A newbie's experience with Linux

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Below I have set out my personal experience with Linux as a newbie in the hope to inspire more people to at least take a serious look at Linux, and perhaps even take that not so giant step.

As a complete Linux newbie I decided to take a look at Linux and installed Virtual Box on my Windows 8.1 machine in February last year. As with everything else in life, it is important to do it the right way, which means getting the right instructions. I got a set of excellent instruction from a commenter, called “a different Martin”, on Ghacks – https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/01/back-to-basics-part-1-updating-your-gnu-linux-system/#comment-4347600.
The installation went smoothly.

Nevertheless, after playing around a bit I thought Linux to be too much of a hassle, requiring too much expert knowledge, so left it. But Microsoft’s updates and disastrous October patches, mostly for Windows 10, which I would eventually have to embrace, spurred me to this time take a serious look at Linux.

Virtual Box is a fantastic program, allowing you to try out, in this case, as many different Linux versions as you like, without affecting the rest of your computer, i.e. Windows & the rest because the VMs in VB are sandboxed. I looked at around 15 distros, only taking a “deep dive” into the ones I felt comfortable with. Those I did not feel comfortable with I ditched immediately. The ones I ended up feeling comfortable with were Linux Mint, Ubuntu, antiX and MX.

The deep dive involved getting familiar with the distro and trying some of the various packages bundled with it, as well as trying Linux versions of Windows programs I used, and Linux replacements when no Linux version was available. I learned a lot that way and found that, in my case, I did not have to make many or big compromises for the programs.

Another thing I learned is that it is not necessary to have a detailed knowledge of the command line syntax for the programs I felt comfortable with. If you need to make use of it one can ask on a forum or even google it, which, in the case of Ubuntu and Mint, is an excellent source.

When I felt I could go for installation on my hard disk I googled for instructions, of which there is a ton for both Ubuntu and Mint.

At the beginning of February I installed Linux Mint as dual boot on my “production” computer. It went very smoothly after following the instructions I had gathered. The only hitch was that Mint did not detect the WiFi signal. But that was pretty simple to solve. Today I am happy and relieved to have ditched Windows, or I should say Microsoft.

At the beginning of this month my wife’s laptop, a Lenovo Yoga with 2 GB of RAM and a 32 GB hard disk with a simplified version of Win 8.1, started to act up and eventually the cursor froze, and the volume got stuck at zero. No amount of research on the net revealed a workable solution. Nor did a Refresh, and even a Reset. She was ready to invest in a new laptop, until I suggested 1 last option: install Linux and wipe Windows off. She agreed and I installed the very light weight but delightful antiX distro. The installation was a breeze, and support from the forum very good. Now my wife is as happy as can be.

Conclusion: a stable Linux distro is an excellent alternative for Windows and nowhere near as scary as people believe. Yes, there may be problems occasionally, but I challenge anyone to show me an alternative that is perfect with zero issues.

P.S. ignore the right hand side of my signature. I cannot find the place anymore where I can amend it.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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Klaas Vaak wrote:

P.S. ignore the right hand side of my signature. I cannot find the place anymore where I can amend it.

Go into your Forum Profile by clicking the link under your avatar then on the L/H side of the profile page there is an Edit link, where you can edit your ‘signature’ 🙂

Welcome to penguista land!

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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Klaas Vaak

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Thanks for sharing your experience with Linux; I hope this inspires others to try it out with a view to ditching Windows.

From a practical standpoint, in my view the two most important issues in facilitating an exodus from Windows are: 1) people not being aware that there are alternative OSes that they can use; and 2) concern that they won’t find software for Linux that adequately replaces what they’re used to in the Windows environment. Testimonials from people such as yourself and your wife can help to mitigate both of those factors. We need a lot more of them.

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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@Cybertooth: whenever I get to speak about computers with anyone, whether that be a friend, acquaintance, or a stranger, I make it a habit to mention Linux and how fine it is. And I don’t have to put up an act because it is meant.

What strikes me is that many people only have a vague idea of Linux, even people you would expect to know. For example, I went to my local computer shop to buy a USB stick. The guy also sells printers and refurbished laptops. When I asked him about Linux he told me “I only know Windows”. Mind you, he does know that Linux often is faster than Windows. Wow, that’s how “far” it goes.

When I read the articles on this site I am really happy I ditched Windows. I can’t understand how home users can still stand the Windows [kvetch]. Companies is another story, of course. Oh well, I just keep doing my “marketing” bit.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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Perhaps they guy means faster as in hardware comms?
I’ve experienced this with a few distros relative to Windows. Overall though, there’s not really that much difference in my experience.
MX Linux has a great/large array of tools and tweaking utilities included in the distro and is fast on new and older hardware. (even has an iPhone utility although I haven’t used it)
I’ve downloaded the new AntiX 17.4 earlier and will check it out when time permits.
Handy for a USB key OS 😉

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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Klaas Vaak

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@Microfix: I had the impression he meant faster programmatically – start-up, etc. – but I could be wrong because after that his statement of “I only know Windows” killed the discussion. He did not seem interested to find out more.

Where I live you cannot even buy a computer with Linux pre-installed, you’d have to order it from abroad.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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Microfix

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It’s more fun downloading/ checking sigs/ Live USB trying/ installing and configuring whichever distro (from an old avid distro-hopper).
It’s funny though, I’m always drawn back to my safe haven Peppermint 7 respin (highly customised) Linux distro 16.04LTS (until 2021) and always on the hunt for a replacement, the quest continues..
PS: I didn’t like Mint though one thing I did/do like about Mint is the Mintupdater which Peppermint has as default.

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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Klaas Vaak wrote:

whenever I get to speak about computers with anyone, whether that be a friend, acquaintance, or a stranger, I make it a habit to mention Linux and how fine it is.

I carry my Acer Swift around with me quite a bit.  Once I’ve left the house with it, I bring it with me whenever I go “in” anywhere, in order to avoid the risk of theft if I leave it in the car.  I’ve been waiting for someone to ask about whether it has Windows 10 or mention Windows at all, so I can naturally mention it has Linux on it, but it has not happened.  It would be the first thing on my mind if I see a laptop!  That really does not happen very often, though.  I am sure that in some environments, I’d see more laptops.  I haven’t been to an airport in a decade, so maybe that’s a place where I would see more laptops.  I keep hearing that some people apparently buy Macbooks so they can go to Starbucks and be seen with them, but I don’t drink coffee.  Where I go, everyone’s glued to tiny phone screens instead.  I recognize that the things can have a lot of utility, but seeing so many people enthralled by smartphones (and social media) is such a turn-off… the culture that has grown around them is just abhorrent to me, and it makes the very idea of buying one just inconceivable.

People are so used to viewing life (their own or someone else’s) through a tiny screen that it is like there’s a disconnect from reality.  People feel entitled to whip out their phones and take anyone’s picture or record a video of anyone, anywhere, anytime, because they’re only seeing life as content, not as life.  Unless someone was doing something that was meant to be a public spectacle of some sort, it used to be that you would not just take pictures or videos of random strangers without permission.  Real life is broken down into nothing more than a reality show, which is completely backwards– reality shows are supposed to be a slice of life (with the permission and cooperation of the subjects), not a replacement for it.  Now everyone’s in a reality show, all the time, whether they like it or not, and that means they’re fair game.

That smartphone dominance means I seldom get the chance to see anyone with a laptop and have a chance to have a conversation about it occur naturally.  I don’t want to be the guy who is always trying to steer every bit of discourse towards the object of one’s interest… being a fan is fine, but no one likes a fanboy/girl/whatever.  I don’t want to have the same kind of effect that the Apple II fanboys did in middle and high school, which made me reflexively dislike them before I even had a chance to try one.  I try to mention it when it is pertinent, but not to beat people over the head with it.

Anyway, I am glad you’re finding Linux to your liking!

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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@ascaris says:

“People are so used to viewing life (their own or someone else’s) through a tiny screen that it is like there’s a disconnect from reality.”

Sorry, I can’t help myself … little things amuse little minds.

I’m still running my Mint19 “Tara” in a Win10 VM, it’s so hard to kick a 25+ year habit.
Only been 3ish months, I’ll get there.

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I know what you mean.  When 10 first came out, I decided to give it a real try, which meant installing it on my Win 7 desktop PC, my main computer, so I could see how it ran on hardware I knew well.  First, I made a full backup on an external HDD, which I then unplugged.  I plugged in another external HDD, and made a second full backup (I may have used a different backup program, but I can’t remember for sure).

I downloaded the Win 10 media creator and made an .iso, which I than wrote to a USB drive.  I did the full upgrade, then tried it out for the first time.

I hated it.  Right from the first moment, it was just awful.  Unthinkably, indescribably awful for an OS that was supposed to be release-worthy.  As an early alpha, I would have thought it had potential, but that it still needed a lot of work.  As a release… they HAD to be kidding.

