I have almost the same laptop (PS63 8M, without any nVidia dGPU).
One of the issues I had to solve was the touchpad spamming interrupts after waking up from sleep. It would keep one core at 100% indefinitely, keeping CPU frequency (and temps) quite high and burning through the battery.
This behavior seems fixed on modern kernels since I’ve installed Fedora recently and didn’t have to do this workaround, but you can still check if this still applies to you.
You might also check if you can disable the dGPU in the BIOS (can’t check since I don’t have one), and/or play with power profiles either through Gnome or tlp (lower power profiles will make your laptop very sluggish though).
Maybe check if both your fans are running. I had to replace one of mine that was starting to fail a year ago.
Other than that, I’ve never had any overheating issues with this laptop.
in a terminal, type flatpak remotes. If it lists flathub, you’re good.
Try installing a random app like flatpak install flathub de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave
It shoud work. If it doesn’t, post your logs.
I have to type a password in the terminal every time I want to use sudo
This is the intended behavior and should not be changed, it’s a basic security feature. Once you’ve finished setting up you system, you shouldn’t need sudo everyday anyway, except for updating/upgrading the system.
I’m used to a desktop interface with a toolbar/start menu that I can pin frequently-used programs to, but with Debian it seems like I need to click “Activities” to do anything. Is there a way to set up the interface so it’s more like Windows in that regard?
Assuming you’re using Gnome, this is easy to solve using Extensions. First if it’s not installed already on Firefox, install Gnome Shell Integration. It’ll let you manage Gnome Extensions directly from extensions.gnome.org
Then, install dash-to-panel for a “windows-style” experience, or dash-to-dock for a “macos-style” experience.
After that, you can go wild on the extensions you want to use ;)
If I need to do a clean install, I’m thinking of switching to Ubuntu, since I’m more familiar with the interface.
Don’t. Ubuntu will teach you nothing but the Ubuntu way. Debian is as Standard Linux as conceivable. If your only concern is the Ubuntu-style interface, configuring dash to panel to appear on the left side is all you need.
I’ve been on trips that have been rudely interrupted by screaming executives when I came down out of the mountains into cell range because I was the only bus factor left on certain systems.
Wow, incredible management skills, genius move to treat your one critical employee like a piece of shit.
I call mine “rillettes de thon” or “rillettes de sardines” depending on which canned fish I put in them. Also, I love to twist them with chopped cilantro, chopped shallots and lime juice or smoked paprika (pimientón de la Vera).
All your points are valid, and I agree with most of them except maybe advising people to use Testing ;)
From a security point of view, Testing is dead last in Debian’s vulnerabilities fix order of priorities after SID and Stable, and fixes in general except when the next release is being freezed. I’ve undergone breaking changes and regressions weekly on Testing, dependency issues that took forever to get fixed, and the year or so I’ve spent on Testing was miserable. Testing definitely has its purposes, but daily driving it on a laptop should not be one of them.
I understand the issues you’ve got concerning Flatpaks and how it goes against a distro’s philosophy, but I think, from a “normie”'s POV, it’s still miles better than the classic “download a random exe from a random website and never bother having to uninstall and reinstall it every week to keep it up-to-date” windows paradigm. Flatpaks are mainly a solution for developers and package maintainers (package once, distribute everywhere), but it benefits the end users. You get to use “the same version as everyone else”, always up-to-date whether you’re on Debian or on Arch, compiled against a known version of all dependencies so bug reports are more consistent and avoid weird distro-specific behaviors.
Fun fact: AMD started out making licenced products based on of Intel’s x86 architecture, and in the early 2000s the roles were reversed when intel had to licence AMD’s 64 bits extension of this architecture.
aarch64 are for ARM processors like the one in your phone, mips64 are embedded processors most likely found in a car or a router.
I’d advise against using flatpaks if you also have the software available in the debian repositories. Always use the package manager instead, when possible.
Please let me disagree on this. Debian + Flatpaks is actually an awesome combo. Rock solid and super stable base, up to date user facing apps.
Debian’s life cycle is awesome for core system stuff, it ensures that once your system runs perfectly, it’ll continue to run perfectly for several years without intervention despite always being up to date.
But for user facing apps, it’s actually really frustrating when you know there is a bug fix or a feature you need that’s been implemented and made available months ago but you’re stuck on a 2-year-old version.
Why did you choose this architecture? Almost all x86 CPU architectures from the last 20 years are 64 bits, you should reinstall using the AMD64 image. This will solve a lot of issues and insure you get the most of your hardware.
I don’t think it’s heresy, but I always find it funny that an extremely vocal community shits on systemd for being a bloated tentacular monster shat should be abandoned, but praise X for being a bloated tentacular monster.
In a way, Wayland is much closer to the Unix Philosophy than X. It’s a display protocol, nothing more. Everything else should be implemented by the applications using this protocol. X has grown over the decades to include way too many features and edge cases.
Translation layers like XWayland are important and extremely useful for the transition period, but shouldn’t be taken as a sign that Wayland is not ready for prime time. If 10% the people shitting on Wayland had instead worked on adding Wayland functionality to their favorite apps (that includes you fuckers at nVidia), the transition would have ended years ago.
Feature parity with X has never been the goal. Because most of X’s features are a legacy of the 80’ and dreadfully obsolete anyway.
I’m all for maintaining compatibility where it makes sense, but carrying over a 40 years old feature set just in case is the best way to prevent anything from moving forward.
Wayland can already do or is actively being developed for stuff that is relevant to modern systems: multi-monitor with different refresh rates and scaling, HDR etc. Stuff that X would never dream of.