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posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 21 2019, @10:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the ymmv dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3196

I installed five flavours of Linux on my new laptop: One month on, here's what I've learned

It's been a month since I wrote about getting a new HP Pavilion 14 laptop and loading Linux on it. My experience with it so far has been extremely good – it has done exactly what I wanted, I haven't had any trouble with it, I have used it, traveled with it, updated all of the various Linux distributions I loaded on it, and even added another distribution to it.

First, I broke one of my own basic rules – never travel with only a new and untested laptop. I left for a three-week-plus vacation in the US the day after my previous posting. I used the laptop pretty much every day during the trip. and never had a problem of any kind. It was fast and reliable, suspend/resume on closing/opening the lid worked perfectly.  Battery life is extremely good – I've never actually managed to run the batteries completely out, but I can certainly say that they are good for 6-8 hours depending on your use.

[...]

I kept it up to date as I was traveling (to be honest, that also breaks one of my personal rules – don't risk updates on your only laptop while traveling). That means openSUSE Tumbleweed got hundreds of updates; Debian, Fedora and Manjaro got a fair number as well, and I updated Linux Mint from 19.2 Beta to the final 19.2 release, all without problems.

I also decided to install Ubuntu 19.04 on it one evening when I had a bit of extra time. That turned out to be just as easy as the other distributions I had already installed – download the ISO, dump it to a USB stick and then boot that and run the installer. As with the other distributions it didn't recognize the Realtek Wi-Fi card, but I was able to correct that the same way, and using the same downloads, as I had already done with Linux Mint and Debian. The one small problem that I ran into I already knew about, that Ubuntu and Linux Mint have a directory name conflict in the EFI boot directory. I avoided that by creating a tiny EFI partition specifically for the Ubuntu installation.

[...] While I was traveling I was asked by several friends who keep up with my blog if I regretted having wiped Windows 10 from this laptop unnecessarily (see the comments on my previous post for details). My answer was a very clear 'no', there was not a single situation where I needed or wanted to boot Windows, and I was happy to have the additional disk space.


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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:56AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:56AM (#883438)

    How many non-engineer types do you know that buy external SSD drives? By the time the clueless start buying them en masse, trim will be mainstream.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:11AM (#883441)

    I have had one now for 3yrs. Nice 1TB, trim is not an issue that it made out to be, it just improves performance since 128KB blocks are clear and waiting. The controller of SD is the critical part to rotate stock from time to time. Almost like DRAM needed in the past.