There was no doubt in my mind that the consumer feedback would be negative, and there was very little doubt that MS would listen and improve the product as they had with Vista and 8.  Still, it was going to have to undergo some of that improvement before I was going to use it for anything.  I performed the MS “roll back” option to see if it would work, and it did, flawlessly (as far as I could tell).  I didn’t trust it, though, so after I was satisfied that the rollback was working, I restored from my backup anyway.  Something could be broken under the surface, waiting until some opportune moment to reveal itself, and every problem I would have from that point on would always be suspect.  Was it because I rolled back to 7, or was it something else?

I credit that kind of distrust and paranoia with why I’ve never had Windows rot.

I knew then what I had to do.  I allowed my “test” PC (a PC very close in spec to my main PC) to upgrade to 10, and then I installed Linux alongside it as a dual-boot.  The goal was to watch 10 and monitor it so I would know when it was good enough for my main PC, and if that never came to pass, I would have gained some familiarity with Linux by then at least.

Over the coming months, I was disappointed.  Windows was not getting better… if anything, it was getting worse.  MS took out the ability to make Cortana use search engines other than Bing with a registry edit.  They took out the ability for Pro users to block the MS store.  On and on, each new update brought more changes that took more power away from users and gave it to Microsoft.  The things I really needed to have changed before I would ever accept 10 didn’t change, and over time, that list just got longer and longer.  It became clear that Windows 10 would not be like previous versions of Windows… it would not be getting better as time passed.

That was when I realized two things: First, there was no more need to keep monitoring 10 on my test PC.  I had my answer about when it would become something I would want to use: Never.  Second, I was going to have to do better than have Linux installed on a secondary PC that I wasn’t doing my real stuff on.

I removed the SSD containing Windows 10 from the test PC and put it into my main PC, alongside the SSD that was already there (containing Win 7).  I started the Linux installer and let it wipe the Windows 10 installation from the new SSD and put Linux in its place.  I don’t know which Linux that was; I tried a few in the Ubuntu/Mint family before I settled on Mint Cinnamon.

The goal of this new setup was for me to gradually duplicate all of the Windows functionality in Linux that I already had in Windows, and to gradually migrate on my own terms.  It was late 2015 by that point, and I had been using Windows for 25 years, and like you say, it’s hard to just break that off all at once.

In those early days, I spent a lot of time in Windows.  I decided to try 8.1 so I could see if I could truly de-weird it enough to make it work for me (seemed like a fun project!).  When I found that I could, I then bought the key to activate it on that and my laptop (C2D, at the time).  That way, I had a few more years to make the move to Linux.

I went back and forth.  Sometimes I would use mostly Linux for a while, then I’d go back to Windows.  I knew I could, if needed, move completely to Linux, but there was no reason to hurry.

Over time, I began to use Linux more and more, and Windows less and less.  While I liked what I had turned Win 8.1 into, my growing disgust with Microsoft began to make me loathe the time I was in Windows, and more and more, I would do whatever task I needed to do in Windows and go back to Linux as soon as that was done.

It just kept going like that, and one day I realized that I hardly even used Windows at all anymore.  By then, I’d bought a few more PCs… all laptops, since I only buy desktops in pieces.  All of them came with 10, which was a non-starter for me.  The goal was to either wipe 10 and install 8.1, or to just skip Windows and go Linux.

The first one was my Dell Inspiron 11, really a Chromebook by spec and form factor, but sold with 10 instead.  With only 32GB of storage and no SATA ports or M.2 slot, there was not going to be a dual-boot here.  I wiped 10 and put Mint on it.  The goal for this laptop was to be a go-anywhere laptop with long battery life and light weight, and it fit the task well for the price.

Shortly after that, I bought a Dell gaming laptop.  I’d wanted a gaming laptop for years, but now I actually had the money for one.  The goal was to make it 8.1 and Linux dual-boot.  Linux went on easily and worked perfectly, but 8.1 was not working well.  I knew I was going to get the MS Trojan that breaks updates for my insolence in violating the Windows 10 marketing plan with my Kaby Lake laptop, but that’s fixable.  What wasn’t fixable was that the touchpad had no working 8.1 drivers.  I thought I had it all set up; the Synaptics driver installed and seemed to be working, but soon I realized that none of the options I changed in the Synaptics settings actually changed anything.  The touchpad worked in its default settings only.

On top of that, the laptop had a ridiculous sharp edge where my wrists rest by the touchpad.  I’m the kind of person that will readily modify any object I own to better suit me, but sanding down the sharp edge would not work here, as the whole laptop had a rubbery coating on the exterior, and I was sure that sanding through that on the sharp edge would cause it to peel.

I liked that laptop a lot other than those flaws.  I returned it to the store with more than a touch of regret.

Then I saw my third laptop on closeout at a major retailer.  It was the Acer Swift… IPS display in full HD, aluminum case, quad core CPU, 64GB internal drive, super thin.  It was one of the models I had considered when I ended up buying the Inspiron, but back then it was far more expensive.  For $250, I had to have that IPS display.  That was the bit that really sold it.

I discovered that the onboard 64GB of storage wasn’t all it had.  It also had an internal M.2 slot!  Wow, did I ever luck out.  I ordered a 1 TB SSD for it, and put Linux on that, leaving the slower eMMC onboard drive for Windows.

I tried to put 8.1 on the Swift just for the heck of it.  By then I was not very concerned about Windows on the thing at all, but I wanted to see if it could be done.  Again, it was the touchpad that proved to be the hangup… there simply were no Windows 8.1 compatible drivers for the Intel i2c bus.  I tried force-installing the 10 drivers into 8, and they didn’t work.  I tried force-installing the 8.1 i2c drivers from an older generation SoC, and they didn’t work either.

I could just have switched the touchpad to Basic mode in the UEFI setup, where it will emulate a PS/2 mouse instead of using the Win 10 “advanced” mode, but it was just a test anyway, and I wasn’t about to buy another Windows license one way or another.  It replaced the Inspiron 11 as my go-anywhere laptop, only a few months after I got the Inspiron.  I hadn’t known I was going to see the Swift on sale for more than $100 less than what it had been!

I always knew I was going to buy another gaming laptop to replace the one I had returned.  When Black Friday rolled around in 2018, I saw the Dell G3 for $699, with i7, 8GB, 128 GB SSD/1TB HDD, 1050ti (Optimus), full HD IPS display… so I grabbed it.

It’s the model that replaces directly the one I returned.  The sharpness on the wrist rest edge was reduced, and gone was the rubbery coating, opening the way for me to smooth it out even more.  I no longer cared if I could run Windows 8.1 on it (I assume it would have the same issue as its predecessor did).

The purchase of the Swift and the G3 had pushed my beloved but aging Asus F8Sn laptop (Core 2 duo) into retirement, more or less.  It was, and is, still fast enough for modern software like Firefox, Thunderbird, and other such things, but it has no IPS display, and it has very short battery life (it always did, even when new) and is quite heavy and bulky.  It’s still a nice PC that I have a lot of fondness for, but PCs are, first and foremost, tools, and it’s a tool whose role is done better by other tools.

These three new laptops are all too new to run Windows other than 10, and that just pushed me even harder out of Windows completely.  The only PC that was in my main lineup that had a version of Windows I was willing to use was my desktop, and even then I hadn’t used it in weeks, maybe a month or more.  I had no desire to use it nor any pangs of regret or nostalgia or anything.  I now saw my desktop PC as a Linux machine with a secondary Windows installation as a dual boot, while my other main two (which both still had 10 as a dual boot) were just Linux machines that also happened to have vestigial Windows installations from their former lives (inside boxes waiting to be bought by me).

At that point I’d mentally moved on.  I still keep Windows around because it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it… I never use 10 except to run Macrium Reflect (to back up Linux partitions!), since it’s faster and easier to reboot into 10 than to find my USB rescue drive and boot that, but it’s there.  I may someday wipe it and reclaim its space, but for the time being, I have plenty of room, and its convenience for backups is worth something.  I’m not enough of a Windows 10 hating ideologue that its very presence offends me to the point that it must be eradicated, but my machines are very clearly Linux machines that also have Windows, not the other way.

On the Swift, the entire 1TB SSD is EXT4 Linux, while only the 64GB eMMC is NTFS for Windows.  On the G3, which now has a 250GB NVMe SSD and a 1TB SATA SSD, Windows 10 is confined to a 50GB partition, with the rest being EXT4 for Linux.  On the desktop, I’ve moved Windows to the SSD that came from the test PC (the slower SSD), while I’ve moved Linux to the faster SSD that used to have Windows on it.  My 3TB data HDD is two-thirds EXT4, while the old 1TB partition for Windows data still awaits its final fate.  I haven’t bothered to get rid of it because I haven’t needed the space, but it will all be moved to the secondary SSD eventually.

