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.
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.
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!
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.
And sometimes the Windows only software is more “Windows only” and works with Wine
Windows 3D Builder though is firmly in the Windows Only category though. Which is a bummer because in my experience it’s the best at repairing 3D models for 3D printing that have errors like holes, redundant geometry, inverted faces, etc.
However, some older programs may actually behave better in Wine than say on Windows 11.
Oh, it also supports ancient 16 bit programs which Windows doesn’t anymore.I didn’t know about the 16-bit support, which is really cool to say the least
I see myself as still somewhat of a noob to Linux
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
You should be able to get most games to work with some extra tinkering.
Got Armored Core running in HDR with this.
Also, I found it was enough to run the just the game in gamescope, no need to run the entirety of steam in a gamescope window. Just set the launch options for the game you want to enable HDR on.
Yeah I can get HDR to enable w game scope but it looks way off in stuff I’ve tested like elden ring or Tekken 8. Gets kinda blown out looking.
The dual GPU problem has actually for the most part also been solved; Optimus rarely poses a problem these days
Yup. Fedora on my laptop defaults the internal GPU and you can run any program with the dedicated card with a right click. Pretty nice compared to last year where I had to throw my laptop across the room 😂
You probably won’t be able to run an LTS kernel on a brand new PC that just hit the market. But using the most recent kernel for arch or a derivative like endevorOS should work after like a week maximum.
I did have an issue like this on Ubuntu and its what made me actually start distro hopping since it worked fine on fedora and Arch using the latest kernels.
I experienced this when installing my AMD Radeon RX 7600XT, it was released two weeks prior to me installing it, back then, and Linux Mint and games in it were clearly running off software rendering. Turns out LM uses a more tried and true LTS kernel by default, luckily ot easily allows you to switch or manage kernels through the GUI updater, so I got that fixed easily.
Huge shout out to the people working faster than some do at their jobs and for 100% less pay.
Dual graphics cards worked fine already 10 years ago for me. What issue are people having?
And HDR has been working for me for over 6 months with Plasma 6. I wish people wouldn’t upvote this stuff that gives the wrong idea.
Pretty sure HDR is “working” in the sense that KDE went ahead and implemented unfinished specs, so that the very few apps that also went ahead with it can do HDR, but only on Wayland which breaks other things that are behind, and also often requires very recent versions and specific obscure parameters to be passed to enable HDR support?
Yeah, it’s a great step forwards and great for enthusiasts, but unless I’m very behind on the state of HDR myself, it’s still something I’d consider “coming soon” and not proclaim it’s just “working for me”. It certainly feels like a “year from now” kind of thing - something to anticipate, not try to force just yet.
I don’t know when the last time you used Wayland was but in Plasma 6 I wouldn’t say it “breaks other things.” Before Plasma 6 I had plenty of problems and stuck on X11 but now it’s great. So give it another try if you haven’t recently. Every issue I used to have with it a year ago is gone.
As for the obscure parameters, as of Plasma 6.1 all you have to do for games is add
gamescope --hdr-enabledto the launch options for the necessary games. I don’t think that’s particularly difficult or obscure. You can also set up Steam itself to run in gamescope with --hdr-enabled and then every game will have it.For HDR movies/TV/YouTube you can copy/paste the necessary options into your mpv.conf and then forget about it. It’s a one-time thing and then it works forever.
The biggest place HDR is missing is in Firefox, but Firefox doesn’t have HDR on Windows either so that’s not a Linux thing that’s a Firefox thing.
In my opinion, HDR on the desktop isn’t really there yet in general. Not just on Linux but on computers as a whole. HDR right now is really only for enthusiasts. The only monitors that properly support HDR1000 are $500+ for the entry level ones and $800+ for the decent ones. And you have to choose between miniLED with local dimming that don’t have enough zones yet or OLEDs that get burn-in after a year.
I use Wayland exclusively, and I’m on up to date Arch. I’m talking about issues like screenshare issues with software, XDG desktop portal screenshare randomly breaking, steam notifications started positioning wrongly, steam’s search stopped working (not 100% sure if those two are Wayland)…
I also tried running a game in game scope with HDR enabled, experimenting with options and env cars I found online, but it just didn’t work. It was a sample size of one, but it was one game I wanted to play with friends, so I gave up in favor of just playing.
I also don’t use MPV - I tried testing HDR with it, and it probably worked fine, but I don’t have the right media to test it. (Side note: I should try mpv more seriously, but I haven’t needed a video player much in general)
An extra annoyance is the fact that the LDR colors are quite off with HDR enabled on Plasma. I suspect this is the fault of the display or configuration, but it’s still something I’d have to spend time researching and fixing, only to barely get any use out of it.
