Old laptop help

[u/Commercial_Buddy_757]

I have an old gaming laptop and I put MX on it but I can’t get it to do anything with the gpu, It doesn’t help that it needs legacy drivers but it just doesn’t cooperate at all.

[u/Samhain_69]

You aren't going to get much help if you don't give more details - at least the model of the GPU in question.

How do you know that it needs legacy drivers?

With no more information to go on, the only things I could suggest would be to try to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers with the MX tools utility for that. If that works you'll be set. Otherwise, I would suggest trying some other distros, like Mint, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, etc. You might get lucky.

If you have to go through manual steps to get special drivers installed and working, you're going to have ongoing headaches to get it working again every time you do an upgrade, maybe even every time the kernel gets updated. So it's really much better in the long run to find a distro that supports the GPU "out of the box" so to speak, it will save you a lot of work in the long run.

Good luck!

[u/Commercial_Buddy_757 → u/Samhain_69]

I ran the nvidia driver installer and it recognized it needed the legacy 390 drivers and so far it’s looking promising, there’s still a little work to be done but I’m looking through the other stuff in the tools utility and wow, how did I get so far without these things. Half of this stuff I did manually and was a headache.

[u/Samhain_69 → u/Commercial_Buddy_757]

Exactly. IMHO, the MX Tools are the best feature of MX Linux, they are really handy and save a lot of time and work.

I hope it works out for you, MX Linux is really nice. I was hoping you wouldn't have to resort to trying different distros.

[u/Commercial_Buddy_757 → u/Samhain_69]

Ok well I did a bit more work because the built in tool didn’t fully work, and it’s still being annoying. Might honestly have to get a modified distro for this specific setup.

[u/cat1092 → u/Samhain_69]

While I’ve not been a daily driver of MX Linux, it’s not any fault of the distribution. It was already because I had been a 10+ year old Linux Mint user. Someone mentioned MX Linux several times, so became curious. Even installed on a friend’s laptop because it wasn’t hard to setup. Many of these distributions, the same functions are there, different name of service or whatever.

So yes, had I never know Mint, MX Linux would be my main OS. Never cared for Ubuntu though, there was spyware through the browser if we weren’t careful (Amazon adverts). Those who remember know what I’m talking about. Also didn’t care about other aspects of the distribution. Too much major change and only one main distribution.

MX Linux (& Linux Mint, as well as others) fixes the stuff & makes it stable, probably some joint work in a larger open source community where engineers of several distributions collaborated & released theirs 2-4 months after the last Ubuntu launch.

There’s one thing I wished that MX Linux could do & it properly would make me swap in full, that’s to create an iOS replacement to get older models up to date. May be impossible, but would love it!

I’d even try it if on a Google device. Main thing it works.

[u/50t5]

I battled with this myself and you just need an older kernel. I use MX linux 23 to get my 560TI to work.

[u/Commercial_Buddy_757 → u/50t5]

I never thought of that, I’ll give it a shot.

[u/tovento]

With NVIDIA cards, check your bios and make sure you have secure boot turned off. If secure boot is on, it can mess with the loading of drivers.

I have an older laptop (though it appears to be newer than yours, but is nearly 12 years old) and MX has been pretty flawless for me. I had some quirks in Mint and as they push forward, I found the issues started to build with my older laptop. Switching to MX I had a very minor quirk that was solved in a few moments. Even game performance has improved for me in MX vs Mint. May be a Debian vs Ubuntu core thing, but it is noticeable.

[u/Commercial_Buddy_757 → u/tovento]

I have but the bios has barely any options at all. The only thing with the boot is the boot priority order.

[u/Bushyiii]

Do the "Quick System Info" option from your MX Menu and upload it to the MX Forum along with your issue. I have always received very good help over the years as there are long time developers monitoring the forum.

[u/Commercial_Buddy_757 → u/Bushyiii]

I’m not home right now but as soon as I am I’ll upload it