There’s only so far you can go with Linux in a VM.  It’s like my test PC’s Linux… it’s in a bottle, like a curiosity, not really being used so much as being looked at like an animal in a zoo.  I suggest letting it out, give it a little partition to run bare-metal… I did that with my PCs, starting with just a tiny little partition for Linux to live in.  I would shrink the Windows partition a bit using Minitools’ Partition Wizard 10 free, then expand the Linux one with GPartED, or later KDE Partition Manager (essentially the same, but using Qt like KDE instead of GTK+ like GNOME; I still have both installed, though).  Over time, Windows kept getting smaller and smaller as my perception of Windows’ importance got smaller and smaller.

I ended up fully Linux not only long before the drop-dead date on 8.1, but before the drop-dead date on 7 as well.  I gave myself plenty of time, so there was no pressure, and as a result, I moved a lot faster than I thought I would.  It still took a few years, but I was planning for even more.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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@Ascaris: Macrium Reflect to back-up Linux from within Windows. That’s cool 🙂 I assume you don’t mean back-up but disk image.

I pondered a few weeks about my back-up set-up for Mint, discussing on the forum with various people. They think Timeshift is great (offers a system restore-type back-up), as well as Clonezilla, which is a monster to me. I eventually settled on a simple set-up:

* personal files I back-up to the cloud (SpiderOak) every day. I started in Windows and since they have a Linux client I carry on

* Aptik on a USB stick for my /home directory and self-installed apps/progs – every week or even less frequently

And that’s it. If ever there is a major disaster then Linux is simple enough to do a fresh install and restore the back-ups pretty quickly. A big difference with Windows where you need product keys and a lot of time, patience and faith to get it back on track.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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@Ascaris: I agree with not becoming a fanboy, that is not my objective. I just want people to become more aware of Linux, but I don’t push it. If they want to discuss it in more detail I will (as far as I am capable), if they don’t, fine, I leave it at that.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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Oh, you’re not at all fanboy-ing!  I’m just explaining why I don’t bring it up at every opportunity when I am out and about, rather than just hoping someone else will.  I’m glad you weren’t discouraged by the discussion about network difficulties Cybertooth and I had and decided to try Linux anyway… I know that if everyone who currently feels stuck but dissatisfied with Windows were to try Linux, not all of them would find it to their liking, but a certain percentage would, and a lot of these would be people who might otherwise have been convinced that it’s too fragmented or that it’s too confusing or that it’s just for uebergeeks who only use the command line, or that it’s the domain of people who never want to pay for software under any condition because we’re all Richard Stallman.

I do like the free (libre) aspects of Linux, but I don’t have any problems with people selling software either.  I’m not in the Linux world because of my desire to get everything for free.  I’m here because MS has destroyed Windows in order to satisfy their own corporate goals– which is their prerogative, because Windows is proprietary.  They’ve made Windows into something I can’t, and won’t, tolerate.  Otherwise, I’m still me; I haven’t had any huge epiphany where I now believe (like the aforementioned Richard Stallman) that proprietary software is unethical and should not exist.  Now that I have declared my intent to not buy any more Windows software, I’m more likely to buy software now than I ever have been, because I want to demonstrate to software developers that Linux software can sell.

I’m a casual gamer of sorts.  There were games I wanted to buy in the past, but I didn’t do it because they required a Steam account, and to me, Steam was nothing more than one more DRM platform, and while I don’t mind paid software, DRM is often way, way beyond the realm of what I will tolerate.  I only relented and signed up after I’d moved to Linux, and since that time, I’ve changed my mind about Valve and Steam.  They’ve done more to bring games to the Linux platform than anyone else, and now that they have decided to integrate WINE (as Proton) into their client and make even more of their games Linux compatible, I am willing to concede that they’re the good guys.  I’ve bought seven or eight games by now, each of them with a Linux version (including one that is available because of Proton, which counts as Linux compatible in my book.  If game devs don’t want to make full-on Linux versions of their games, I will still count it as a win if they at least make them Linux+Wine compatible, a much easier goal for sure).  Those that don’t have Linux versions, I just watch as playthroughs online.  I don’t mind having them spoiled as long as they’re only for platforms I won’t use, like Windows, Xbox, or Playstation.  It’s Linux or nothin’, baby.

The goal for me, in which I am but a tiny, tiny part, is to make more games (and ultimately all software, but Steam is about games) available on Linux, which in turn makes Linux a viable alternative to Windows.  This benefits everyone except Microsoft– including Windows-only gamers who can’t or won’t come to Linux for whatever reason.  If there is a viable alternative to Windows, then Microsoft’s power evaporates, and they can’t monetize them or use them as involuntary beta testers anymore.  MS has only made Windows 10 as bad as it is because it can.  We’d all be better off if they can’t.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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@Ascaris: I agree with most of what you say, we’re on the same side. The only thing I cannot comment on is games because I don’t play any.

You stated:

I’m glad you weren’t discouraged by the discussion about network difficulties Cybertooth and I had ….

Ironically, I was discouraged by exactly that, I thought Linux is too much of a hassle. But ….. when I decided in October to give Linux a serious look-over your/Cybertooth’s discussion came back to me and pushed me to look for a distro with the lowest chance of WiFi hassle. That was one of the main reasons I chose Mint. This month I discovered that when I installed antiX on my wife’s laptop WiFi was even less of an issue, in fact it was as smooth as in Windows (they do get some things right) in that WiFi was detected immediately and you only had to type in the router key/password.

Another aspect of Linux: the enormous choice of distros. This is often criticised for confusing people. Superficially that seems a fair statement. Nevertheless, if someone is really interested in Linux, then that choice forces her/him to take a good look at a series of distros, learn about them and about Linux, which will help to make a more informed choice, rather than just taking the plunge because there is nothing else. Luckily Henry “you can have any colour you like as long as it is black” Ford’s days are past 😉

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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And thankfully this space is called askwoody not WINDOWS secrets !!

 

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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Nice work on Linux. I have a VM with Ubuntu, my first Linux venture with a few moments requiring extra attention/frustration.

After a few months I ditched all my security apps and now do most internet activities with Ubuntu in the VM. Unfortunately I still need Win10 for the hardware, but with a broken update mechanism in 1709, computing is safer and smoother than ever.

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anonymous wrote:

After a few months I ditched all my security apps and now do most internet activities with Ubuntu in the VM.

Your surely not running W10 without security/ AV are you? Windows STILL needs security whether a host or guest.

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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Very, very true.

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johnf

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Macrium Reflect and Windows Firewall Control.

Nothing else needed.

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Linux needs security too. What is not immediately clear to a linux nebwie: switch on the Firewall & other tips 22 Important Things To Do After Installing Linux Mint 19

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@anonymous: 1 very pleasant surprise I had after installing Mint on bare metal (remember, it is a dual boot with Win 8.1) is that, because Linux can detect and read NTFS files, ALL Windows files, incl. system files !, were visible.

What was useful for me is that my personal files were visible and accessible (i.e. read and write), so I did not have to move them to a Linux drive. Wow, I was blown away by this. And if I ever have to boot to Windows, all my personal files are there and up-to-date. BTW, I have not heard this dual boot  “feature” mentioned before.

So, since you are keeping Ubuntu in a VM, this might be an important factor in helping you decide to take the plunge. What’s more, having Linux in a VM in not the same as a real install, and with Linux as a guest on a Windows host you are still relying on Windows, despite using Linux.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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Win 10 needed for Nvidia card and DAW, otherwise I would be all in.

Linux is like my old favorite, Windows NT.

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Hm, which Nvidia card would that be…? I’ve noticed that at least for older model GPUs the support is usually better on Linux.

The other thing though… well if the A is for Audio then yes, you usually need to run that on bare hardware because audio is a near-realtime thing at a minimum, up to hard-realtime in some cases.

You can actually get kernels tuned for that on fairly normal Linux distributions, but specific applications are a whole different thing of course.

And I really don’t want to have to look into how audio buffer handling and scheduler interactions would’ve changed between various Windows 10 builds, timing sidechannel vulnerability mitigations and all that…

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1080ti, 4K gaming on 40 inch screen. Awesome.

Digital Audio Workstation, software and audio card drivers not on Linux with 70 tracks imposible to move. Also impossible to do clean install due to VSTs.

So I made it all work and frozen it in time like an offline computer. VMs of Ubuntu, MacOS and latest version of Win 10. With an 8700k, I’m set for the next 6 years.

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Or the other way ’round Read Linux Files in Windows

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I too have recently dipped a toe into the Linux waters.

I’m weighing up my options for what to do once Windows 7 support ends. To that end I’ve been using my older Dell Latitude D600 as a guinea pig. That laptop is running XP under 2 GB RAM and is a useful backup for my main Windows 7 Pro laptop. Once Firefox became unsupported on XP in 2018 I took the D600 offline; I also removed any antivirus (not needed now), with the result that the boot time reduced from over four minutes to a little over a minute.

I played around with a couple of Linux Live distros, but finally settled on a dual-boot Xubuntu 18.04 for the D600, as it’s fairly lightweight, but with plenty of features, and supported until April 2021.

