T w e n t y S i d e d

As promised last week, I will be talking about the Linux Switchover Project. And that’s literally the first time I have used that phrase, but I guess it’s accurate. The past week has been full of trials, tribulations, cursing, depression, and few successes. Most importantly, the laptop *is still running Linux*, and is doing more things *now* than it was a week ago. In fact, it has been running the same distribution and flavor since…Monday, I think. I probably could have been running the distribution and flavor I started with if had known then what I know now. I think that’s where I will start; with what I have learned that affects some underlying assumptions and rules.

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 7000 2-in-1. More specifically, it is the thirteen-inch screen design. They haven’t made those for a few years, and this was one of the earlier ones. The chipset is an AMD Ryzen 7 2700U with Radeon RX Vega 10 integrated graphics. The sound chip implementation is a well-documented pile of ____. I keep the laptop on my desk, to my right. I started doing this when I removed my multi-monitor setup and returned to a single monitor to improve game performance and stop the regular system shutdowns I have was having trouble with. For the record, removing the multi-monitor solution did, in fact, stop the crashing. My main computer is back to a dual-Crossfire single monitor setup.

Anyway…I kept YouTube playing on my right-hand monitor, so when that went away, I played with various old laptops and tablets set to my right to do the same. This prompted some Linux experimentation several months ago. None of those attempts resulted in anything I was happy with, so I put my actual, newest laptop in place. It certainly fit the space better than the fourteen inch and fifteen inch older laptops I had tried. Back to the sound card…I have a pair of auxiliary speakers that fit unobtrusively in front of the monitor. I plug them into the headphone jack. Even under Windows, I had occasional dropouts, crackles, and *constant* volume changes. Always, as far as I could tell, just shifting between two volume levels. Not ramping up and down, like the volume control was being activated, just up:down:up:down:up:down. Usually for only a few seconds, but it was randomly timed and constant. Some research indicated this was normal and unsolvable…Dell had just done a crappy job with the sound chip hardware. And it was the hardware that was specifically mentioned. This chip in other computers worked just fine.

Well guess what? Under Linux, every distribution I tried, the headphone jack (when connected, obviously) will start outputting a droning buzz within 30 seconds of sound stopping. Say, like when you pause a video, or return to the main menu to find something else to play. A buzzing starts. Something in the open source drivers handles this bizarre implementation in a similar, yet more annoying way than Windows does. Still, I know the problem is hardware. This can be dealt with many different ways, from unplugging the speakers when I pause or stop a video, to plugging in a USB sound card to use. I have one…somewhere. In fact, I just had a memory triggered that I had to use it *with this laptop* when I was using it for streaming on Twitch years ago because the built-in audio hardware wouldn’t operate correctly.

The other big hardware issue that I finally learned is mostly unsolvable is the chipset. The AMD Ryzen 7 2700U has never been fully supported by any Linux kernel. They mostly work now, in 2024. From everything I have read, there is apparently a small fault in the chip in managing power states. Some people claim this can be addressed by adding certain kernel boot parameters to the boot configuration. I tried the first, simplest one and still encountered a system freeze. NOTE: technically the kernel is not freezing, but it definitely shuts down all input devices…so you can’t really do anything about it except hold the power button down. I have tried a modified set of instructions for the boot parameters and have not experienced a freeze since yesterday afternoon, but I haven’t been able to just run YouTube videos non-stop for several hours, yet. There has been…a lot of news…this weekend that tends to dominate my watch lists and I’m kind of tired of hearing about it.

This is a Logitech G13 Advanced Gameboard. It was released in 2009. Windows Vista had been largely rejected as the replacement for Windows XP (I always liked it), so Windows XP was still being supported while Microsoft rushed Windows 7 to release later in the year. This was *the preeminent* MMORPG gameboard to have…and was honestly one of the *only* gameboards to have. However, the G13 was likely Logitech’s response to Belkin’s (yes, Belkin) updated Nostromo gamepad released in 2008. The G13 had more of everything than the Nostromo, including an actual mini-joystick instead of a thumb-controlled D-pad with a hat. Logitech belatedly, and sometimes poorly, updated the drivers of the G13 through Windows 10. In 2018, they announced the product would be discontinued and support would be ended, citing poor sales and no place for this kind of device in their product line. The last driver released does not work with Windows 11, at least not correctly. Meanwhile, Razer has produced two more gameboard devices (two versions of the latest are still in production), there are a handful of “premium” gameboards like the Azeron and the Hori Tactical, and a few “cheaper options,” although none of the cheaper options have either a D-pad or joystick. All the other offerings have opted for a thumb-controlled D-pad only in the mistaken belief that the point of these things is to replicate motion capture interfaces or the Nintendo Power Glove.

