I switched to Windows!?
In my previous post, I told the story of buying a new laptop [1].
I immediately burned an Ubuntu 16.04 ISO to a USB Flash Drive and began the installing process. I tried to install it several times, but it failed at the final stage of the installation process, saying that it failed to install the bootloader.
As it turns out, this laptop has EUFI, which I was new to. So I had to research on how to install OS on such a laptop (Hint: Create a Primary Partition about 200 MB big, and when installing Ubuntu, select partition type “EFI”. Installer will know what to do next.). Finally, the installation completed successfully, and I booted up Ubuntu on my brand new machine!
It looked good enough at the first sight, but I started identifying some issues right away. Here they are, in the order of importance:
- Battery status was not being detected. Direct power input was not detected either.
- Screen brightness controller hotkeys were not working (Volume controllers were working.).
- Discrete AMD Radeon R5 M320 graphic card was not detected.
The first issue really bugged me. It was simply not acceptable. I tried with Linux Mint, hoping they might have found the issue and fixed it; Nope. I tried Fedora; Nope. Looks like the issue is in Linux kernel. I tried the latest stable kernel 4.8.6; No luck. I even tried the latest Release Candidate version of Linux, 4.9-rc3. Looks like the Linux developers are not yet aware about my motherboard model.
A few results came up when I googled for fixes to the brightness controller hotkey issue, but non of them worked.
If above two problems could be solved, I would be happy to let the discrete graphic card sit unused. But I can’t accept this number of issues with my new laptop.
So I bought Windows.
I have been using Ubuntu exclusively for more than half a decade now, and I recommended Ubuntu to many people. Heck, I even converted all my office’s PCs to Ubuntu! But this time, I had nothing else to do.
But I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault.
- ASUS can’t build drivers for a OS that has ~2% desktop market share.
- Linux Community can’t build drivers for every model of PCs out there.
- I can’t buy a Ubuntu optimized laptop that’s high price and not even available in Sri Lanka.
So, I have a dual boot configuration on my laptop now.
I think in about an year or so, Linux development community would come up with some drivers that can support my laptop. But until then, I will have to keep using Windows as my primary OS.
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