I did have a little trouble setting up the dual boot. I wasn’t given the option of installing alongside XP, only replacing it. So, I tried to do the partitioning manually, using GParted, which is included in the installation feature. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t shrink the NTFS partition.

I eventually was able to shrink the NTFS partition by 10GB using EasUS Partition Master from the XP side of things, leaving me a 30GB partition for XP. I then went back to the Xubuntu installation, and in the unallocated space created an 8GB ext4 primary partition for Xubuntu. The remaining space was allocated as a logical partition for the Linux swap file.

The result is that I have a Latitude D600 that can safely connect to the internet using Firefox on Xubuntu. That OS also comes with some useful apps; in addition to Firefox, there is Libreoffice Writer and Calc (I also installed Draw), Mozilla Thunderbird, Snapshot and a host of other programs. Additionally, I can access all my data on the NTFS partition. If I need to use a Windows program (I’m not keen on reinventing the wheel) then I can quickly switch to XP.

This experience has led me to the conclusion that dual booting Linux Mint 19 MATE (supported until 2023) with Windows 7 is a real contender for my main laptop. Of course, I could still use Windows 7 online for some time beyond 2020 by ensuring that other security measures are kept up to date (browser, antivirus, antimalware, use of a normal user account for daily work, and regular full system backups).

Alternatively, I could try the free upgrade to Windows 10. The question is, do I want to? That’s what I’m trying to figure out, now that the clock is ticking down on Windows 7.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Elly

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The Maxthon browser still supports Win XP.

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I’ve tried several Linux distros over the past few years and have settled on Anti-X for an old netbook and MX for an ex-Win 7 laptop.  Several other distros are also very good, but these appeal to me the most.

I keep a Windows machine only to run software not available for Linux such as Turbo Tax.  As most likely pointed out in other posts, the only real weakness of Linux is support for certain windows applications that don’t have Linux counterparts.  Wine and Play On don’t always work with Windows software.

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Klaas Vaak, Microfix

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@FL Jack: I like both antiX and MX, though I am somewhat put off by the inadvisability to use PPAs.

I don’t like Wine, was disappointed by it because you can only smoothly use apps from their supported list, which inevitably did not include what I wanted. Now I don’t miss it anymore because I have good Linux equivalents and/or workarounds.What’s more, Wine poses a security risk for your Linux set-up because you run Windows programs on it.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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anonymous wrote:

Or the other way ’round Read Linux Files in Windows

And I have not found a solution I am happy with so be ware>>

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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In response to @ascaris Post #339014

I went back and forth. Sometimes I would use mostly Linux for a while, then I’d go back to Windows. I knew I could, if needed, move completely to Linux, but there was no reason to hurry.

I’m not concerned about rapidly moving to Linux either, or being a switch hitter during the interim. The last four words of the above quote from you says everything about that.

I can’t swear to it, but it’s entirely possible I’m not done being angry with Microsoft yet. Or, or … Windows obscene updates. M$ is removing more and more control from users under the guise of “we are making it better for you, trust us” c***-ola, or the forced (and widely sheep accepted) telemetry you can’t flip a switch and turn off. These are but a fraction of “I hate what Microsoft has done to Windows”, on my list of things to be angry at them for. I’m only one of 800 million, not even a blip on their radar.

If I had to be succinct, I could say I’m not a computer socialist, (the philosophy not political doctrine) where I’m allowed to color my chocolate orange, but it’s still chocolate and everyone has to have the same. Color me angry instead.

So, why stay with Windows at all? ~Glad you asked!~

“You can’t do that” ok, I digress, there are some things you can’t do in life, but fighting how Microsoft forces me to accept their changes and control isn’t two of them. If I spent the same amount of time tooling around with Linux as I do thwarting M$’s buggy updates and telemetry for instance, I could have Linux set up as my OS. I will not be satisfied until I have proven to myself as the song says, “I Did it My Way”.
Thunderous applause, perfunctory bows … now sit down and shut up Bluetrix, move on to Linux and leave the people that want to use Windows to their choice of slow poison. I really don’t care if people are willing at accept whatever Windows throws their way, I’m not on that path.

I have done the improbable. I have totally stopped the much sought after buggy Windows updates, and unless M$ alters how the OS changes are baked into future updates, I will still get stand alone Windows Defender updates without all the baggage. You can’t do that!, oh but yes I can, and have. I am just a run of the mill computer user, not a gamer or corporate entity or IT professional. I will be dust in a jar on a shelf before my ‘Window10 1803 Home’ has any major changes. That, or totally moved/switched over to Linux of some flavor, though my Linux won’t be orange colored chocolate. I know what Windows7 users are feeling.

I’m not really angry, I’m more annoyed than anything else. Change for the sake of change and calling it progress is never a good option, but it appears that is what M$ does. To me, many of those changes are like weeds in my lawn … when I pull them out by the roots I smile, even though I know more weeds will eventually replace them, or they mysteriously appear again.

It might sound odd, but like many members here I am the person who is called when friends or family have issues with their computer they don’t understand or can’t solve. They all use Windows and most are on Win10. I don’t try to sell them on Linux or alter their computer as I have mine, they wouldn’t understand. Being a member of a group like AskWoody enables me to help them more than if I were not a member, or at least a reader, tons of info here. One of the things I love about this site is all the information you read has a date on it, so I don’t give out advice that is outdated. It’s a great place to start.

I heard praise of Chromebooks. If I did all my computer use online I still wouldn’t use a Google OS, mainly because it’s Google, which I consider worse than M$, but maybe that’s just me. Woody uses Chromebooks and is happy with it, but he doesn’t rely on it alone.

My transition to Linux is progressing nicely and in time I know it will be my main OS. It doesn’t matter what flavor I end up with. Any~hoo, whatever OS you choose to use and you’re happy with it, more power to you!

No reason to hurry.

Windows10 Home 1803 | Mint19 on VM

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I have been using Linux on and off for about 15 years, and have used many live distros as well as full HDD installs on several home built dedicated machines. Have also dual booted using secondary hard drives, and then finally discovered VirtualBox a few years ago, which is where most of my Linux resides today.

I really like Linux, and I don’t consider myself an expert, but more of a power user.

One thing that I have confirmed for myself over the years, is that there is no full replacement for all Windows software on Linux. It is what it is, but that’s the truth. If it was possible, I would have switched over to Linux long ago.

I am held hostage by certain Windows only applications that I need to run, that either don’t run at all, or run with issues under Wine and those related options.

So my decision is to keep running Windows for those apps.

But that still leaves the option to move my online life entirely over to Linux. There is now so much that you can do on Linux.

Here are the best scenarios I can think of to avoid Microsoft and keep your stuff private by using Linux online, while still being able to run necessary Windows applications.

1. Run two PC’s, one for Linux, and one for Windows 10. Just put your beloved Windows software on Win 10 and hope for the best. Do everything else on the Linux box. Take regular system images of the Windows box, so that you can restore it if an update ever makes it go “poof!”.

2. Use one PC, but install Linux on the hard drive. Install VirtualBox, and then install Windows 10 as a VM and activate it with your Win10 license. Put your Windows only apps on that VM. Do everything else on the host Linux OS. You can back up the VM by just copying the VM folder to another drive.

3. Dual boot (I consider this the most inconvenient method, as you can only access one system at a time this way).

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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Bluetrix, johnf, Klaas Vaak

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@YP Long time Win7 user (Group B). I was a unix user for 10 years in the 90’s.

My 6 months of Linux experience.

In developer mode, I installed ubuntu on my chromebook [refurbish]:
– I started with Trusty & now on Xenial
– Xfce is the default desktop. It’s basic, OK for me because I keep a clean desktop.
– learned to install apps, using command line & synaptic
– run wine apps [Primarily, I run portable window apps, notepad++]
– setup portable app launchers

Personally, I like Chromebooks. With linux installed, I can use Libreoffice & notepad++.
I’m not concern about Google tracking because:
– I created a gmail account to use with Chromebook only
– No activity, history etc save on gmail account
– Don’t use google assistant, and use DuckgoDuck for search

In Dec 2018, I bought a refurbish Dell with Win8; I installed xubuntu [bionic], on the system:
– From my chromebook experience, I was set up pretty quick, and continue my linux learning.
– I learned to use Timeshift for “disk imaging”. It works pretty good and fast.
– Installed a 1Tb SSD, and reinstall OS & Apps because I couldn’t figure out Timeshift.
With the SSD, OS install was <15 mins. Since I keep a text log of install commands, it
was cut and paste.
– Installed xubuntu on my old laptop XP OS. Used it to test out Clonezilla to clone/recover.
– Installed virtualbox with guest systems Win10 Pro 1803 and xubuntu.
Done more testing with Timeshift, Clonezilla, and Macrium.
– Safely, learning to disable & update Win10.

Currently, I’m just using the Linux machine, for my normal task to work out the kinks.

