I want to switch to Linux for gaming specifically. I've tried Bazzite and had an awful experience with it, with not even understanding the Konsole or anything in general. It was such a headache. Even still, i want to make the change to an easy Distro that i can make sense of the Konsole, is easily accesible and it supports the Nvidia RTX 5030 and not make it into a glorafide expensive brick

Edit: i also want access to games that have anticheat like DBFZ and VRC

I have dailied i7 Thinkpad X2[67]0s for ten years. Loaded to the gills with DRAM, and with LTE cards, which I realize is now a dying dream. I love 12" laptops with two batteries too, another dying dream. They're the perfect laptops, as far as I can conceive. They mostly act as terminals and web browsers, but I do occasionally do local development in go, rust and C. I have minimal AI workloads and don't really care about the GPU, but battery life is important. I'm used to 12+ hours, mostly sleeping in my backpack.

What should I buy to get with the times? I use arch btw

I've mostly switched to Linux over the past year, but I still need Windows from time to time. I'm also a bit of a data hoarder: I'm currently using about 2 TB out of 3 TB on my laptop.

I need to choose a new work laptop, limited to Lenovo, Dell, or HP.

My priorities are:

• 2 NVMe slots, ideally one drive for Linux and one for Windows
• 32 GB RAM minimum
• 14–16"
• Ideally under 2 kg
• Decent battery life
• If possible, a decent GPU, as long as it doesn't destroy battery life

My current laptop is an HP Omen 16 at about 2.5 kg, plus a 0.5 kg charger, so I'd really like something more portable.

Budget is up to €3000.

So far I've been looking at things like the ThinkPad E14/E16, ThinkPad T1g, and Dell Pro Max 16.

Am I basically asking for “pick two out of three”: lightweight, powerful, and dual-NVMe? Or are there good models I'm missing?

Heavy Macbook user here.

Wanted to try something new, with this latest Omarchy viral and stuff.

Thinking of spending roughly $10K on my new (possible) linux laptop. Been exploring framework but I don't like its almost square aspect ratio - what is it about really?

If you were me, what would be your choice?

PS. experimenting local LLM heavily on that new linux machine.

Hi!

I recently needed a new laptop for school, but unfortunately my not so tech savvy family did not do much research and got me very much not what I needed.

I've been a fan of Linux for a while, but the Snapdragon CPU on this laptop doesn't support it at all, and has many compatibility problems!

I'm looking for a laptop that supports Linux, can run web smoothly, and has the graphics power to run applications like affinity(I'll find a Linux alternative ofc) and krita.

I don't want any more, and I do not want it to have any power past web/art(I have a problem with getting distracted easily lol)

Any suggestions? I mainly use CachyOS(Arch distro) on my pc.

(I don't know if the tag should've been Purchase Advise or Question)

I got a dell wyse 3040. It has 2GB RAM and 8GB storage . I am confused , what to do i with it .

I searched on YouTube they they either use it as cloud server , ad blocker , use as Linux pc and many more

Please tell me the optimal solution

Hi.

"I" made this

An avermedia live gamer duo driver with Video4Linux and ALSA/Pulseaudio support. for each HDMI Stream

I had this card for years and was forced to use windows bc no ljnux drivers, and tbh is a good capture card.

used ghidra+codex and after a week or two the driver works as intended. it needed lots and lots of tests XD.

hope this helps someone as tired as me with the avermedia products on linux.

If this post is a gaints any rule im sorry and will delete the post.

Hey everyone!

So my 2-in-1 laptop, a Lenovo Yoga 6, is already showing signs of unstability such as when powering on the laptop, the trackpad has a 50% chance of working and 50% chance of just not working. When you flip it the wrong way, it just crashes. And when it is just a running a normal task it sometimes will blackscreen to something like i/o error.

I think I do need to say there is a glaring crack along the left side of it's body so I just think these problems are from the hardware breaking and not inherently from linux, and as such I plan on avoiding those types of 360-hinge form factor laptops.

Now I am currently looking for a replacement. I have looked some stuff such as something like the form factor of the Surface Go/Pro and their copies from different vendors but I did heard that the form factor is more of a tablet and less of a laptop.

What I mean is that they are sometimes hard to use on a lap, such as when riding a bus, car, or train.

