My experience so far - Everything's perfect but the installer

ArnoldLayne

I installed Solus 3-4 weeks ago and I'm using it as my daily driver on a low end laptop (intel n3450).
Everything is so smooth, stable (never a crash or a problem) and the battery life even improved (compared to the pre-installed Windows 10) which usually doesn't happen so often with Linux.
I came from Ubuntu Budgie so I already fell in love with Budgie but I prefer Solus much more.
But with the installation process I had some problems:
1)It messed up the dual boot with Windows (with Ubuntu or Manjaro I never had this problem and I don't know what I did wrong since there aren't many options to choose). It took me some time to fixed everything.
2)With other distros I usually have the option to encrypt only the partition of that distro while on Solus, if I understood correctly, there is only the full disk ecnryption.

Besides that I would like to thank all the Solus Team for doing such a great job!

cryptn

ArnoldLayne

How did you fix your dualboot problem? Any solution to get a bootmenu so far wasn't successful and I am just testing Ubuntu Budgie as alternative for the moment.

alawi3d

ArnoldLayne can you kindly tell us what kind of problem you had with dual boot? cause I also facing problems that
still haven't solved them .. upon my first time into linux and Solus budgie i had these issues that happened to me:

wired network was on connection loop (solving it was with either resting PCI from terminal " still don't know the command line" or switching PC off/on before going from Windows to Solus.
my 3TB HDD wasn't showing in Solus because it was on "Basic" and not "Primary partition" which i had to install EaseUS master partition to solve this.
then i added new AMD GPU and had black screen after dual boot manu and neither of the suggested options from this forum or anywhere helped me which i resolved to reinstalling Solus to my PC again.
then i had "read only" problem on my both drives SSD and HDD which i solved it by uncheck “Turn on fast startup" in Windows but then wired connection loop came back again and this time even after shutting down my PC and turn it on doesn't solve the problem but if I checked back "turn on fast startup" in windows my wired connection will work but i get back to read only drives which at the moment i'm stuck and can't do anything. 🙄

other than these i really do like Linux and Solus only that dual boot really messed up my experience.

Staudey

Yeah, the installer is one of the remaining weak points, seeing as most support threads seem to be about installation issues nowadays.

shan9656

cryptn try adding the boot entry manually through BIOS

ArnoldLayne

cryptn Hi, What is your problem?
I wasn't able to boot anything (Solus or Linux). I resized the Solus EFI partition properly and reinstalled it to fix the solus boot. I wasn't able to boot into windows because although efibootmgr listed Windows boot manager it wasn't present from the boot menu of the laptop.

For Windows I did the following steps (it worked but maybe there are better solutions).
-I created another EFI partiction (100 MB) for windows (beacuse I lost it)
-From a live usb with gparted I flag the Solus EFI Partition as a data partition (i removed the /boot and /esp flag) because when i was trying to recover Windows with the Windows iso it wasn't able to distinguish which one to use
-I booted with the Windows ISO usb and then used bootrec commands from cmd.
-With gparted I flagged with /boot and /esp the Souls EFI partition

Now I can boot into Solus or Windows.

cryptn

shan9656 can you give me a few more hints or a link for a fitting tutorial? I don't see any option in my bios indicating there's such a possibility

cryptn

ArnoldLayne Hi, my problem is that my new laptop (Lenovo Yoga 530 14-ARR - Ryzen 5 with integrated Vega graphic) boots straight into Windows10 after installation, with a supergrub USB stick I was able to boot manually into Solus - works somehow but touchpad and WLAN(!) drivers are missing. The laptop does not have a LAN port so I ordered an USB 1 to 3 Hub with a LAN Port to connect for driver installation which should arrive today. I hope the driver problem is then easy to resolve but the missing bootmenu is my main concern 🙂

Justin

cryptn Open up your motherboard settings and change the boot order so Solus is ahead, alternatively every EFI device has a keyboard button to select OS to boot.

cryptn

Justin Hi Justin, like I said, nothing in the BIOS indicates I could change the boot settings regarding the bootmenu. I tried to attach some photos I took - maybe I missed something - "attach" zip or jpeg gives me error and says to reload and try again....

EDIT: Pictures in my Dropbox

EDIT2: F12 gives me the boot device list where I can only select my drive or my USB Stick. This is what you meant with OS to boot right?

Justin

cryptn EDIT2: F12 gives me the boot device list where I can only select my drive or my USB Stick. This is what you meant with OS to boot right?

Yes, if it only shows your boot device it means there is no EFI boot partition or it can't see it :/

cryptn

Justin I will try to solve it as soon as I get some time, otherwise I will start my own thread. Many thanks

EDIT: for the future users. I had to install "refind"(bootmenu) to get a dualbootmenu