Solus Saves the Day

timbo

I decided to bite the bullet this week and replace my 8 year old HP Pavilion G7 with a new laptop. Got myself an Asus TUF FX705DT. Very nice!

Windows was the first thing to go. I have been a bit of a distro hopper and periodically return to Solus, as it just worked so well on my HP. However, I was on Manjaro Plasma, so decided to install this.

No dice. The installer couldn't find any partitions to install on - I had disabled Secure Boot, etc. I therefore devised a cunning plan to install another distro, in the hope it would overcome this issue, then install Manjaro over it. I went for Pop_OS! and it installed without issue. However, I had the same problem with partitions when I tried to install Manjaro. I eventually figured out it was something to do with selecting LVM when I installed Pop.

So plan B was to install Solus followed by Manjaro. I don't quite know why I didn't stop at Solus, but I had a thought in the back of my mind that with a new laptop, having an Arch-based distro might be better for driver support, etc.

Still didn't work. I eventually solved the issue by running Solus off a USB stick and manually editing the partitions. Manjaro installed, finally good to go.

There was no WiFi to start with, and I knew I'd need to install Nvidia drivers. So, salivating over the prospect of how the graphics would perform when compared to the Intel HD 3000 in my old laptop, I ran the manjaro hardware tool and installed the proprietary drivers.

Manjaro hang on reboot, something about #ness of backlight. I searched on this and found people reporting this issue, but still saying they could boot into their system. Not me however.

I therefore decided that the 'Universe' was telling me I needed to install Solus, which I duly did (the Plasma version). After running updates, using DoFlicky to insall Nvidia drivers and following the instructions on the forum to get the Realtek WiFi working, I have a quietly purring new laptop that is playing me Waterfront by Simple Minds whilst it downloads my Steam content.

The HP will be used to scratch my distro-hopping itch (Manjaro XFCE installing as I type) but Solus is here to stay on the new beast.

brent

timbo I therefore decided that the 'Universe' was telling me I needed to install Solus,

that's how it happens🙂

mojave21

I used Manjaro on my laptop for a year and I swapped it with Solus when it's bloated. I had driver issues, random crashes as well. The only thing I don't like about Solus budgie is limited customization where I could customize Manjaro XFCE anyhow I wanted.