Pop!Os and Linux Mint Debian Edition vs Nvidia

I have, on and off, tried getting an acceptable Linux distribution on this laptop (Acer Nitro 5, 8th gen i7 and an Nvidia GT1060). While Debian Buster installs and works, I have been tearing my hair out trying to get a 2nd monitor working. I figured a more "user friendly" distro was worth trying to see what would happen. I put it off until today, when Microsoft Word decided to give me some ridiculous "LinkedIn" resume helper while I was updating my resume. I don't recall asking for the LinkedIn resume assistant to be loaded (I gather it's been a thing for a few years) but it set me off. I really don't care for LinkedIn, it's a stupid fantasy world of happiness, people "living their best lives" and has lately descended into Minion memes and flat out garbage The Endless September will never go away apparently. Rant over, onto distro hopping...

Laptop setup

Once Windows 11 gets ahold of your machine, it gets increasingly hard to do things with the boot sequence. Pop!OS wants secure boot disabled for example. The convoluted sequence for getting somewhere to turn off secure boot is to head to the Windows Settings app, go to "Updates", find the "Advanced" features and finally tell it to reboot to show you the new version of the menu that used to be there when you held down F10 while booting. I haven't tried F10, perhaps it still works. Regardless, after some fiddling around I did manage to disable secure boot, clean up enough stuff off the D: for a Linux partition and I was ready to go.

So why the D:? This laptop has two drive bays, the first one is an NVME device and the second is a good old hunk of spinning rust. For some reason, the linux kernels used in the installation distributions can't see the NVME drive and I ran out of patience trying to work out why. Something to do with the way it's set up as some kind of raid device but for testing out distros, it just wasn't worth screwing with when all I wanted was a 200Gb play space.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 5

In retrospect, I might have had more luck with the normal Linux Mint, but I was curious as to whether the Debian Edition had made enough changes to get that Nvidia card working on the external HDMI. The short answer is: no. Probably something to do with the older 5.10 kernel Debian Buster is using. I mean, it worked fine and recognised most of what is plugged in here, except the damn 2nd monitor. Installing the Nvidia driver to replace the Neauvou driver was the same faff as replacing it in stock Debian and also didn't do squat. Time to move on.

Pop!OS

Not too much to report here: it works out of the box. The installer however did not work. The external USB DVD drive I use was almost ground to pieces while the Pop!OS boot sequence tried to run casper-md5check (a process that took a good 10 minutes to finish). The system reported many system daemon startup failures until it retried all of them, finally it stopped grinding away at the DVD only to dump me unceremoniously at the boot screen with no graphical prompt to log in. Thankfully CTRL-ALT-F2 gets you a normal console (login: pop-os, no password) and you can restart gdm manually. Then it worked and much to my surprise, the 2nd monitor flickered to life! Only then I was confronted with a background wallpaper that induces migraines from 50 metres:

Seriously Pop!OS guys, your hideous background is objectively terrible. It's too bloody bright. Get rid of it.

Then it worked and much to my surprise, the 2nd monitor flickered to life and I finished the installation uneventfully.

One small issue I found was that using the Pop!OS package manager to install Chrome uses a Flatpak. The Flatpak by default doesn't give the app enough permissions to properly install the extensions I like to run, so I uninstalled it and just installed a .deb direct from Google instead. Much better.

So now what

I guess I will simply buy a fat SSD and put it where my spinning rust is and do a proper re-install of Pop!OS. I don't hate it, but the Ubuntu underpinnings pop out everywhere like stuffing out of a worn cushion. Top marks for the Nvidia support though.

Postscript

Getting the entire SmartShepherd development toolset installed was as easy as Debian (VSCode, Android Studio, GitHub Desktop). So this laptop is now feature complete compared to my main development workstation. Pop!OS is actually a pretty impressive thing, more of a slimmed down Ubuntu (which is a marked improvement). I'd still prefer I could get the stupid Nvidia card working under Debian, but this will do nicely.

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