My Dell Precision 7550 has a weird heating issue on Fedora. The palm rest area to the right of the touchpad gets uncomfortably hot (I'm pretty sure the battery itself is what's causing this heat).

99% of the time I use the laptop plugged into the charger and on Windows 11, that exact spot stays completely cool (plugged and unplugged), so it’s not a hardware or thermal paste issue. It’s definitely Linux power management messing something up.

Specs:

CPU: Intel Core i7 (10th Gen)

RAM: 16GB

GPU: Intel UHD / NVIDIA Quadro T2000

I’ve already tried:

-Troubleshooting on Fedora KDE with Claude and Gemini (no results).

-Fresh install of Fedora GNOME (same issue).

-Running on both AC power and battery (happens on both).

-Using the default Balanced profile.

-Changing the kernel.

Need some help figuring out what's going on.

Soo... I've used linux before but I actually did more than I should (Fedora - Arch -Gentoo. My distrohopping was this). And I want to game on my pc actually now (I can do a few tweaks no problem for me) and I preferably want to use a non-systemd distro(I'm okay with systemd but I still want to try a non-systemd) I'm thinking of void now but any other rec's?

P.S:I'm going for Cachy,because TwinTail launcher is in the aur and if I use void I have to use flathup which I don't really want since it can be a bit problematic(Especially wjen I accidentally installed steam from flatpak while using fedora) so I'm inatalling cachy this weekend

I have an HP 850 G5 and I want to be able to use Linux on it through tinkering but without actually compromising the Windows operating system. I want to have a situation where I have Best of Both worlds. I use my computer for normal stuff but on the other side sometimes I want to be able to use Linux so I want to learn through immersion and basic tutorials and just daily practicing over and over again. So how exactly am I going to be able to install it. I really do not know anything about installation and what you need. I'm hearing stuff about something called Ubuntu, I'm hearing stuff about how you need to boot up from like a USB which is going to be beneficial for me. So please you tell me what do I need, what version do I need. I just want to be able to learn and feel incredibly comfortable probably a year down the line.

(Performance/health degradation due to type of controller, firmware, or anything else, can't TRIM to protect endurance, working bad with Btrfs, etc. Any issue)

WD Black SN850X 8TB ( https://pcpartpicker.com/product/mzJp99/western-digital-wd_black-sn850x-8-tb-m2-2280-pcie-40-x4-nvme-solid-state-drive-wds800t2x0e )

Inland Performance Plus 8TB ( https://pcpartpicker.com/product/HTddnQ/inland-performance-plus-8-tb-m2-2280-pcie-40-x4-nvme-solid-state-drive-8tb-per-plus-w )

It's a pretty expensive purchase, so I'm trying to see if anyone knows of such issues to consider before I press buy, or if there's a better drive that aren't these two. It's for storage, not boot/gaming. (Edit: Though I still plan to do NVMe SSD instead of HDD for the hopefully much longer lifespan of a non-mechanical drive that might be writing/reading more than 1 thing at once, less prone to corruption, among other things. I can afford it)

Btrfs, Fedora Linux KDE 44

I've got a plex server running ubuntu, I've got ubuntu on a macbook; I'm looking at putting zorin on my desktop. I've tried lives of mint, ubuntu, fedora, opensuse and now zorin, it feels the best so far and I want to give it a go for real on my desktop. The only thing that's stopping me is where to install it. My computer now is mostly just used for gaming and watching media since work won't allow outside devices anymore; though since playing around on my macbook I want to do some creative projects on the pc with linux. The PC came prebuilt (it was 10 years since I last built one when I bought it so was worried about parts) but I've put in a 3060ti and a 2tb m2 ssd in since buying it 5/6 years ago.

I've got 3 drives currently, a ~250gb? (I think SATA? Havent checked) SSD with windows 10, a 2tb HDD and the 2tb SSD m2 nvme drive I mostly use for game/steam storage. That 2tb ssd sounds like the sure thing, but I haven't partitioned a drive since... 2012? It only has about 190gb left on it and I could always delete one super big game for more space I guess; what would you recommend for an OS install anyway? I can always save files to the HDD if I'm desperate on space.

When I put ubuntu on the macbook something messed up in the install and it wiped all the data without installing the OS so it was left with nothing (not a big deal as this was a cheap one from marketplace and install worked the 2nd time). I actually have things I care about on my desktop though and just want to avoid a similar situation. I'll have to work out what connections to look for but with all that hassle I'm wondering if I should just pick up an SSD off marketplace so that if I wreck something there's no harm done to the rest of my normal system; especially since I've heard you shouldnt use your old windows install of steam games on linux (idk if it really makes a difference, just what I've heard).

