is that EOS provides a button in their "Welcome" app that will helpfully run a command for you in a terminal for some of these tasks.
The welcome app shows several package management buttons, but no clear explanation of what they really do or if & how they relate to each other. What’s a beginner to do, click each one multiple times and hope for the best?
By introducing more package management commands than came with Arch, they’ve made it seem more complicated, not less. Am I supposed to use
eos-updateas well as the other commands, or is it supposed to replace one or more of the other commands? Admittedly I’ve only spent half a day with EndeavourOS—the first Arch-based distro I’ve ever used—but I have no idea.I don’t think it compares well to a beginner’s experience of package management on Debian or Red Hat or Alpine-based distros.
What’s a beginner to do
Well that's just it; Endeavour is not a beginner distro. It's not designed to be. Endeavour is Arch with a graphical installer and some modest quality of life improvements for users who are otherwise willing to trawl through the Arch wiki for answers. The welcome app really just seems to be there so that you don't have to memorize all the commands or set up aliases, etc, if you don't want to.
So when you ask "am I supposed to X," the answer is that there really isn't a set-in-stone workflow to accomplish anything on EOS or Arch; what you're supposed to do is read the manual, so to speak, and decide for yourself how you want to go about things.
Unlike some other Arch based distros like BlendOS and Manjaro, Endeavour is still very much a DIY distro.
I'm glad it's going easy for you. Unfortunately after 3 hours of trying I still haven't gotten mint cinnamon installed yet. Bitlocker has been a pain to disable. I'm determined to get it working though, I'm really tired of microsoft
I agree, and I love it. Sure there are some iffy aspects of it that may give trouble, but for the most part a lot of those problems I've experienced can easily be solved by a quick search or are "would be nice but i'm sure it will work soon" features, and I can't even think of any recent examples with the latter. So I'm left with a great learning experience to how my computer works, another win.
Linux has also taught me to make good references. You get a very different experience to your computer than with a regular windows machine that 'works'.
I like to point out how I can update installed apps with a simple command (e.g., sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade).
No bloat, no ads, open source and the communities are just amazing and helpful.
What's there not to like?
I don't think I could ever use windows again, and it makes me proud.
