I have just seen your edit. I had a similar problem with no audio but meter levels working on my toughbook. Could you start terminal, type alsamixer and turn all the volumes up? Press F6 to swap through sound cards.

For me I had to adjust the headphone volume.

Cool beans. Let us know how your experience goes and if you have problems. I have it on four devices here and it has been very smooth every time.

Which variant are you trying? KDE? Gnome? Nvidia?

Seconding just installing something easy and pre-setup. Try a desktop variant of Bazzite (I like the gnome flavour) and see if most of your issues just disappear.

Me too. The Bazzite desktops are amazing.

So we can’t suggest it because you don’t like it? Check.

Won’t happen again, sir.

Do:

• Mint if you’re coming from Windows
• Ubuntu if you want lots of help online
• Fedora if you want strong and stable
• Bazzite Gnome if you want indestructible, grandma-safe and Apple-like.

Seconding and thirding the use of an immutable OS. I specifically like Bazzite Gnome. People know it for gaming, but many don’t know it has a fantastic desktop mode, suitable for children, mums and grandmas.

Almost all the software a casual user needs is available from their Flatpak App Store, and it’s pretty as hell (looks very Apple-like and shiny). I have been using it for about a year and I am still impressed how fluid, polished and solid everything feels.

Totally agree. Which variant? KDE or GNOME?

The desktop version of Bazzite is such a hidden gem in the Linux scene. Polished, fast, and no fuss. I rate it the best distro by a good margin, and I have tried many many distros.

How are you dealing with the immutable side of things? Was it easy to get your head around?

Not seen this done manually before. Neat idea!

Try setting your vpn to listen on UDP, port 53 (usually used by DNS. If that fails, it’s going to be some sort of deep packet inspection, yes.

If you migrate to it, I promise we’ll shut up.

I got burned by something like this on Manjaro when a rolling update completely borked my graphics card. The devs reacted in a similar way and it made me realise that my priority is stability over bleeding edge and tinkering.

On that day I moved to Fedora. Stable as hell, no fuss. My main OS should just work and not kill itself.

I still love it but jumped over to Bazzite Gnome recently, which is like Fedora with a few bells on top, coupled with having a read-only root-filesystem (stability, man!). It also comes with distrobox, which will let you run arch natively in a container if you need the AUR.

Nordé VPN

Damn straight. Another reason not to buy a pi.

1. Go into your BIOS and disable Wake On Lan (WOL).

2. Boot Windows, start Device Manager, right click your network card (probably Intel I217-V) and disable all WOL settings there too.

3. Completely power down the PC (don’t just reboot) and then try booting Linux.

Was the road ok?

Came here to say Julia Stiles but you totally beat me to it! I cannot stand any film she is in either. It’s really hard to describe, but your description is spot-on. It’s like an empty husk with makeup has been made to act.

Bazzite is stuffed full of polish, especially the Gnome variant and, little known to me at the time, they have a whole set of non-gaming-related tools in the background for developers who use containers (distrobox, podman etc), which is exactly what I use for my job.

I was so impressed that I have installed it as my main OS on my laptop and have replaced SteamOS with it on my SteamDeck.

This distro is one of the best I have used. It is definitely one to keep an eye on.