The thing is the Logitech G13 is getting rare (especially in good shape), expensive, and has no future in Windows anyway. There have been three attempts to create a Logitech G13 driver in Linux aside from a couple of more broad-use Logitech device control programs. Only one of the the G13 drivers is generally considered mostly usable at this point…except the person who created it stopped maintaining it in 2021 or 2022. The last confirmed install that worked (someone who posted the entire process on a web page or in a video) is from May of 2023. In November of 2023 the driver was marked as “out-of-date” by an archive contributor, and there are several accounts of people trying to get it to install on a current Linux distribution with no luck. Bottom line: the Logitech G13 will not be usable on Linux.

This is a Razer Orbweaver. I don’t have an Orbweaver; Razer doesn’t make them anymore. The current gameboard by Razer is the Tartarus, which is still available in two or three versions, I can’t remember which. The thing is, the Orbweaver is A) Mechanical, and B) has more buttons available on the main keypad, partly because it C) does not have a scroll wheel, which I don’t need. The Tartarus has a scroll wheel. The Nostromo (remember the Nostromo? That “updated” version was co-developed between Belkin and Razer, and Razer later bought it outright from Belkin) has a scroll wheel, too. I know it’s useless to my needs because I actually own a Nostromo. I bought a used one specifically to use with my laptop when I first bought it, and it’s been kicking around the house ever since. The G13 has 23 main board keys; the Nostromo has 14. The Tartarus has 19, the Orbweaver has 20. BUT, Razer seems to be fairly well supported through open source Linux drivers. In fact, I have already had *some* success getting the old Nostromo to work. I actually had World of Warcraft installing on my laptop to test when I started writing this, and was able to finish the installation (it worked, first try, although I did have to do a lot of googling to figure out what *specific* install procedure I needed to follow.) I was able to get one key bound properly, but attempts to bind a second were being rejected. There are several possible reasons for this; for the time being I exited the program as a successful first try and will attempt binding further keys later. I won’t be keeping WoW on the laptop. The Dell only has a single 256GB SSD, and WoW takes up 100GB of that. This was just to prove both WoW and the Razer input device worked.

I have read in a couple of places the Azeron gamepads are actually pretty straightforward to get working in Linux using a program called AntiMicro. AntiMicro is essentially a Linux version of Xpadder that lets you program a controller with keyboard functions. Plus the Azeron devices have an analogue stick, although it’s still situated for thumb control. They are also…not cheap. They make Razer devices look affordable, and I usually don’t play in that end of the pool if I can help it. The single best option would be the Hori Tactical Assault Command F14 (for Final Fantasy 14, the MMORPG.) Like the G13, it’s designed for MMORPG use and has a properly located analogue stick. It also has the appropriate number of buttons, although the layout is a bit strange. And it’s cheaper than an Azeron; about the same price as a Razer device. Unfortunately there has not been any discussion on getting this to work under Linux. It is still a new device, and Hori traditionally makes these for console use rather than PC…I am getting the impression they are still a bit buggy.

So let’s move on to distributions. Most of the distributions I worked through and abandoned were because of the freezing issue that I later learned was hardware-related. So, I won’t count that against anything right now.

My original intent, as this was meant to test a distribution that would work for my main desktop, was Garuda. This is based on Arch Linux which is apparently becoming one of the three big distributions, along with Debian and Fedora. I tried four installs, the only difference being the default desktop environment. Garuda itself comes with many of the fundamental gaming libraries and apps you will need included with the base installation. Following the initial install, an assistant opens to help configure a handful of options, but most importantly give you categorized lists of software you may want, like office apps, communications like Zoom and Discord, multimedia apps, etc. I have at least marginal familiarity with many of these, but I would point out that for a complete noob with no knowledge outside of Windows, there isn’t much detailed explanation of *every* app…only a few. You will be left wondering “well, do I need this? It sounds vaguely familiar…” *However*, I will note here this isn’t exclusive to Garuda. Linux installs in general are “noob friendly” to, I am assuming, people who already know what all of these options are and what they do. It is certainly much better than the last time I extensively tested Linux fifteen years ago (or so), but the overriding experience is that you will have to get on a search engine and try to find help for many, many things. As far as the desktop environments themselves are concerned, XFCE was the easiest to use. Garuda shoots themselves in the foot a bit with a pervasive customization in all environments that favors small icons, text, and cursors. Sure, it’s minimally invasive, but on a thirteen inch laptop screen this is practically unusable. This is also where I discovered that some implementations didn’t feature a usable desktop scaling function. Finally, Garuda’s preferred KDE Dragonized environment would not function properly. Something in that environment breaks the wifi on my laptop *only after the install is completed,* the install works fine.

