I got a laptop as a gift. So I had to get Linux installed on it once again. However, Windows had to make a return into my life, but at least its not just on a device of mine...
These last few days have been quite crazy, and some really good things happened. First, I am writing this in my Nextcloud instance from another computer while working at Uni. I don’t usually do that, but I got some time and decided to go ahead and use it for something more productive.
By reading the title you already know what this is about, so lets go for it.
New laptop
My new laptop in its desk 😎
I’ve used a fairly old laptop for a while, it has served me really well and I don’t really have complaints, other than the hardware being quite damaged. The laptop fell and a corner is pretty much busted, alongside 2 USB ports. I’ve done fine with a dongle, but it was really annoying. The hinge was broken too. It was flimsy and whenever I opened the lid it would turn on by itself, or turn off if I moved the screen a bit too much.
It also used dual graphics (Optimus? I think?) with an Intel integrated graphics card and a discrete NVIDIA GPU, which gave me some problems and it made the device incredibly hot at times. I actually disabled it via the BIOS for a while because the fan was also quite annoying and it never felt right when playing games or doing graphically intensive stuff. It was more laggy than the Intel graphics.
I’ve thought about running Windows on this device again since the NVIDIA drivers worked better there, still undecided, to be honest, since running Intel graphics is just fine most of the time.
I got an ASUS Vivobook S15 The new laptop does not have dual graphics, it has the new Intel Xe graphics that I’ve heard are a lot better than the old integrated HD Graphics (terrible name btw). It has an 11th gen core i5, 8GB of ram and 500GB of nvme storage. Which is a lot more than I need, since I lived with 240GB for the last 4 years.
Its been quite fun to use. It came with Windows 11 installed and I have decided to keep it there since I want to do some gaming and I also depend on some software for school that only runs well with that OS. I have ran some on Linux before, but I always had annoying hiccups. I decided to stop that and just use what they expect me to use. Also I wanted to try a couple games, that seem to be a bit harder to setup on Fedora, the distro I chose to dual boot alongside Windows.
New distro
It’s not as new, since I’ve been using Fedora on my old laptop for a bit more than a month now, I am also trying KDE Plasma with it. I’ll write about all that later in the future.
For the new laptop, I considered running EndeavourOS once again, but it did not support Secure Boot, and while it was easy to disable and run everything fine, Fedora supports it out of the box, and it was just nice to have, even if not really, so I just went with it.
I decided to try out BTRFS and also encrypt my partition. Both things have been going fine, but I’ve only used that for a couple of days, I’ll write about it later, probably.
I also installed GNOME, which I kinda avoided in the past not only due to it being hard to customize, but because it was laggy on my old device. However, in this new hardware, all the animations are perfectly rendered and buttery smooth. I think I’ll stick with Plasma for now.
Another thing I wanted was fingerprint support, since my device has a sensor for that, but it looks like neither DE detected it, which was quite sad. I will look into it another time, probably.
Windows again
I don’t know if I ever mentioned it in a blog, but I had tried for a while to get Linux installed on our family desktop. So I installed Linux Mint on it a few months ago. It worked fine, but unfortunately the graphics drivers were not ideal (It has an NVIDIA Quadro on it, which I would use for CAD and such, but I never did) but other than that it was good.
Sadly my sister was not a fan of LibreOffice, and even tho I installed a virtual machine with the software she wanted, she just would not use it. Instead she would ask my parents to use their laptops whenever she had to do pretty much anything, and basically nobody would use the desktop at all.
That’s why I ended up going back to Windows there, since my parents were annoyed too at having to lend their devices for such simple things. At the device works and will see some more use now.
Finishing up
Its really fun to have the latest software in decent hardware all running like a charm. Its great to have a laptop that feels super solid instead of feeling cheap and plastic. I am really happy with what I got, and I also have a place to fill with cool geeky stickers without the thought of “I will replace this in a few years so why bother” I used to have before.
Thanks for reading, I’ll keep y’all updated
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