Hope this helps

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johnf, Klaas Vaak

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I think that linux is an alternative but one people should investigate before making the change. I have friends that live linux and have so for years. linux can “do no wrong” and microsoft is the “evil empire”. well OK.

While I would not go to windows 10 and we do have several distros of linux around here, I feel some version of Windows is the answer. If you are running linux and are happy with it, then by all means keep it. whatever your OS is, if you are happy use it.

Here is a person that tried linux and was very disappointed to say the least. I would not go to 10 but he has his own ideas.

Goodbye Linux: Why am ditching linux and going back to Windows 10
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/86ka64/goodbye_linux_why_am_ditching_linux_and_going/
“Around 6 months ago, I made the move to Linux … After experiencing Linux, my respect for Microsoft and Windows 10 has increased by a 1000 times. … So much effort, so much time spent tweaking, so much distro hopping, so much anticipation to permanently shift was all for naught. “

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Concerning the point about a user’s frustration of getting a recent version of an important application (Blender) installed with Ubuntu, I wonder if the following might possibly be of any help to the person who wrote that long complaint ( #1888856) :

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=293784

Also I agree that Cinnamon is less than ideal a GUI, but not for the reason given in point No. 3. It bother me the smallness of folders and screen buttons, which make using this GUI harder than it need to be and, mysteriously, does not follow the good and long-standing examples of Windows and macOS.

As to the rest, to me it reads more like an emotional rant than a serious discussion of issues with Linux. As any OS, Linux has its off putting quirks and changing to a different OS merely exchanges those quirks for new and different ones. I am also acquainted with more than a few people, both friends and professional colleagues, which I know for a fact are really power users, and who would use Linux (different distros of it, mostly SUSE or forks of Debian, as it happens) and swear they have no reason for changing to anything else.

For my part, I have Mint 19.1 in dual boot with Windows 7 (after years of using LINUX on and off, but only in line-command mode), for testing and learning purposes — mainly to familiarize myself with using it through its GUI and doing some maintenance tasks someone else used to do for me and other users in my working group. I also have a Mac that has a Unix-like OS that I have been using that in line-command mode for most of my programming work, and now am in the process of moving some of that work to the recently installed Linux on my PC, to practice with it. No complaints, so far.

 

 

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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I started out by installing Ubuntu in a VM on my Windows 7 machine. I finally ended up with Windows 8.1 in a VM on my Linux Mint box.

I have 12 GB of RAM on my computer, and so my Windows 8.1 VM runs like a champ, as does my Linux Mint host OS.

There are a few things I simply can’t do in Linux, such as run Splashtop – I support one of my customers remotely using Splashtop. It just so happens that that same customer gave me a license for Office 365, so I have installed Office 365 in my Windows 8.1 VM. For some reason I can no longer download Youtube videos from any browser in Linux Mint, so I go to Firefox in my Windows 8.1 VM when I want to download a Youtube video.

Of course, my wife does not like Linux, so she can get to Windows 8.1 with one click – keeps her happy.

Windows 8.1 will be supported till January of 2023. At that time I will likely pull the plug on my VM being connected to the internet, and I’ll keep using my Windows 8.1 VM for a long time to come after that.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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doriel

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Downloading youtube videos stopped working for most of websites. I found one functional on y2mate (simply google it). But this has nothing to do with Linux desktops. I saw this topic somwhere on the forum if you want to find out more.

Dell Latitude 3420, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz, 16GB RAM, W10 22H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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Jim, did you try the latest version of youtube-dl ?

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For many years now (like, since the win98 days) all my systems – desktops or laptops – have been dual boot Linux/Windows.  For desktops, I always use dedicated drives for each OS.

Tried running Linux in a VM on Windows for a year or two on a couple systems.  It worked fine, but I went back to using classic dual boot on dedicated drives.  I just prefer keeping the operating systems’ storage isolated from one another.

I like Linux Mint, but I keep returning to Xubuntu.  Xubuntu’s UI is simple and lightweight.  Not a lot of fancy effects which can complicate getting actual work done.  I like simple windowing  user interfaces and Xubuntu is just that for me.

I recently replaced an old pokey Acer AMD A6 laptop (running dual boot Mint & Win 7) with a Dell Precision 3530 – with Ubuntu 18.04 pre-installed.  Yep, my first laptop purchased EVER without any Windows on it.  At purchase, choosing Ubuntu dropped the price a little over $100, which I used to bump up to the next higher processor option.  The laptop is running great.  I did have to install and configure TLP, a system service for CPU and system power management.  Without TLP the 3530 was always throttling the CPU down due to high temps and I’d only see 4hrs on battery.  With TLP the system doesn’t throttle due to overtemp and I get over 12hrs on battery & it’s still fast.   It’s using the standard flashy Ubuntu Gnome desktop, which I am not a fan of.  It’s pretty but unnecessarily gimmicky and often just gets in my way.  I’ll probably add the Xubuntu desktop soon and use that.

Anyway, I could say a thing or two about Dell’s 3530 design and it’s thermal suitability for high boosting multi-core CPUs.  The phrase “somewhat under-built” comes to mind…

Meanwhile, I yanked the mechanical drive from the old Acer Mint/Win7 laptop, cloned it to an ssd (via clonezilla) & installed the ssd.  Now the system literally flys & is a great backup laptop.  I’ve since replaced Linux Mint with Xubuntu on the laptop.  The Xubuntu 18.04 install on this Acer AMD A6 laptop went very well.  Everything just worked (trackpad, hotkeys, thermals, etc).

For many years I used Windows 90% of the time for everything.  But for the last 7 years or so, I rarely use Windows to occasionally run a few graphics apps.  But Linux has some really good graphics apps now and I’m starting to use those more.  Eventually I’ll stop using those old Windows apps completely.

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I recently replaced an old pokey Acer AMD A6 laptop (running dual boot Mint & Win 7) with a Dell Precision 3530 – with Ubuntu 18.04 pre-installed.

Nice move up. Fast machine!

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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ek

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ek wrote:

Tried running Linux in a VM on Windows for a year or two on a couple systems.  It worked fine, but I went back to using classic dual boot on dedicated drives.  I just prefer keeping the operating systems’ storage isolated from one another.

Well you can still do that with a VM … just assign the physical disk to it. Or you could just assign a raw partition or several. You lose the ability to take easy snapshots of the VM storage state though.

I once converted a dual-boot Windows/Linux system into just booting the original Windows installation, direct off the original partition. Worked just fine as long as one had enough RAM for both simultaneously, only problem was going over the licensing paperwork to check that it was all legal…

Also a real bother trying to get *one* VirtualBox license for professional use as Oracle only wants to sell them in bundles for large enterprises… gave up on that part, Qemu/KVM is faster anyway even if it doesn’t do seamless desktop.

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@ek: that’s interesting what you wrote about TLP. A couple of months ago I bought a Lenovo laptop with Win 10 pre-installed, which I deleted during the installation of Mint 19.1. I also installed TLP and left the default settings. I have not seen any improvement in battery life, which is a terrible 2 hours !! despite people saying TLP is fantastic – you confirmed it.

Would you care to share what settings you tuned to bump up battery life?

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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I have Linux Mint 19 on a Desktop [1 of 4 different OSes on a KVM] on a 15″ Notebook and on an 11″ 2-in-1 with only 32GB SSD [since the fiasco with not being able to use USB drives], have been using Linux Mint since Version 13.  Most of what I need can be accomplished, just a matter of sorting through the myriad of programs to find one.  I use several of the cross-platform programs on Linux, Windows and used to on MacBook Pro until it died.

Before you wonder "Am I doing things right," ask "Am I doing the right things?"

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[ek]

MrJimPhelps wrote:

I recently replaced an old pokey Acer AMD A6 laptop (running dual boot Mint & Win 7) with a Dell Precision 3530 – with Ubuntu 18.04 pre-installed.

Nice move up. Fast machine!

It is nice.  I considered getting a Lenovo or another Dell model (both with Win 10 pre-installed) and then install Xubuntu myself.  But I read good user experiences with Dell’s pre-installed Ubuntu laptops, so I went with the Precision.  They offer the XPS laptops with Ubuntu too, but I need all the ports the Precision features.

I chose a conservative config with a 35watt i5-8400H quad, just onboard Intel GFX but ample ram and storage (16gb ram and 2 drives: nvme ssd and disk) .  I was really tempted by a six core Xeon CPU option.  What a beast!  Glad I went i5: it’s plenty fast and the 6 core Xeon would have probably always been throttling due to high temps no matter what I did with TLP tuning.  The overall design of the 3530 is great but it seems like it was originally targeted for 25-30watt CPUs with more modest boost clocking.

Initially Out-of-the-box, the laptop would sometimes seem a bit slow doing some tasks.  It was because of CPU throttling due to heat.  Using TLP I tuned-down the CPU pstates profile just enough to discourage throttling and got a good performance improvement.  I probably could have done some undervolting too, but I want to keep things simple.