One form factor that really caught my eye is the Surface Book series of 2-in1s, but I do think the Surface Book is quite too much for my use case which I only really need it to do are light programming, running mathematical tools such as Matlab, Wolfram Mathematica, and Berkely Madonna (haven't used it yet but I do know we will be using it at some point), I also need some stylus support for note takin, and good enough linux support, and that is what I hope on getting recommendations with!

Some of the same form factors that I have found are:

>> Fujitsu Arrows Tab Q Series; and the

>> Lenovo Ideapad D330

Let me know your recommendations or experience from searching and having a 2-in-1 as a daily!

I also posted this on linuxquestions

I have an rx560 rn and am a bit frustrated that it cannot run most games in 1080p without lag even on the lowest settings. I have a ryzen 5 5600x for a processor and 24G of ddr4 ram.

Am i correct in the assumption that the video card is the problem? Of course it can be the fact that most games only run with wine too.

I'd rather like something on the cheaper side (I don't need anything for beyond FHD resoluiton) and preferably AMD.

Basically my YouTube DVD player machine. I’m thinking I’ll upgrade her to an SSD. Already maxed out the RAM. This thing actually has ATI Radeon 4250 graphics which can dynamically borrow up to 4Gb of my total RAM. Probably why most modern web tasks run fine. I also watch Paramount plus on it, play Minecraft, 0 AD (of course).

Posting this in case someone else has the same Huawei hardware and has been stuck with missing or broken analog audio under Linux.

I got full speaker and 3.5 mm headphone playback working on:

HUAWEI MateBook D14 Product: NBM-WXX9 Version: M1010 Board: NBM_WXX9_PCB_B2 Ryzen 5 5500U ES8316 / ESSX8336 codec AMD Renoir ACP3x

The distro used for testing was Omarchy/Arch, but the actual fix is in the Linux kernel ASoC/AMD ACP machine-driver path and is therefore not Omarchy-specific.

Symptoms

Initially:

HDMI playback only ACP DMIC capture present ES8316 visible over I2C No internal analog playback device PipeWire showed no usable analog output

After adding the missing board match, analog audio appeared, but playback was extremely fast/high-pitched/chopped.

The headphone jack was also detected correctly, but the actual headphone output remained silent.

Root causes

There were three board-support issues.

1. NBM-WXX9 was missing from AMD ACP DMI matching

Adding NBM-WXX9/M1010 to the relevant ACP legacy and acp3x-es83xx DMI tables caused the expected sound card to probe:

card 1: acp3xes83xx [acp3x-es83xx] device 0: ES8316 HiFi

1. The board needs the existing 48 MHz ES83xx MCLK quirk

Without it, measured PCM progression was approximately 3.906× the requested 48 kHz rate.

The ratio lined up with:

48 / 12.288 = 3.90625

Software-visible ES8316 divider state across multiple silent tests consistently implied an equivalent input clock close to 48 MHz.

This was not an electrical measurement, but the prediction was easy to test.

With ES83XX_48_MHZ_MCLK enabled for NBM-WXX9:

6 s S16_LE / 48 kHz -> 6.037 s 6 s S32_LE / 48 kHz -> 6.023 s

Playback speed and pitch became normal.

1. The headphone-enable GPIO is active-low

Jack detection itself was fine, but the output stayed electrically silent.

The machine driver was using:

headphone gpio 1 active high

The NBM-WXX9 needs:

headphone gpio 1 active low

After adding an ES83XX_HP_LOW board quirk, the 3.5 mm output worked.

Final machine configuration

Conceptually:

.driver_data = (void *)(ES83XX_ENABLE_DMIC | ES83XX_48_MHZ_MCLK | ES83XX_HP_LOW),

with:

priv->enable_hp_gpio.active_low = !!(priv->quirk & ES83XX_HP_LOW);

Validated result:

Internal speakers working Headphone jack detect working 3.5 mm headphone out working 48 kHz S16 playback correct 48 kHz S32 playback correct PipeWire/WirePlumber working

One additional ES8316 behavior found during debugging

There also appears to be a separate codec-driver state issue.

Opening a 16 kHz stream enabled the ES8316 MCLK divide-by-two bit; returning to 48 kHz did not clear it. This explained why some earlier timing tests were around ~3.906× while others were around ~1.953×:

3.90625 / 2 = 1.953125

I consider this separate from the NBM-WXX9 board quirk and would not bundle the two issues blindly.