At this point, I tried three Fedora-based installations. None would install. Only one would boot and run an install, then fail when the laptop rebooted. I have no idea why, but as the problems were consistent and boot-related, I didn’t research too much. I was looking forward to Fedora, as throughout my research concerning the freezing-while-playing-YouTube issue, none of the mentioned distributions was *ever* Fedora. I know it was boot-related because writing the bootable USB using Rufus I would receive a caution that something in Grub was a different version from what was needed, and Rufus would try to download the proper files. If I created the USB with Etcher (which was the recommended tool only for Fedora installations) it would create the USB successfully but one stick consistently reported it was missing boot information, once stick said the contents were corrupt, and the third did what I described earlier. The second two required manually editing the GRUB boot parameters before the install would run. I am *positive* all this is addressable, but considering how well other distributions were doing out-of-the-box, I gave up on Fedora.

I tried two installs based on Ubuntu: Kubuntu and Pop! OS. Pop! OS is meant to be a “it just works” installation, which is certainly true if you need a well-defined machine for general office or student work. You get all the tools you would expect and want from the default installation…no questions, no problems. It’s possible I would have stuck with Pop! OS if I wasn’t still trying to solve my freezing issue. Next up was Kubuntu, which I liked even better. Like Pop! OS, it comes with everything you need ready to go, plus a ton of gaming utilities installed or readily available. Kubuntu also uses the KDE Plasma desktop environment by default, which worked very well for me. As with Pop! OS, I likely would have stayed with Kubuntu if I wasn’t still working on the freezing issue. I wouldn’t rule out returning to it.

The final install was Manjaro, a flavor of of Arch Linux. Manjaro is designed to be an easy-to-use distribution with gaming-ready support, and that seems to be accurate. It was after installing Manjaro that I discovered my freezing was likely a hardware problem, which I am currently experimenting with. I also discovered at this point that Chromium is *slightly* faster than Firefox and at least is reputed to have fewer “problems.” If you are completely new to the Linux community, this is an appropriate time to bring up what a long-time Linux user apparently thinks is important in a browser (and they aren’t entirely wrong), versus what an average user is going to consider important. Just about everything a person like me values in a web browser…data sync across multiple platforms through a central location, password storage, shared bookmarks, availability of history…those are all security threats. The Linux users capable of answering your most specific, detailed questions *don’t like security threats.* I would not at all be shocked to find a new, perfect, designed-for-Linux browser popping up any day now; one that is so secure it won’t let you actually open any webpage.

So what is now keeping me from installing Linux on my main computer? Primarily the fear of losing data. I have actually made the “are you sure you are formatting the right hard drive?” mistake, many years ago. My system drive only has Windows and utility programs installed. All games are installed on an external drive. All my data is stored on external drives (I have several.) As far as I understand, the data, all on NTFS-formatted drives, should not be a problem. Linux can read data to and from NTFS drives, I have been told repeatedly. *But* Linux can not “install” programs to NTFS drives, nor can it *run* programs on NTFS drives. I have gathered that it is highly recommended that you backup your data and convert the drives to ext4 format. There apparently *is* a procedure to do that, but honestly the most recommended way is to recreate the partition and format it to an empty ext4 drive, then copy your data back over. I’m not thrilled about that, because we’re talking about *terabytes* of files.

I am considering two plans to get started. The first is to do the standard “shrink your partition then create a new partition out of the free space” to dual-boot Windows and Linux from one drive. My system SSD is only about half full (since I don’t keep much on it other than Windows) and this would keep Windows available while I got the Linux system up and going. However, as empty as the drive is comparatively, after I create a Linux partition, which I see recommendations for between 20GB and 80GB, Windows won’t have much swap file space left. The second plan is to obtain a second SSD to install Linux on, leaving the Windows installation alone in case I need it. This would cost more, of course. I also likely will need another external hard drive to copy files over while freeing up a drive to be converted to ext4. Probably the first plan is the most economical. Dual-drive dual-booting is something that I am finding surprisingly little information about. I would assume that you really have to have a primary drive to run the boot loader anyway, which defeats part of the purpose of the dual-drive plan.

Once again, we will see where we are next week! Thanks for reading!

Paige Francis He/him