I bought a laptop very similar (same model group but from the year after) to this just before Christmas for my niece. Got it 2nd hand, as my brother was just looking a laptop that she could browse on and maybe do some homework.

I refurbished it and got it cleaned up and I tried lubuntu, xubuntu, linux mint xfce and one other (forget now). Same thing kept happening. Would simply freeze when trying to boot them. Had removed Secure Boot too.

After couple days of trying I ended up giving up and going with a Windows 10 LTSC IoT version from Massgrave for her.

Wish I had better news or something more productive for you. Sorry!

I moved a couple months back fully and have tried quite a few distros (before I figured out the hardware issue I was having on my Acer laptop). I have mostly used Pop OS (pre-Cosmic) and now Nobara is my daily driver.

Nobara is fantastic, it suits my use case perfectly and has everything ready to go essentially. The set up was very smooth and maintenance is a breeze. I did try Cachy too (when i still had my annoying hardware fault) and would love to try it again at some stage but I’m settled on Nobara and feel like the Fedora base is the perfect platform for learning more Linux in depth.

I was initially in love with Gnome and hated KDE for how it tried to copy Windows with the bottom left menu - I wanted something fresher. But i have used it more and customised it so its less like Windows and I adore KDE now as well.

I still use Windows on a separate laptop for work and its hilarious how shit Windows 11 is now, especially in comparison to using such a beautiful desktop environment on my personal laptop. So many things are broken and I just hate the fact that its almost entirely spyware, being filled with vibe coded ai shite and they still try and serve you ads when searching for stuff.

Fuck Microslop! Will never buy another Windows machine.

Aw yeah that makes sense actually on rereading it. I think i was going to try the Proton Bridge at first on moving to Linux but then saw it was only available via their paid version.

That put me off lol, so I’m just sticking to using it via browser and their own mobile app for now.

Just to clarify - Protonmail does have a mobile app (works great by the way, especially on Graphene)

https://protonapps.com/

On the off chance you haven’t tried this, you might need to try disabling the ‘phantom process killer’ from the developer options if that’s thing on your device -

https://localdesktop.github.io/docs/user/getting-started

One thing I’d like to clarify too, it may have sounded like I was throwing shade on Garuda and Bazzite but didn’t mean that at all. I assume the issue was related to the same hardware fault I have been experiencing with all these distros. Definitely would like to try Garuda and/or Cachy at some point in the future when I’m more comfortable.

With Bazzite being immutable, not sure I’d be able to do the needed fix for my hardware to work okay.

This sounds awesome actually. I was looking through them by pressing up and going through one by one but can be a slog when there is a lot lol. I’ve been trying to make Joplin notes to myself for particularly useful commands but I’ve forgotten to do it quite a few times

Haha yeah I have noticed that slightly too. Bought a Raspberry Pi at start of December to try and set up a personal music server, so been learning ssh and docker etc on that side of things lol. I am very lucky with the server side stuff because a good friend of mine set up his own emby server during lockdown, so he is very knowledgeable about server stuff and is able to break things down for me to help explain.

I was also lucky to also get the RP4 for £60ish and then with the recent price hike caused by ram shortages its now up to £95 in my neck of the woods!

Lol i kept thinking of him too when typing GSP, he was one of the GOATs!