Mikeserv Support Forum

My nephew needs a new laptop for school and he wants to ditch Windows 11 and run only Linux on it.

A few months ago they bought one of these for my sister, so we booted a live image to test it.

https://store.acer.com/en-ca/aspire-15- ... 5-41m-r9jg

Firstly, I had trouble getting into the BIOS, the timing of F2 is tricky... start tapping it and don't stop until the BIOS screen appears.

I found I couldn't turn off secure boot! The slider wasn't greyed out or anything, it was green, but it wouldn't move. So my nephew searched on his phone and said "you have to use the supervisor password". I said there isn't one set. So he read a bit more and... you have to SET a supervisor password, then reboot and use it, before it will let you turn off secure boot. So I set 1234 and then magically, the slider was functional. That's ridiculous... how are you supposed to know to do that? I'll bet that's Microsoft dictating.

I first tried CachyOS on my Ventoy stick, but it wouldn't boot. The bootloader worked, but it died out with a USB related error after choosing the OS. I thought maybe it was because it was plugged into a hub, but no it didn't work directly plugged into a port either. So then I dropped a Manjaro ISO in, and it also failed with a similar error. The problem seems that the Ventoy bootloader couldn't do the USB i/o on that AMD mobile chipset. It works at the low level because the BIOS supports booting from USB, but it wouldn't be able to load the kernel.

So I wrote an image directly to a USB stick with Rufus, and Manjaro booted and the live environment worked. Display, audio, WiFi etc. Weirdly, that laptop doesn't have ethernet. I've never seen one... even my silly little Raspberry Pi board has ethernet. He says he doesn't care though (I would never buy a laptop without it) and apparently that's more common now. How fucking chintzy.

He wasted no time, and ordered the same laptop right away (from Acer). It should be here in a few days, they use pretty good shipping. On Saturday we'll wipe it and put Manjaro on (he's used to that distro now and this isn't for games anyway). I just hope that Grub will be able to boot a kernel on that chipset. I think it will, but that's not tested booting a live distro.

Yeah that's becoming more common these days, omitting the Ethernet port. Similar with all the houses I looked at last year, very few of the new construction homes had Ethernet. They figure all the normies are only using wireless now. When I got my previous house all of them had Ethernet in the walls.

I had the same issue with Ventoy and some distros, and had to write the images directly with a Linux image writer.

It probably will work OK, if you had an external USB drive handy that would be a good way to do a test install. Back around 2020 I got a little Acer Chromebook to get me through the multiple power shutoffs, I got that one because it had really good power efficiency and I figured I'd try installing Linux on it later. It worked for that purpose, but not surprisingly I hated ChromeOS. I ended up not keeping it charged and the battery died. I didn't care, I'd just be running it plugged in anyway like I've done with other laptops which ran just fine plugged in even without a working battery...but this one was different - it refused to work at all if the battery was dead, it didn't matter that it was plugged in.

This is why I quit working on computers, they are just so stupid now. Your laptop doesn't work? Bummer, send it back to the manufacturer or go buy a new one. Chances are you won't even be able to use recovery options because Windows Update broke it.

It would be dead in the water if the WiFi wasn't working. Not ALL WiFi adapters/drivers work on all WiFi networks. I've seen it many times. So what then, buy a USB WiFi dongle to plug into one of the two USB ports? Microsoft would have everyone signing in and using Office 365 and saving their files on OneDrive, so it's not as if the Internet would be "optional" for most people.

So that ChromeBook didn't have AC charger passthrough? That's utterly ridiculous, it's how all battery charging devices are supposed to work.