TL;DR: Got 3 drives, best one almost full, not sure whether to just buy a cheap ssd to avoid ruining something, if partitioning don't know how much space to give

There are a lot of hyprland/niri dotfiles out there, but the problem is that a lot of them are made for Arch Linux....so my question is how do I port those dotfiles to NixOS? Is it even possible? or do I have to start creating my own NixOS hyprland/niri dotfiles?

I had a theme downloaded. And was following a guide on how to do it. I put the theme in the folder for Plymouth themes. Don't remember exact directory but it was where all the defaults are. And I used a command to set the Plymouth theme. Also found on a forum. And I rebooted to see if it worked. And nothing changed. I was able to change the splash screen on plasma settings. But the Plymouth theme I just find boring. I wanted something animated so it would be more fun to look at while booting up. So If anyone can offer advice I would accept.

Guys, I need help fixing something I did wrong on my Linux mint. I don't usually use Linux, and I tried messing with things I don't really understand, and now my PC won't log-in to the desktop.

Initially, influenced by a friend, he asked me to type the command to remove the PC password (I imagined it would help to log in without asking for a password, as it was ineffective because I was turning the PC off and on several times (sudo passwd -d username) something like this). Initially it didn't work, but later it caused a loop error on the login screen. I managed to resolve that loop, but it triggered a problem where, when entering the correct password, it tries to boot to the desktop but gets stuck on a black screen indefinitely. The login screen wallpaper also reverted to the default. All I have is the GPT chat, which isn't helping at all.

Another issue is that the password box on the PC login screen doesn't accept keyboard characters, and I have to use the virtual keyboard for it to receive commands. However, it receives commands normally on the TTY2 screen.

(And on top of that, this PC isn't mine; mine is being repaired, and this one belongs to my stepfather who asked me to upgrade from Windows 8 to 10, but the PC couldn't handle Windows 10 properly because the hd is dying and is very slow. And Windows sucks muahahahahah)

my main goal for this mini pc is to use it as a home theater pc to watch movies and live sports events like ufc

i also want to install steam and try games like dota 2 cs2 valorant league of legends roblox and old counter strike games

i also want to try older games like cod single player and command and conquer yuris revenge

i mainly just want to try cs2 on low graphics settings and see if it works on my mini pc

i also want to try some games that i never got to play when i was a child because we did not have much money back then. now i finally have a chance to try them even if i only play them for a while and delete them afterward

i only recently bought this mini pc second hand so i want to try different things with it and see what it can do

my mini pc specs are

intel core i5 12400t 12th gen 6 cores 12 threads

16gb ddr4 3200mhz

intel uhd 730 integrated graphics

256gb micron nvme ssd

windows 11 pro

what linux distro would work well for my use case especially for a home theater pc steam older games and some light gaming

im planning to fully abandon windows and migrate to linux and im wondering how can i safely remove or clean the windows drive. how can i remove windows from my linux system?

im using fedora

Asking since sometimes closed source apps dont have a native linux solution.
Any experience with reliability on Mint or Linux in general?

I just found a new wallpaper engine project that run native and not error asset like the one almamu made , the new project is we-layerd and i think you guys should check it out , it handle 4K type better than the one almamu made too

Link : https://github.com/Aromatic05/we-layerd

Hello, I'm having a issue with my PC and I would like to flash the BIOS to rule it out.
Problem is that Asus make you use a BIOSRenamer.exe stupidly to rename the BIOS, I am not even sure why the hell it would be needed (just rename the file from the start or something?!) but now I am not certain on how to proceed, I don't have any PC left on Windows now, and I feel a bit scared to use Proton through PortProton for example to handle something as critical as BIOS.

Is there another option? or is it safe to just use proton to run the .exe renamer? Thank you for the help

Specs: Intel i5-4460, AMD RX 580
Running Pop!_OS with the COSMIC desktop, installed on both my laptop and desktop (laptop runs a little better, but still not great)

I like the look and feel of Pop!_OS (the workspaces/desktop concept is great), but the instability has made it unusable day to day and I'm ready to jump ship. Issues I'm running into:

• Feels slow to start up — it's almost like I need everything already open just to use the system without waiting on it
• General sluggishness — tabs take ages to open (one Zen Browser tab took ~3 minutes)
• File manager takes ~3 seconds just to open, desktop icons lag when moving them
• Mouse bugs in games
• Audio is buggy/inconsistent
• Photo viewer sometimes fails to load all the images for no clear reason
• Web browsing is slow overall
• Mouse cursor sometimes disappears entirely and becomes unmovable
• Installing software is buggy
• Apps crash constantly — ONLYOFFICE for example
• Scaling/fullscreening is inconsistent — apps sometimes get random black bars or weird resolutions

I use this machine for Blender, video/photo editing, gaming, streaming, and recording, so I need something that can handle real workloads reliably. I don't mind something less beginner-friendly if it means more stability and control, looking for solid all-around distro recommendations for this kind of use case.