I haven’t tried setting up steam itself in gamescope, but wouldn’t it be limited to one window then? Could try it just to experience an HDR game, but otherwise it’s a bit of a deal breaker.
You might be right about it being for enthusiasts in the first place, but I feel like there’s a lot of people who will just pay up for a good screen that includes HDR, and on Windows I’d imagine you can just turn it on and start getting HDR from various sources - something that will surely become possible on Linux, but will take a while longer.
All that said, I’m not saying this to shit on Wayland or the developers’ work on HDR. Not long ago HDR was something that just wasn’t possible, and people were whining it’ll take another 10 years at this rate. I’m excited to see the next update on this, as well as stable wider adoption, but that’s the thing - that’s something I’m anticipating, not something I’m gonna be using now.
I also tried running a game in game scope with HDR enabled, experimenting with options and env cars I found online, but it just didn’t work.
To be fair I don’t play a lot of games so I have only used HDR in Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring but it worked perfectly in both so I am 2 for 2.
An extra annoyance is the fact that the LDR colors are quite off with HDR enabled on Plasma. I suspect this is the fault of the display or configuration, but it’s still something I’d have to spend time researching and fixing, only to barely get any use out of it.
Plasma is supposed to be able to display SDR content correctly while HDR is enabled (which Windows 10 can’t even do) but I can’t actually test that properly because my monitor doesn’t allow you to disable local dimming while in HDR mode so desktop stuff is completely unusable anyway. But if it doesn’t look right it is probably something you can fix in your monitor’s OSD.
I actually suspect the colors are correct and your normal colors are the incorrect ones. If your monitor has a wider gamut than sRGB you need to either A) set it to sRGB mode or B) use a calibrated ICC profile. If you aren’t doing one of those then all of your colors are oversaturated. When you switch into HDR they are correct but it looks dull in comparison because you’re used to them being wrong. It’s a pretty common thing people experience on Windows as well. Not a lot of people realize their colors are horribly inaccurate by default.
Also, most people only turn HDR on when it’s needed. You can add a keybind for it in Plasma’s shortcut settings. The commands are
kscreen-doctor output.1.hdr.enableandkscreen-doctor output.1.hdr.disable. You may need to change the output number to the correct one.I haven’t tried setting up steam itself in gamescope, but wouldn’t it be limited to one window then?
Yep. I don’t like it honestly. It’s just an option if you want to set it up once rather than on a per-game basis.
but I feel like there’s a lot of people who will just pay up for a good screen that includes HDR
That’s the thing, even if you pay up there aren’t actually any “good” HDR monitors. At least not in the same way as there are good HDR TVs. That’s why some people use 48 inch TVs as monitors instead of actual monitors. There’s a few monitors that are “good enough” but I wouldn’t call any of them “good” right now. I am one of those people who considers anything below HDR1000 to not be real HDR. If you look at the rtings.com monitor table, out of 317 monitors they’ve reviewed only TWO of them actually hit the 1000 nits of real scene brightness needed for HDR1000. And both are miniLED with local dimming which have haloing and blooming because there’s not enough dimming zones.
I have a feeling that by the time genuinely “good” HDR monitors exist (maybe 2-3 more years) that will be enough time for Linux programs to seamlessly support it instead of requiring launch arguments.
I do have my screen set to sRGB, and it is possible it’s simply incorrect in SDR - when I enable HDR, everything looks greenish IIRC. As for color profiles, I think there might’ve been a built-in profile that was automatically enabled in the settings? It’s possible I’m looking at horrible colors and not realizing, but at least I’m not doing things like a friend, who “optimized” his colors to improve gaming performance, and keeps complaining about colors being weird 😅
Color management is annoying, since you need a correct reference to verify anything, and I never looked into that.
As for the monitors, I specifically meant good screens, not screens with good HDR - I feel like if you go for a good screen these days, it’ll likely have some HDR support, letting people simply try it out with little effort on Windows.
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.
“Generally” is the key word. I’m a linux user since slackware on diskettes. My daily driver is Mint, because lazy. I have 2 VMs with kali and kinoite.
A couple of days ago a kernel update borked my install. A problem with the Ryzen graphics driver.
For me it was trivial. Boot into the previous kernel, timeshift roll back, and back in business, but I can see how a newbie woul go into panic.
A satisfied “customer” will recommend you to a friend. A pissed off one will tell 10.
Or a Mac ime. I tried to run mint OS on a 2016 intel MBPro and it was a disaster. I got it up and running but the Touch Bar didn’t work, the Wi-Fi didn’t work, all kinds of issues.
Apple doesn’t support Linux
I got it up and running but the Touch Bar didn’t work, the Wi-Fi didn’t work, all kinds of issues.
That’s because Apple doesn’t release drivers for all those components.
