My Asus ROG Strix laptop died prematurely after a meager 3 years of service. Best guess is the graphics MUX bridge got buggered by poor ACPI table handling in the firmware. It limped along the last couple months, working normally while running but failing to boot at the windows spinner about the half the time. On failure it black screened and stayed that way indefinitely. I did a fair amount of diagnostic assessment, and tried installing Fedora, but by that point the machine was failing after less than a minute after a successful boot to windows or a linux live boot.
Anyway, I’ve replaced it with an HP Omen and I’m very happy so far! I’ve made good on my promise to myself to finally dump the packaged malware known as Windows 11, and tried a few Linux flavors before I settled on Debian.
My attempt was Arch. The draw of customizing everything on my machine sounded great. I love the idea of knowing every fucking package installed on my hardware. The reality hit immediately when I got the first shell. Fuck. I have to pick a window manager. What else do I have to pick? Bluetooth stack? Audio drivers? I want to use the machine, not endlessly wrench on it. Maybe someday. Neeeeext –
Next I tried Fedora. I used to run this distro on my first Linux boxes way back in high school, but haven’t used it since. 43 looked good! Everything was snappy. At the time I was worried that there were no packaged NVIDIA drivers, but after my Debian experience I’m not sure that’s a major issue.
After that I booted Ubuntu. This has been my go to since college. Easy to use, sane defaults, the devil I know. I tried 25.10 first. Seemed… reasonable. I think it felt slightly sluggish compared to Fedora. I just got this machine. I don’t want a brand new box running slow. Again, got concerned when I found out there’s no packaged NVIDIA driver. Was surprised when I attempted to install the LTS release 24.04 which did have a packaged driver and couldn’t get it to boot! Not sure exactly what the problem was, but didn’t investigate too hard. Think it might have been an EFI/Secure boot thing.
Finally tried Debian 13. Made sense since it’s upstream of Ubuntu. I’ve never ran it seriously and kind of regret that now. Really like the feel of it so far. Getting the Japanese keyboard input was a little challenging, but I’ve got it working now.
Here’s the NVIDIA site to get the Production or New Feature Linux driver: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/
Only things I’m not thrilled with so far is unusually quiet audio, and the power key part of the membrane keyboard. Hopefully the list stops here.