Anyway, hats off to Dell for doing a good job on integrating the Precision platform with Ubuntu.  They eliminated the hardest things many people have to deal with when trying Linux: finding a reasonably compatible hardware platform and a trouble-free installation.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by ek.

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If you like Xfce (the desktop in Xubuntu) and Mint, but not so much Cinnamon, you might also like Mint Xfce.  There’s not a huge difference between Ubuntu proper and Mint, but there are a lot of nice touches in Mint that aren’t in *buntu.

TLP (or another similar package, like Laptop Mode Tools) is essential for battery life in Linux.  I use TLP in my Acer Swift (which spends more time than any of my other PCs on battery), and its battery life is not far off of what it would be in Windows 10.  Windows still has the advantage, but Microsoft has made sure that the Swift (and my G3) won’t effectively run Windows other than 10, so there is no other choice for these two laptops besides Linux.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Klaas Vaak

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@Ascaris: I am interested in the TLP settings to increase battery life. I have a terrible 2 hours on my new Lenovo, as I explained in my comment (#1890579) to ek. I asked him/her for the settings that can extend that life.

I would also like to ask you as an MVP because I left the TLP default settings since I am not sure about them.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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Klaas,

I just used the out of the box settings with TLP… just installed it from the repo and tested.

It’s possible that it’s not working on your laptop.  To check, and to narrow down the cause of the excessive power consumption if it is working, you might also want to install Intel’s PowerTop utility to see what’s drawing the battery life down.  It’s in the Ubuntu repo (go for the one called powertop, which is version 2.9, not the 1.13 version).

Powertop is a command line utility, but it’s menu-driven.  Once it’s installed, unplug the AC power and start it with “sudo powertop”, and use the tab key to page through the screens of data.  In the Tunables section, most of them (all but two) on my laptop show “Good” when on battery power.  On AC power, most of them show “Bad”, since TLP only tunes things when on battery by default.

The two that are “bad” when on battery are really okay, just not to the settings that PowerTop looks for to be “good.”  You can use PowerTop to toggle each setting to Good and see what effect it has on the power draw.

What are you doing to test the battery life (what kind of workload, that kind of thing)?  Do you happen to have a reference run time doing the same thing with Windows for a target?

If anything is pushing the CPU or GPU, the battery life will plummet.  Is anything showing in the system monitor as using a lot of CPU power?  It should mostly be idle for as long as possible for long battery run times.

For my tests, I set the screen backlight to 40% brightness, bluetooth off, wifi on, TLP installed with default settings, with one external mouse plugged in.  I ran VLC set to loop with “Big Buck Bunny” H.264 at 1080p30 (downloadable from its maker online in many formats) until the battery died.  That was with Intel integrated graphics, with the VAAPI driver (i965-va-driver) and hardware acceleration enabled in VLC in each of the Linux setups, and the default Windows 10 setup with whatever media player 10 uses these days.  No other programs besides background programs started by the OS were loaded with Linux or Windows.  I don’t remember if I had the “Intel” or “modesetting” driver set up at that point, but by my recollection, there wasn’t a lot of difference between them in battery run time.

Windows 10 got around 7 hours.  I got ~6.5 with Kubuntu and Mint Xfce, and kernel improvements seem to have narrowed the gap a bit more since then.  I did have problems with Mint Cinnamon initially; it was over an hour less runtime using Mint Cinnamon 18.3 than KDE or Xfce.  Mint Cinnamon 19.1 seems to be more on par with KDE and Xfce, though I never ran it all the way down.

I seem to get really bad battery run times if I use mainline kernels instead of Ubuntu release kernels.  I’ve never run one all the way down, but in the quickie test (I run it down to ~90% and see what time it reports remaining and compare that to previous results… it’s not as accurate, but a lot easier on the battery than the full rundown), it seems to run it down about twice as fast as the official kernels.

 

 

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Klaas Vaak

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Yeah, TLP does seem to have sensible defaults.

Oh well. I usually adjust mine by hand anyway, out of habit.

It’s possible to configure for more extreme powersaving but that’ll then come out of the user experience… and certain hardware models can really benefit from throttling while on mains power too to increase component lifespan, if/when the factory defaults for thermal behaviour run too hot for a long life.

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Klaas Vaak

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@mn: just out of interest: which settings do you adjust and to what values?

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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@Ascaris: good to hear from you again, it’s been a while.

Many thanks for your help. Let me answer 1 or 2 issues you raised.

I installed Powertop 2.9 with Synaptic. Toggling through the various pages does not mean much to me, but when I got to the Tunables (on battery) I was glad to have your comments. I had 7 lines showing “bad”, 5 of which relating to “enable SATA link power management for host 0, 1, 2, 3, 4”. I toggles all of those to “good”. The other one was “VM writeback timeout”, even though I do not have a VM set-up. I toggled it to “good”. The last one was something about Nvidia (I have a Nvidia card), but after I toggled it to “good”, toggled through the other pages again then back to Tunables, the Nvidia line was gone.

As for my system: Mint 19.1 XFCE (I deleted Win 10), always haven a browser open (Firefox or Iridium), File Manager, Typora (a Markdown app), 1 or max 2 spreadsheets, Liferea (RSS feed reader), Autokey, Redshift, Battery Monitor, backlight at 38%. No heavy stuff at all. I have also set the native Mint power settings as best as I could – hence the backlight.

As for kernels, I don’t touch them because I am scared stiff to bork my machine. It is running well, and very stable. I have tried some other distros on the side, and with each one my appreciation for Mint rises. The only reason I look at others is because I want to ultimately have a rolling release, but that’s another story.

Regarding power management, I am not going into a sophisticated benchmark exercise, I just base myself on a subjective impression. I know that can be dangerous, but I am not worried about 30 minutes or even 1 hour. To me a battery life of 2 hours is far too low considering I don’t do anything particularly taxing. 6-7 hours seems to be an average for many people, so I would be happy if I could get to 4-5 hours; alright, even 3.5-4 hours would be a pleasing improvement for me.

Anyway, I am going to monitor it to see if there is a difference. BTW, sudo tlp-stat -s tells me TLP is running, although you said it might not be working. Hmmm.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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Ascaris

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It’s talking about another kind of VM in the PowerTop stats.  In this case, it means virtual memory.  The report you provided showed that TLP is working… the SATA link power state and VM writeback are the ones that TLP tunes a little differently than what PowerTop considers good, but if the rest are good, TLP is running and working.

Some laptops have longer battery life times than others.  My Asus F8Sn laptop is a power hog… if I could get 2 hours out of it, that would be quite good. It has a discrete nVidia GPU only, not an Optimus/Prime setup, and I have to disable PowerMizer on it to keep it from crashing Linux, so that makes it even worse.

You say your model uses nVidia graphics… now we’re getting somewhere in terms of the power consumption.  That’s probably a big part of the reason, but it may be possible to substantially reduce the power consumption.  I’m presuming that it has an Intel CPU, since it would be most logical for a laptop with an AMD CPU to have an AMD GPU as well.

If your model has only an nVidia GPU, the battery life is probably going to be on the bad side of the spectrum no matter what, as the discrete GPUs are optimized for performance and not so much in power use.  Still, if you are using the open-source Nouveau driver, battery life will probably improve noticeably if you switch to the nVidia proprietary driver.  Unfortunately, nVidia doesn’t cooperate that much with open source developers, so the Nouveau drivers are often sorely lacking in power saving.

If your laptop has dual GPUs (Intel integrated and nVidia discrete), the battery life should improve a lot if you disable the nVidia when you’re not using the extra performance it provides.  If you have an icon in the system tray (which it should in Mint on an Optimus/Prime model), you should be able to turn off the nVidia GPU using that.  I’ve never tried to use the Nouveau driver with my G3 (which has this type of dual GPU setup), as its performance is poor compared to the nVidia driver (and I didn’t buy the gaming laptop to not have good performance), so I don’t know how well it works with the dual GPU setup.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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It’s talking about another kind of VM in the PowerTop stats.  In this case, it means virtual memory.  The report you provided showed that TLP is working… the SATA link power state and VM writeback are the ones that TLP tunes a little differently than what PowerTop considers good, but if the rest are good, TLP is running and working.

Some laptops have longer battery life times than others.  My Asus F8Sn laptop is a power hog… if I could get 2 hours out of it, that would be quite good. It has a discrete nVidia GPU only, and I have to disable PowerMizer on it to keep it from crashing Linux, so that makes it even worse.

You say your model uses nVidia graphics.  That’s probably a big part of the reason, but it may be possible to substantially reduce the power consumption.  I’m presuming that it has an Intel CPU, since it would be most logical for a laptop with an AMD CPU to have an AMD GPU as well.

If your model has only an nVidia GPU (which is unlikely on newer models), like my Asus F8Sn, the battery life is probably going to be on the bad side of the spectrum no matter what, as the discrete GPUs are optimized for performance and not so much in power use.  Still, if you are using the open-source Nouveau driver, battery life will probably improve noticeably if you switch to the nVidia proprietary driver.  Unfortunately, nVidia doesn’t cooperate that much with open source developers, so the Nouveau drivers are often sorely lacking in power saving.