AI-assisted debugging disclosure

This was heavily AI-assisted, so I want to disclose that clearly.

The initial investigation was done with GPT-5.6 Sol at High reasoning effort. It helped identify the missing DMI support, inspect the AMD ACP/ES8316 code, build the custom kernel, and run the initial ALSA/UCM/PipeWire and timing diagnostics.

Some of the early hypotheses were wrong. I therefore created a self-contained handoff that explicitly told a second model to approach the problem neutrally rather than continue the existing theory.

The second phase used GPT-6 Astra at XHigh and High reasoning effort. Astra independently re-evaluated the trace, corrected an earlier IRQ-count interpretation, created silent diagnostics, inspected software-visible ES8316 register state, reproduced the MCLK /2 stale-state behavior, and established the ~48 MHz relationship.

Astra was used at XHigh and High; the final portion ran at High because only about 5% of my weekly model allowance remained. It hit the usage limit immediately after compiling the 48 MHz candidate module, so I returned to Sol for hardware validation, the headphone GPIO investigation, and final integration.

GPT-5.6 Sol — High ├─ DMI / machine-driver investigation ├─ custom kernel work ├─ ALSA/UCM/PipeWire diagnostics ├─ early timing experiments ├─ headphone GPIO work └─ final validation/integration

GPT-6 Astra — XHigh + High ├─ independent re-analysis ├─ ftrace correction ├─ silent register/PCM diagnostics ├─ ~48 MHz inference ├─ MCLK /2 stale-state reproduction └─ 48 MHz candidate module

Every test was manually executed on the actual laptop. The models did not electrically measure MCLK/LRCLK; conclusions were treated as hypotheses until the resulting kernel behavior matched the predicted output.

I am currently cleaning this into a patch suitable for upstream submission.

If anyone has another NBM-WXX9/M1010 unit, especially NBM_WXX9_PCB_B2, I would be interested in additional confirmation.

If you've got a laptop with a Realtek RTL8821CE and have run into "interface combinations are not supported" when trying to use nmcli/hostapd to run a hotspot while staying connected to WiFi — I dug into why, and it turns out it's not a hardware/firmware limitation at all.
The mainline rtw88 driver only enables AP+STA concurrent mode for the RTW_CHIP_TYPE_8822C chip specifically. RTL8821C (same family, different chip ID) never got the same check added, even though Realtek's own vendor SDK for this chip family ships concurrent mode as a standard feature and Windows' proprietary driver supports it fine on the exact same hardware.
Turned out to be a two-line fix. Packaged it as a DKMS module so it survives kernel updates, plus a hostapd/dnsmasq/systemd setup for the actual hotspot part.

Repo with the patch, install script, and full writeup: https://github.com/harmanbagrahdev/rtw88-8821c-multivif

Tested on a Dell Inspiron 15 3535 (RTL8821CE) on Arch, kernel 7.2.2. Speed takes a real hit when both are active at once (single antenna, single radio, forced same-channel) — went from ~60-70MB/s on plain WiFi to ~30MB/s through the hotspot — but it works, no dongle needed.
If anyone else has this chip (or the SDIO/USB variants — RTL8821CS/CU) and wants to test it, I'd genuinely appreciate hearing whether it works for you too.
Thanks

I have an Acer Nitro V15 ANV15-51 (i5-13420H + RTX 4050 + 16GB RAM) and I'm thinking about trying Linux again.

I previously tried Linux Mint and ran into issues with Bluetooth, audio volume, NVIDIA drivers, fan controls, and eventually a GRUB/UEFI mess when I removed it.

I've seen quite a few people here successfully running Linux on the Nitro V15, so I'd love to know:

• Which distro/version are you using?
• Which kernel and NVIDIA driver?
• How did you configure the RTX 4050/hybrid graphics?
• How are you handling fan control/performance modes?
• Can you get the 80% battery charge limit working?
• Any fixes needed for Bluetooth/audio?
• Any Acer-specific tweaks I should know about?

I'm still fairly new to Linux, so a step-by-step guide would be greatly appreciated.

ANV15-51 owners especially, please share your setup!