Running anything but a Mac OS on a Mac is a nice pet project, but you can’t expect Linux to work.
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.
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.
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.
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
Long ago. Check this one out if you want something that actually works and I think it’s open source
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.
my experience with hibernate issues is that its either a swap partition issue or there’s not a cmos battery, but also idk my current system is like 7 years old so it could be something else broken
My system is even older. Still, everything was fine until I transitioned from 20.04 to 22.04.
you shouldn’t need to disable tpm
On my surface I still need to :/ fuckin Microsoft
Surface wasn’t meant to run linux. Its a struggle to get it working on them.
/owner of 3 defenestrated surface devices.
Defenestrated is the best way to say removed Windows and I’m using that forever, thanks
Don’t thank me, thank Stallman. I stole it straight from straight him ;-)
So far the surface pro 3 been working great for me. Still no secure boot or tpm but I think I just did something wrong when I followed the guide
That’s good to hear. I assume the normal- and IR-cameras aren’t working? The latter is nice to have, the former is a bit of must-have in today’s remote work environment.
Front and back cameras work perfectly. Not sure about IR, didn’t even know it had it
Yeah I had an MSI gaming laptop that had a lot of proprietary stuff that was a pain to setup. Everything from display brightness to volume to internet to keyboard lights to headphone jack took special workarounds to setup. This was in 2018 and Ubuntu 18.04. Then 19.04 rolled out, and I didn’t have to do the speaker workaround anymore. 19.10 rolled out, and i didn’t have to do the keyboard lights workaround. This way, little by little, every Linux kernel upgrade added one or another of the components, and after a couple of years, everything on that laptop worked out of the box. That’s when I was truly impressed by Linux.
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!
Why will it be better in just a couple months?
Explicit sync. It’ll fix most of the issues with Wayland on Nvidia CPUs. Wayland landed support for it in April, and Nvidia recently released a beta driver that supports it. I think every graphics driver will implement explicit sync eventually, since it’s a lot better than implicit sync.
Some great information about why it’s important here: https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2024/04/05/explicit-sync.html
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
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)
on nobara, nvidia drivers have never once been an issue for me.
What about in steam specifically, seemed like a bit of a steam issue as it was very buggy, flicking graphics and such in Steam client and big picture mode was godawful, even tried the render fix mentioned online and it didn’t help at all.
While Nobara was great at NVIDIA drivers, they seemed to have completely gotten rid of WACOM drivers, and that was a dealbreaker for me
Did you use the Bazzite image with the Nvidia driver? They have separate images for that.
I did yes lol
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.
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.
1991 to 2024, I think the only other OS that has managed that is Windows.
Also the various BSD-based OSs. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD etc. are still around, and MacOS is based on BSD too. And since BSD (1978) is a Unix, you can trace these all the way back to 1969.
That’s kind of true, but MacOS and Mac OSX are 2 different things. What is based on BSD is the MAC OSX that came out in 2001 AFAIK.
And BSD was interrupted for 2 years because of copyright disputes with AT&T. If that hadn’t happened, BSD would be the longest continuous OS today, and probably way more significant than it is.
I don’t consider MAC OSX as part of BSD, just like Android isn’t part of Linux Desktop, but only uses the Linux kernel. OSX took parts of BSD and shielded it behind a proprietary wall, because the BSD license offer no protection from that. So they become separate projects the moment they enter the Apple domain.
Problem here is when people mix up the use of the word Linux as an OS with Linux the kernel. I am 100% sure OP meant Linux as a Desktop OS like GNU/Linux or something like Free desktop according to freedesktop.org. Using his experience with EndeavorOS as an example.
But you are right, it can be said Unix/BSD has an even longer running time, but it has been somewhat problematic and interrupted because of AT&T and SCO and Novell.
Let’s get even more technical with MacOS X then. Which, btw, doesn’t exist anymore as macOS 11 was released in 2020 (tho it still maintains the BSD-legacy in the same way Windows 10 does the NT legacy). It is based on the NeXTSTEP operating system from NeXT Computers, who Apple bought in the 90s to famously also bring Steve Jobs back into the fold. The initial release of NeXTSTEP occurred in 1989, pre-dating Windows and Linux…
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 probably have the same Envy as you. It is just an unreliable piece of shit. Open it up and see if it is full of little metal chips, which is how HP “deburrs” the holes on the bottom metal plate.
opened it up a few times mostly to fix the frickin hinge and I didn’t see anything wrong visually, and I doubt it’s that because the problem only exists on endeavorOS
now that I think about it I think it’s the only arch based distro I installed on my laptop and that was a big reason why I tried to use it, it might be an arch problem with my stupid HP
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 :)
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.
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
They’re possibly running KDE, but other than that you’re right