If your laptop has dual GPUs (Intel integrated and nVidia discrete), as most current production laptops with discrete GPUs (like my Dell G3) do, the battery life should improve a lot if you disable the nVidia when you’re not using the extra performance it provides.  If you have an icon in the system tray (which it should in Mint on an Optimus/Prime model), you should be able to turn off the nVidia GPU using that, with the nVidia driver at least.  I’ve never tried using the Nouveau driver with my G3, so I don’t know how that works.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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[Klaas Vaak]

If your laptop has dual GPUs (Intel integrated and nVidia discrete), the battery life should improve a lot if you disable the nVidia when you’re not using the extra performance it provides.  If you have an icon in the system tray (which it should in Mint on an Optimus/Prime model), you should be able to turn off the nVidia GPU using that.

That’s right, it has both, so, following your suggestion, I switched to the Intel GPU using the icon in the system tray.

I’ve never tried to use the Nouveau driver with my G3 (which has this type of dual GPU setup), as its performance is poor compared to the nVidia driver (and I didn’t buy the gaming laptop to not have good performance), so I don’t know how well it works with the dual GPU setup.

When I booted the computer for the 1st after installing Mint, I had a problem with the cursor freezing, and I could not work out why. I uninstalled/reinstalled about 3 times without any change. Then I thought (boy, those newbie brainwaves !!) let’s have a look at the drivers, and in the window that opened up there was the Nouveau driver marked as active, and the Nvidia driver was recommended. I switched to the latter, and …. cursor problem disappeared. Boy, was I proud of myself 😉

BTW, am I right to assume I don’t have to switch back to the Nouveau driver?

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

• This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by Klaas Vaak.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by Klaas Vaak.

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@Ascaris: I am not handling a reply with quotes too well, my apologies. My reply is #1892992.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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Correction: the Big Buck Bunny I used was 24 fps, not 30.

I ran VLC set to loop with “Big Buck Bunny” H.264 at 1080p30 24 (downloadable from its maker online in many formats) until the battery died.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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I have been dual boot now for more than 2 years. I am still a newbie! I tried many different distros (like 20+ flavors), Arch, RPM, Fedora, and Debian based. Some were too bleeding edge for me and I had hardware issues of backward compatibility others I just did not like the “feel and fit”. Finally settled on Mint Xfce (currently 18.3 planning on migrating to 19.2 soon) for work and stability. Machine is a Laptop Lenovo Thinkpad/ I5/ originally loaded with Win7. so for the past 2 years Win 7 has not gone on line except to upgrade my Ross Tech software I use to service my car. I do not miss the MS issues at all. In fact I have not bothered to do any updates since just after the GWX fiasco. So if you want an easy transition Mint Xfce was a breeze…then again I was used to working command line- lots of practice with all the distro hopping. I did have to edit the Grub several times when I made a goof changing distros. No matter what there is a learning curve. I still have a Dos, XP, 98 and 7 laptops that never ever go on line these are used in test and measurement set-ups. The one thing I do not have under linux is MS Access. so that stays under Win7. no have not tried Wine yet ….maybe in the future. I have two laptops in which to experiment. now for more time!

Glad I started early, may you find the feel and fit along with LTS….good luck to all.

Renée

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Renee wrote:

no have not tried Wine yet ….maybe in the future. I have two laptops in which to experiment. now for more time!

It’s improving nicely, like a fine… okay, okay, too easy.

I don’t need MS Office or Photoshop, two of the big ones that make people say they need Windows, along with games in general.  I’ve been fortunate with the programs I’ve wanted to run under WINE.

As far as games go, I’m not all that aware of what the big titles are that I am supposed to be excited about at any given moment, and even then I probably would not be if I knew.  Sometimes I will see a video of someone doing a playthrough and think I’d like to try that, and most of the time, I find the thing is a few years old by then, which means it’s usually cheaper.  It stands to reason that these would be more likely to work in WINE too, though I don’t have any actual statistics to back up that guess.

All of the things I’ve specifically wanted to run on WINE have worked, fortunately.  Most of the time, it works in the other direction, with me starting from the library of things that run on Linux and picking one, so I don’t even see the Windows-only offerings. There’s enough that will work in Linux to use up all the available time I have to spend many times over.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Thanks for the info.

Renée

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[ek]

Klaas Vaak wrote:

@ek: that’s interesting what you wrote about TLP. A couple of months ago I bought a Lenovo laptop with Win 10 pre-installed, which I deleted during the installation of Mint 19.1. I also installed TLP and left the default settings. I have not seen any improvement in battery life, which is a terrible 2 hours !! despite people saying TLP is fantastic – you confirmed it.

Would you care to share what settings you tuned to bump up battery life?

Have you installed TLPUI?  It’s a gui interface to TLP.  Info on installing here:

https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/11/install-tlpui-in-ubuntu-or-linux-mint.html

It makes tweaking & testing TLP settings much easier.

Also, I use TLP to tune both battery and AC power modes.  The battery mode tune is tailored to save power a lot of power and extend battery run time.  AC tune is mostly tailored to de-tune CPU pstates (processor speed steps) to keep the cores running at the highest speeds that don’t trigger constant thermal throttling.

The attached plain text file below contains my tlp settings.  Disclaimer: the settings are extremely hardware specific and probably won’t work as-is on your system.

 

• This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by ek.

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Klaas Vaak

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@ek: many thanks for that. No, I did not know about TLPUI, I kept struggling with the app through the terminal. I downloaded and installed TLPUI immediately.

Thanks also for the file with your settings; I ‘ll have a look how I can use that 🙂

Sometimes it seems this “Linux forum” is more useful than specialised ones.

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@EK: I commented about all of my actions to improve battery life, and what I achieved in a reply to Ascaris – see #1896673.

I want to thank you for your help too.

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[ek]

@klaas-vaak:  I did some checking & it seems like Lenovo laptops can sometimes be a challenge to control CPU or system power under Linux, resulting in poor battery run time and/or excess CPU throttling on AC power.

There are a few tools some folks have developed specifically for Lenovo Linux laptops.  As an example:

https://github.com/erpalma/throttled

I have NOT toyed with this yet, but I have looked it over and it looks promising.  But there are some conditions to using it: you’ll probably have to disable UEFI Secure Boot (a show stopper for some I’m sure) and disable thermald (if your Mint install uses it).

The thing I like about throttled is it supports setting the tdp_down state in CPUs that support the feature.  I’m pretty sure Windows 10 effectively allows configuring tdp_down on some i5-or-greater laptops to achieve better on-battery time.

I’m assuming much on this, but I believe throttled and TLP can be run together – so long as all CPU control options in TLP are effectively turned off.

But, sadly, it looks like thermald is strictly command-line and configuring it could be daunting for some Linux novices.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by ek.

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@ek: thanks for your research. I feel a bit more nervous about throttling because I don’t quite understand it.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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Klaas Vaak wrote:

BTW, am I right to assume I don’t have to switch back to the Nouveau driver?

Yes, that is correct; I would not suggest switching back to Nouveau.  If nVidia would cooperate with the open-source devs the way that Intel and AMD have, the Nouveau driver (especially on newer hardware) would be far better.  Old habits die hard, and the urge to keep everything secret is strong with some less enlightened companies like nVidia and Microsoft (it will take more than open-sourcing Windows calculator and similar trivial things to prove you’ve changed, MS!).

Make sure that the option to power off the nVidia card, not just switch to the Intel, is the one selected, if that option exists.  You’d think they were the same thing, but I have both options on my Dell G3 laptop.  It will require a logout and login to complete the switch.

The Windows drivers can make the switch on the fly, seamlessly switching to nVidia when the Intel reaches the peak of its ability, then switching back to Intel when the need for speed is gone, but nVidia hasn’t put as much effort into its Linux drivers as its Windows drivers.

The Bumblebee project aims to produce a working Linux on-the-fly switch as in Windows, but I’ve never tried it.  I bought my G3 because of the discrete GPU, so I’ve never used the Intel GPU except for testing.  I don’t think of the G3 as a full-on laptop to be used on battery as much as a portable desktop replacement that is a lot easier to haul around than an actual desktop, so while I do have TLP installed, I haven’t actually ever used the G3 on battery power.  If I ever change my mind, though, the option to switch to the Intel is there.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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@Ascaris: just to wrap up the issue of battery life, this is what I have come up with.

As I said above, changing the setting from the Nvidia GPU to the embedded Intel graphics chip, in combination with some TLP fine-tuning (don’t know if it did anything), improved battery life by 30 minutes.I had noticed, however, that even though I had changed to Intel in the Nvidia settings, the Nvidia GPU was still running in the background, consuming power. So, following advice I picked up elsewhere, I changed the BIOS setting to Intel, and that yielded another hour, giving me a total battery life of 3.5 hours, an improvement of 75%. Many people would still be very unhappy with 3.5 hours, esp. when one considers that that is with a relatively light load of apps open. Still, I think I have maxed out what is possible and will have to accept this.

