Just bought an Acer laptop (as my desktop replacement). It runs a 3070Ti (@150W) + an i7 12700H (with completely upgradable RAM)- and I believe it’s the cheapest laptop with those specs to do so, atleast from where I’m from.
Problem: I forgot to do my research and apparently most Acer laptops have abysmal Linux support. And I’m not even going to try installing a distro bare metal because I’m not sure if there’s a second M.2 slot in the laptop for me to dual boot off of, so my options (to have a decent Linux experience) are down to using WSL2 or Virtualbox/VMWare Workstation Player.
Tried WSL2 (Ubuntu) and right off the bat I’ve run into issues (with WSL2 not having systemd and also misc. flatpak issues) that I have no idea how to deal with. Been using Fedora for a couple of years now but I suppose I’m still an amateur who can only follow instructions for anything complicated.
Is KVM nested virtualization my best bet for getting a decent Linux desktop experience given all my caveats?
What’s the GPU acceleration situation really like? I’m not looking to do anything graphically intensive, but I’ve gotten used to the smooth animations that Gnome 42 has to offer on Fedora (now that Nvidia drivers are playing nicely with Wayland).
I really don’t see how this laptop doesn’t have decent Linux support and all honesty if it’s just a matter of you not being able to disable secure boot which is what I’m seeing in Google then just install Fedora 36 and use the RPM fusion not negativo repos for Nvidia. This will automatically sign the Nvidia driver so they can be loaded by the EFI and you won’t have any issues
There’s a lot of stuff out there and a lot of fudd about Nvidia. I wouldn’t listen to it and I would try to push your own experience and try to get it to work on there if it’s just a matter of a couple kernel flags or something or making ACPI a little bit more loose then that’s not really that hard to do
I’d at least give it a try first. If it works, cool. If it doesn’t work, but takes you a day or two to figure out why I’d still call that worth it.
If you fall down a rabbit hole of driver shenanigans and it’s taking forever, then you can reevaluate how you’d like to best spend your time from there.
I mean all things considered he has a 12-700 h which is well supported at this point and he has an RTX3070 which is well supported at this point. If his laptop can’t disable secure boot Fedora has found a way around that and it’s very reliable just install Fedora 36 workstation and enable RPM fusion and install the drivers per their manual is what I was getting at above
Took me a fair few fumbles, through cracking open my Zenbook, to run Linux
First hurdle was having it identify thumb drive [+ in turn, setting the boot order]
Second, was to brick the secure boot… Took bit of diving, through the BIOS
Thirdly, was then finding a Distro, that had sizable native acceptance/ support
It took me 3 separate distro attempts, to nab one []Parrot, []Xubuntu, [X] Manjaro
Update: I grew a pair, partitioned the SSD and installed Nobara on the laptop. Everything seems good. As expected, the RGB keyboard and “Turbo” mode don’t work but it seems like there is some work been done to reverse engineer the Acer Predator app and “port” the functionality to linux.
