This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,798 for Wednesday, the 22nd of February 2023.
Today's show is entitled, laptop second-ess SD with an excellent install.
It is part of the series Hardware Upgrades.
It is hosted by McItrony and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, overcoming UEFI and Windows 10 to install an excellent X21.3 on a 2021 ASUS laptop
second-ess SD drive.
Greetings, this is McItrony and this episode I'm going to describe installing MX Linux
on the second-hard drive on my laptop and my first impressions with this operating system.
So I've tried a few other distros on this and for a very few reasons that didn't work out
slack where it couldn't adjust the brightness and some other problem with it.
And it didn't have OBS installed open broadcast or software as ZenFloader 2 said it had and
I got the biggest, the biggest ISO on the site that I could find and did not have it on
there for some reason.
So fake news there, squirrel fake news, dev1 also didn't see the Wi-Fi for that.
So it couldn't be used either but both of those, like I had this problem with grub.
The slack where it didn't install grub in the Wi, I guess there's the EFI partition
and Windows, I forgot to say, running Windows for the last year or so just because of convenience
and inertia I suppose and I wanted to play my pirated copy of San Andreas, but anyway
so yeah it's time to switch, like Windows is pretty annoying.
The file system, sometimes you can't even find files that you know are in the directory
that you're looking at, bizarre but I have too many files maybe.
So yeah this U-E-F-I, I'm not too fond of it, I understand that there is limitations
to BIOS but why didn't they just make a better BIOS instead of this crud, like computers
are really great now, I mean I really love this computer and then some MBA over at Intel
decided to make it shitty with this U-E-F-I and what I mean is before you're able to just
put another hard drive in, have two hard drives and choose which one you want to boot from.
But now the boot is controlled from this EFI partition which some people said was a
attempt to buy Microsoft to make it so that none Microsoft are pretty systems couldn't be
booted but apparently that's not true, but yeah so this definitely security downgrade since
obviously it's better to have a completely separate boot hard drive rather than have the boot
be dependent on the other hard drive then you're using for your OS, I mean that's kind
of stupid and I think there has been like a zero days found for U-E-F-I as well so but yeah
anything Intel puts out I'd be with suspicion nowadays, so yeah yeah Windows, annoying and of
course free hardware, I mean free software is good, Elon always have like open source software
or fast software if possible on all your systems, except if it goes into your body and you should
take every non-free software they tell you to get definitely, so with MX Linux okay so yeah
still talking about U-E-F-I so with Slackware when I installed that it made me make a startup USB
and I had to use that startup USB every time that I wanted to boot it to the second hard drive
and I'm like what the freaking hell so finally I did some reading up on grub so I was prepared
I was going to actually install grub myself on that stinking EFI partition but when I installed
MX Linux I was almost disappointed because it did it automatically so unlike a Slackware where it
was like maybe I missed something on the install for Slackware to be fair but that was kind of
disappointing to have to plug in a USB stick every time you want it to boot up so now it boots into
into grub immediately with MX Linux as the default selection so that's awesome so first impressions
it's the XF CE desktop that I was using I'm not recording with it now I installed tenacity
on that MX Linux installed but it didn't appear to be working so I can't give an opinion on that
but everything else worked like right away and that was really impressed that the grub installed automatically
so if you have a laptop you might want to do that but for other reasons spoilers it didn't go well
for other reasons you might not want to use this if you have a new laptop but it might work for you
H top has it as 841 megabytes at idle which is kind of high but it has a lot of features so
a lot of desktop enhancements and stuff um kongki it's got a clip manager that shows a whole bunch of like
you last your last saved stuff you last control sees and seeing that it becomes apparent
why they put the menu bar on the left hand side because you hit on our clip man and it shows all
this info and same with browsers it is show all your tabs as like meet little text things that
you can click on that's pretty cool so it's kind of it's kind of slick it has I'm really fond of this
it has a startup sound options is now the startup sound which is missing from most operating
systems nowadays which is a travesty I think I think there should be a startup sound demo
so there's yeah kongki gives you the time and some stats like how much hard drives being used
and stuff yeah the first wallpapers kind of this primary color really plain thing but they've got
some really nice wallpapers you go into the desktop settings um nice manuals right on the desktop
when you start so that's a really nice touch but a lot of distros you feel kind of on your own
I mean yeah usually they'll have a link in the browser that's comes with the system but
that's nice having those PDFs right on the desktop for you there's a big manual and there's
FAQs um boot up is like faster than windows it also allows you to set the audio up to 150%
which is nice because sometimes the video makers have low audio so that's useful I
not usually just listening on these laptop speakers so you can't crank too much so yeah turning
up the audio is useful so a few cons including a deal breaker but maybe I'll be able to fix it
I don't know the function button is lit after every boot and I noticed that
slack word did the same thing so you have this function button for the extra keys
and blue tooth is on after every boot after being turned off beforehand and slack word did that as
well so the USB keyboard and mouse randomly disconnect and that's the that's the catastrophe here
because I would have tried to live with the other things but I cannot stand to use the laptop
keyboard or trackpad it's just ridiculous and it's really bad for you on ergonomic so
yeah after well after awhile it would just disconnect and you couldn't even plug it back in
like just like the USB is dead the message didn't say anything which is bizarre um so I think I
need like a less hardware support or something I tried the advanced options in grub there's an
option to use the 6.006 kernel that didn't work and then there's option to use the 6.006
kernel with system D I forgot to mention MX Linux that's one of the criteria that I used to choose
operating systems is they not have system D but MX has system D if you need it so I tried it with
system D and it appeared to work but then after about an hour or so it disconnecting the USB as well
so it seems like I need an advanced hardware support version it's it's said on this laptop
that it was ready for Ubuntu so I don't know but anyway it's a great computer if you haven't
tried a new generation computer yet Ryzen of course it's an AMD Ryzen 5 and it just blows away
anything I've ever had as computer not then I've been keeping up but this generation is so much
ahead of what previous generations were so the generation before it seems like this is just a
big leap forward so yeah thanks to AMD and ASUS for that so yeah I'm gonna have to I don't know if
I'm gonna need to try to get like one of those rolling release ones or something or
because unfortunately Ubuntu uses system D which is said because I really like Ubuntu Studio
and has a lot of nice software including OBS and Ubuntu Studio is how I discovered Yoshi
which I use the keyboard effects and some of my other podcasts but yeah so that's the how to install
MX Linux I guess I skipped the part about using Belina Etcher to make the live USB and then
booting from USB pressing up 12 boot from USB to the live and then install from there and yeah
like I said it worked really perfectly I was pretty impressed MX Linux looks like a really nice operating
system and I would recommend it is you can see why it's in the top and I haven't even talked about
half of the features that it has like it's it's a system snapshot feature and all kinds of
other little utilities that it has so it's a nice operating system check it out if you're
just your hopping haven't found anything good yet but see you next time you have been listening to
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