A friend of mine recently started using Linux on his laptop. He shopped around and settled on Solus because of how fast and effortless it is compared to other distros. He only got to use it for about two weeks though.
Unfortunately, his laptop met its untimely demise a few weeks ago. We're not really sure what happened, but he couldn't get it to boot (despite lots of good advice and troubleshooting). This particular device has been plagued with hardware-related issues from day one though, so he knew this would probably happen sooner or later.
Luckily for him, right now is a pretty good time to build a computer. I helped him choose parts for a new system and he placed a few orders. As of yesterday he has everything assembled, and was attempting to get Solus up and running.
This is where the issues start.
I recommended an AMD RX 6600 GPU for him, as it was the best performer he could get for his budget. I knew there had been some reported issues with that particular card, but I didn't think it would stop him from installing. Unfortunately he couldn't even get a live disk to boot. He posted on the subreddit about his issues. You can take a look here:
I worked with him a bit to do some troubleshooting. We tried some boot flags and an older ISO with no results. Ultimately we concluded that he had three options:
- Attempt to boot without the GPU using a serial console (complicated, and perhaps not even possible)
- Wait until he could borrow a GPU to do the install (a few days at least)
- Try another distro
In the end he chose to give up on Solus and go with Manjaro. Of course this makes me sad. But I get it - he's excited to put his new hardware to use. It just left him disappointed with regards to Solus.
I love this distro, but honestly I'm a little disappointed too. I know a new ISO is in the works. Usually I'm the guy saying "be patient, it'll be here soon enough". Sometimes people can't wait though, and it makes me sad to see a new user turned away because of a solvable (albeit with a lot of work) issue.
As far as feedback goes, he and I had a few thoughts.
- There should be a link to the RIT mirrors on the main site so that users can access old ISOs if necessary. I'll probably submit a PR for this tomorrow or Saturday if someone else hasn't already opened a PR for this. (Feel free to beat me to it though).
- As long as we're going to host an old ISO, we need to be upfront about hardware incompatibilities that may affect new installs. As far as I'm aware this includes Intel's 12th gen CPUs, AMD 6600/6600XT, and perhaps a few other parts. Perhaps this could be stickied on the forums somewhere so that we don't leave people high and dry in these sorts of situations.
- We need an up-to-date ISO. I know that you guys are working on it, and I appreciate your hard work. If there is anything I can do to facilitate this or help test, please let me know. I want Solus to continue to grow because as far as I've seen it's the best darn distro out there.
What else can I do to help? Do you have any other ideas for improving things with respect to new users with newer hardware?