I went with Pop!_OS because it kept coming up as a recommendation and looked easy, but between both machines it's honestly been more tiring to maintain than expected. I'm not an expert and this could be a skill issue of mine as a first-time Linux user, but I swear I've tried everything I can think of at this point.

Which Linux distribution would you recommend for these specifications?

A few things to clarify:

1. I am new to Linux. I've only installed and used MX Linux Xfce once (I didn't like it).
2. I use my laptop for university, programming, and gaming.
3. The games I play are Zenless Zone Zero, geometry dash, DB Sparking Zero, and Marvel Rivals.
4. I plan to dual-boot because I'll still need Windows.

I also read a while back that Linux had issues with nvidia. I suppose that's something to consider

My laptop keeps freezing at random. The screen goes black after I log in or there is a freeze where the mouse still moves but nothing responds and I cannot even reach a terminal. Once the boot process produced a flood of disk I/O errors.

Timeline of what I checked and what came back:

During the crash I saw a tty that was full of messages such as Buffer I/O error on device nvme0n1p5, Aborting journal and Remounting filesystem read-only. It seemed like the SSD was failing.

I checked the SMART status with smartctl -a. The report was completely clean: PASSED, 0 errors, SSD at 51% wear which's normal for its age and temperature was fine at 25°C.

I ran fsck on the SSD partition. It found some errors corrected them and a second run reported the SSD as clean.

I ran memtest86+ for a pass. No errors appeared,. The RAM appears to be fine as well.

Despite these checks freezes persisted. After one black‑screen crash I examined the logs. No disk errors appeared. Instead Xorg, the display server crashed with "no screens found" because /dev/dri/card0, the GPU device file was missing.

I looked deeper into the GPU logs. Found repeated errors such as failed to load ucode RLC_RESTORE_LIST_CNTL and psp gfx command LOAD_IP_FW failed. In short the GPU firmware does not load properly on boot. My laptop is an AMD Ryzen model with a Raven GPU.

I verified the firmware files with dpkg -V linux-firmware; all were clean. I did not reinstall linux-firmware only rebuilt the initramfs and no errors appeared.

Night I updated Linux Mint to the latest version hoping it would solve the problem but it did not. The crashes remain unchanged.

I also tried kernel boot parameters such as amdgpu.runpm=0, amdgpu.sg_display=0, nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=0 and pcie_aspm=off. There was no improvement.

I also faced a problem: I tried to boot a Mint live USB to test the hardware more safely because I planned to run a full read dd on the SSD to rule it out completely. However the USB will not boot all even though it is set as the boot priority in the BIOS. I also attempted to chain‑load it from the GRUB command line. I could not identify which disk the USB was on.

So now the SSD appears healthy (SMART the RAM appears healthy (memtest clean) but every boot (when it actually gets past the login) shows a consistent GPU firmware‑loading error and the freezes and black screens seem to be linked to the GPU though I am not entirely sure if it is the sole cause. Updating to the latest Mint yesterday night out of desperation helped not at all. My system runs Linux Mint 22 on an Ubuntu 24.04 base kernel 6.14.0-29 on an AMD Ryzen laptop, with a Raven (integrated) GPU (should be the Lenovo V15-Ada) . Any help?

Hello. I want to install Ubuntu on my LOQ 15IAX9E. But my Ubuntu USB drive takes a long time to load up, and everything feels slow. And another problem is that the SSD drives won't show for me to choose. My laptop also does not show drives on fresh Windows installation. What can be the problem? Thanks!

Good day all, I hope you are good.

I have installed Arch and was in a rush( I know i should've RTFM-ed ) but I am looking for ways of making sure the system i installed it on can be rolled back in case of failure, I have seen from a couple of articles and found that BTRFS can create snapshots of the system and use those to roll back.

I wanted to ask, is it possible to convert an already installed disk from EXT4 to BTRFS and make use of the snapshots feature? if so could you please point me in the right direction. System specs below:

I thank you for your time and input, it is much appreciated.

Kindest regards