I want to thank you and EK for your suggestions and helping me improve battery life.

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Thanks for the update, Klaas.  I’m now testing my Dell G3 gaming laptop on battery for the first time since I bought it (in November 2018).  While I didn’t buy it with long battery life in mind, I’m pleasantly surprised– with the nVidia GPU disabled and turned off (not in the BIOS/UEFI, as that is not actually an option on this model), it’s reporting a predicted run time of up to 8 hours in KDE Neon, with a probable “real” run time being closer to six.  TLP is installed with default settings, wifi on, bluetooth off, LCD backlight at about 25% (it’s brighter than the display on my Swift, and 25% is actually a nice level).  That’s just the reported time while I am browsing here on AskWoody, which is pretty light-duty computing, but 6 hours is still more than I expected even for that.

Modern laptops can give pretty good battery spot life estimates (within certain limits), as the battery is able to report the power draw in real-time, and the OS can easily compare that with the remaining watt-hour capacity reported by the battery to get a run time.  The estimates may bounce around; if a given process starts and uses a lot of CPU time, the power consumption will rise, and the predicted run time will plummet.  There’s no way for the power management program to predict what the draw will be in the next few hours, so the estimates Powertop gives are based on the assumption that the draw at that exact moment is going to be constant for the whole time (which is what I mean by a spot estimate, rather than an average estimate over the time the laptop has run on battery).  The battery run time estimates reported by KDE seem to match Powertop’s estimates pretty closely, so it appears to be using similar methodology.

I’m glad there has been improvement in your battery run time, but there may well be some more battery life to be found in your laptop.  Powertop will help find anything that may be pulling the run time down.  Any processes that are using CPU time that are not necessary can be stopped (I’ve had Syncthing and Veeam both trying to do something while on battery on the Swift, and since I was not connected to my LAN, there was no use for either program to drag down my battery, since both of them would have been looking for other PCs on the LAN).

I remember mentioning the kernel (for me, the mainline kernels have always appeared to have a bad effect on battery life), and you said you were afraid to mess with that, or something to that effect.  It’s kind of weird at first for a Windows user, but the kernel can be easily swapped at boot time, with the rest of the Linux installation remaining the same.  It sounds worse than it is.  If you install additional kernels, you can choose between them in the advanced options submenu in GRUB.

Mint makes trying out other official Ubuntu kernels easy.  One of the options in the software updater utility is Linux Kernels, and from there you can see all of the available official Ubuntu kernels.  Later kernels often have better power-saving support.  If one of these were to fail completely (which is not likely), you could just reboot, choose your old kernel in the menu and boot that, and from there, uninstall the kernel that does not work.

FWIW, I’m using Ubuntu kernel 5.0.0-23, currently the newest one Ubuntu offers.

Mainline kernels are unmodified kernels taken right from the kernel team (Linus Torvalds and crew), as far as I know, though compiled and hosted on Ubuntu servers.  Ubuntu does not recommend them for daily use, as they do not have whatever magic Ubuntu adds to their official kernels before release.  These kernels are not shown by the Mint update utility… it only shows the official Ubuntu releases, which I’ve always found to be very stable and good.

If you wanted to try mainline kernels, you could try the “Ukuu” utility.  It stands for Ubuntu kernel update utility, and is available from the same author as Timeshift (Tony George).  I doubt you would be interested in that, but just in case anyone wants to try that, Ukuu is an easy way of doing it.

 

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
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@Ascaris: many thanks for your feedback.

It’s interesting that you should mention kernels. When I 1st did a Mint bare metal installation, I upgraded the kernel a couple of times when suggested by the Update Manager, and both times there were issues so I reverted back to the previous version via the Advanced options in Grub. But it left me a bit of an aversion to kernel updates – unreasonably so, I know.

Just a quick sidetrack. My wife’s Lenovo Yoga with 2 GB RAM and a 32 GB eMMC card and Win 8.1 installed had a much better battery life than mine, although I have to say she only uses it for browsing and emailing. Then Win 8.1 gave the ghost, could not be revitalised, so we almost ditched, till it struck me to wipe Windows and install Linux. And that worked, with continued good battery life.

But here’s the issue. It had a funny scrolling jumping behaviour in the browser, and trying another browser, nor changing Synaptic settings changed anything. So, choose another distro, but no other Ubuntu-based distro detected the eMMC card, only the distro I had installed originally: AntiX. Now someone on another forum is helping me get rid of AntiX  with an unconventional method since regular methods did not work. And 1 of the things he made me do is install Mint to a flash drive and update the kernel to the latest stable release using UKUU.

We have not managed to get Mint booting yet, though the Grub menu shows it now. I’ll be interested to see how Mint will affect battery life. The reason I choose Mint is because of its rock solid stability. I have been very happy with it since Oct 2018, and every time I experiment with another distro my appreciation for Mint rises. Remember: I am a beginner newbie Linux user.

BTW, your kernel version is supported till Feb 2020 only.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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[Ascaris]

Klaas Vaak wrote:

BTW, your kernel version is supported till Feb 2020 only.

Oh, there will be a new version of it long before then!  I always grab the new one as soon as it’s available in the hwe-edge channel.  I’ll go back to the previous one if there is a problem, but thus far, there haven’t been any problems.

That’s strange about the recognizing the eMMC drive issue.  I’ve never had any issues getting Mint 18.3 or 19.x to install on an eMMC drive on my Dell Inspiron 11 or my Acer Swift 1.  I don’t know enough to be able to offer a hypothesis as to why, though!

Edit: I just thought of something that I am reasonably sure that whomever it is helping you with the issue probably already thought of, but just in case, here it is.  I used the manual option every time I’ve installed Linux.  Is it possible that you used the guided mode only and that’s what didn’t work?  The manual mode may have given options not available in the guided mode.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

• This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by Ascaris.

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Heh… actually don’t remember if I’ve *ever* used the default automatic install mode with Linux… well, except at a previous job with a pre-customized installer…

Ascaris wrote:

I used the manual option every time I’ve installed Linux.  Is it possible that you used the guided mode only and that’s what didn’t work?  The manual mode may have given options not available in the guided mode.

Well yeah, there’s plenty of reasons to use manual mode. Such as LVM within encryption container, which has several advantages… say like https://albertodonato.net/blog/posts/full-disk-encryption-with-btrfs-on-ubuntu-xenial.html (oh dear, certificate expired since I last visited that page)

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Hi, this may not be the perfect forum but I wish of all the 1000 linux distributions, someone could make a current small distribution of linux that would work on some of the older non-supported GPSs and hand held readers that are usable but no support for.

Magellan Garmin TomTom old tablet readers left behind.

There must be hundreds of distributions in reality, since every developer is annoyed with the way another developer deigned a particular version of linux, they make another one. Surely some developer is willing to alter a current distribution and have it work on an old device. Then once a year only make bug fixes to complaints of a flaw and not have any new feature updates.

The other option is to have the permission of the original OS company (Microsoft? HP?) allow a 3rd party to do bug fixes. But that won’t happen.

Just thinking out loud here.

TY

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Ascaris wrote:

Make sure that the option to power off the nVidia card, not just switch to the Intel, is the one selected, if that option exists.  You’d think they were the same thing, but I have both options on my Dell G3 laptop.  It will require a logout and login to complete the switch.

The Windows drivers can make the switch on the fly, seamlessly switching to nVidia when the Intel reaches the peak of its ability, then switching back to Intel when the need for speed is gone, but nVidia hasn’t put as much effort into its Linux drivers as its Windows drivers.

Heh. On one Dell Precision dual-GPU laptop model (with a Quadro… actually don’t right now remember which Quadro), the only way to stop BSODs in Windows 10 Pro was to just drop one GPU from firmware menu.

Compared to that the Linux switching worked just fine.

Also nVidia does usually offer much longer support lifetimes for the Linux drivers.

Klaas Vaak wrote:

@mn: just out of interest: which settings do you adjust and to what values?

That would depend greatly on specific hardware and workload, including clamping max freq in advance based on weather forecasts sometimes.

Usually “conservative” CPU governor though, if using ACPI power management (instead of intel_pstate or some such).

Modern systems with smart CPU management and SSDs for storage are a lot easier to tune than older models anyway.

ek wrote:

@klaas-vaak:  I did some checking & it seems like Lenovo laptops can sometimes be a challenge to control CPU or system power under Linux, resulting in poor battery run time and/or excess CPU throttling on AC power.

There are a few tools some folks have developed specifically for Lenovo Linux laptops.

Though when you find a good match between the various Lenovo-specific tools and hardware version, you might end up with twice the battery life on Linux. BTDT.

And the product line really makes a difference. The consumer and ultraportable lines haven’t been nearly as Linux-friendly as, say, Thinkpad T series, historically… or a 600 E/X.

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