Edit: It works! Not beautiful and shows a concerning amount of “Error” lines on startup but it will do. I got VSCodium and ESP-IDF running, at least – and CMake isn’t awfully slow despite it being a crappy 4GB RAM machine (not easily upgradeable). The first boot took a while and I haven’t rebooted since, I guess it will be below 30 seconds next time (Mint on same machine but HDD was about 1 minute).

Edit: I hope I chose the right kernel here, surprisingly not much info online on this! Also, I picked “targeted” because the 10-year-old system does not use any cutting-edge hardware and all drivers should be auto-detected, I think.

After some experience with Linux Mint, I gathered the courage to try another distro. I’d like to turn an old laptop into an IPTV receiver plus FTP/OpenVPN/HomeAssistant server with occasional desktop use. I first installed Windows 11 just in case my family needs to use it (it fucking sucks, the built-in PS/2 keyboard doesn’t work half the time but that’s an issue for later) but now I’ll be turning it into a dual-boot setup with Debian as the primary option. Please give me some encouragement, I’m really afraid of new things.

Old pic: https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/d4bf0222-4fc1-42ab-a3e9-464087dec3af.png

  • ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    43 minutes ago

    Some specific drivers are a little fiddly if you have nvidia graphics

    Nit-picking here but Nvidia drivers for Debian are ridiculously easy to install? Doc page

    • Prerequisites
    deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ trixie-security contrib non-free main non-free-firmware
sudo apt update
    • Install the driver (Trixie)
    sudo apt install nvidia-kernel-dkms nvidia-driver
    • Have an RTX capable GPU?
    sudo apt install libnvoptix1

    Edit: For an Nvidia Optimus Laptop just install envycontrol and set your Nvidia GPU as your primary GPU.

    sudo envycontrol -s nvidia --force-comp --coolbits 24

    Done, easy peasy.