Re:PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition
by ncmncm on Monday August 31, 2020 @03:14PM
(#24334948)
It really comes down to installers with proprietary firmware blobs that you need to install on laptops.
Debian's download page makes it hard to find the images with the non-free bits. They're there, though, if you dig just a bit.
Then, on laptops that have both Intel and Nvidia graphics hardware, for some reason the installers insist on loading both the i915 and nouveau kernel modules, which then fight over the console. (I asked over at the nouveau IRC, and they said a one-liner patch would fix that, still after all these years.) So, you add "nouveau.modeset=0" to the boot line on those laptops.
Finally, there is the confusion over the name "unstable", which is what people using Debian run, at least for the parts that need to be up to date, like browsers, media players (mpv), and firmware.
But the experience once you have got set up is better than on Ubuntu.
Debian's download page makes it hard to find the images with the non-free bits. They're there, though, if you dig just a bit.
Then, on laptops that have both Intel and Nvidia graphics hardware, for some reason the installers insist on loading both the i915 and nouveau kernel modules, which then fight over the console. (I asked over at the nouveau IRC, and they said a one-liner patch would fix that, still after all these years.) So, you add "nouveau.modeset=0" to the boot line on those laptops.
Finally, there is the confusion over the name "unstable", which is what people using Debian run, at least for the parts that need to be up to date, like browsers, media players (mpv), and firmware.
But the experience once you have got set up is better than on Ubuntu.