Due to issues with recent things, a friend has lent me a laptop. Its actually a laptop I wanted a long time ago, so thats pretty cool on top of it. Anyways, heres the spec
CPU: i7 4720HQ 6mb cache
GPU: Nvidia 860m (4G???)
16GB Ram @1600-1866mhz
Switching graphics, unsure if PLX’d or MUX’d
860 Evo 500GB SSD
No M.2, msata, or even eSATA, but USB 3 at least
I plan on running a windows of some sort on it as well, start with 10 and go from there, so it’ll likely have 250GB to actually work with. I don’t think I care too much about building whatever as thats more platform specific for me now, more to the point I want compatibility with older apps such as WoeUSB. In fact, I’d like to be able to run 32 bit binaries, even in wine, any time on the desktop, and possibly do gpu passthrough if possible with the hardware available. VM’s are on the table as this is a 4 core machine, so it’d be tolerable to me.
I want to completely avoid having swap. I don’t want errors about “OMG UR SWAP” I just don’t want it. If anything, security reasons, but I found with my 40-70 that having no swap or just having a swap file really sped things up for some reason. Though, that machine had an sshd, so there could be other stuff with that. I just know the reputations these machines have, I wanna cut out any problems I COULD run into early.
Thinking about:
Salix
Ubuntu LTS
EndeavourOS
ElementaryOS++
++mostly this one
if yall know any quirks I’ll hit, this isn’t the newer one with the 960m or the 10603g, so I have no idea what the mobo will do. thx for any pointers.
Any Ubuntu based distro should work fine with switchable graphics, Elementary OS is based on an LTS so it should be perfectly fine.
Only (mainstream) distros you might have issues with are Fedora and Arch due to the drivers not being officially supported or updated too frequently, possibly breaking things.
I second the take on Pop!_OS. Although, modern distros don’t really require a swap file and is really only recommended for systems with less than 8 gigabytes of RAM. I think swap is also supposed to help with standby mode on some distros, but shouldn’t be a necessity. Is it okay to ask what you’re using the laptop for? That might help narrow down a better distro.
You’re right, I’ll be honest and say I skimmed over the part about WoeUSB and GPU passthrough. I’m personally not familiar with WoeUSB. My recommendation still stands as is, though. I don’t think that you would be disappointed with something like Pop!_OS .
i think if you really want to learn linux and use it through your carrer, debian is the way to go most linux server use debian or redhat, fedora, ubuntu is for desktop, but i prefer windows desktop !
I mean I’m already a pretty deep litux user. Mostly I just don’t know how graphics switching in these units works yet because I remember there being like 7 different versions of the 40 series. So eh.
Put your favorit OS on a USB. Boot it in live mode and watch it work… or not. After all, - you already made up your mind with what youre going for, and we all just want confirmation that what we use is right and great. Linux is Linux (+ gnu of cours), - every Distro is just a collection of additional packages that makes your life easier depending on your preferences (that’s why there are so many). So unless we want to discuss about “linux from scratch”, you might rather want to chose the OS you like the most and look if it works.
It’s actually the laptop I am writing this reply on, although I swapped a few bits and pieces in the course of the years (Wifi card and SSD) and it only runs Linux.
More specifically I run Arch on it and it had no issues since, I believe, 2016 … I guess anything like any Arch derivative would run flawlessly on it.
My 2cents on not having swap: I am not sure what are your concerns but NOT having a swap partition would hinder the capability to hibernate. Nowadays it’s the only use I make for the swap: 16 GiB of RAM makes it 16 GiB swap.
About Windows, I had to use it to unlock my BIOS recently (the BIOS has a hardware whitelist - feel free to ask if you want), and I tried win to go (or something like that) to boot it from USB. Worked very well as well - if you don’t need Windows so often you could dedicate the SSD to Linux entirely so to avoid any issue whatsoever (and have a proper swap partition).
!