Start with Linux Manjaro 2022 edition part 1

Introduction

Hi all. This is the first post in a new series for me and this is Start with Linux Manjaro 2022 on my personal Laptop. I’m using an older version of HP envy x360 13 inch with first gen Ryzen APUs 2500u. So, a couple of years old, but I think it would still be usable and good enough for my use case. But when I was using it with Windows 10, it start becoming very hot, fans ramping up for no reason. Another annoying thing was that for some reason after updating the auto rotating feature was disabled. Being this 2in1 laptop that feature was needed. So I decided to back up my data and nuke Windows and replace it with Linux. On my desktop I’m using Manjaro, variant i3, so for laptop distro choice was easy, stay with Manjaro.

To Do

I wanted to make my laptop to use it not as power user but as normal or beginner user. In this Start with Linux Manjaro 2022 edition I need normal desktop environment. There are a lot of choices inside Manjaro for this, but for some reason I ended up with Gnome 40. I never used Gnome because I always wanted to tinker around with my Linux Distro, but for this case when I wanted to set up as soon as possible and have everything working from the box, and after some YouTube videos I chose Gnome.

But as you can guess, and because I’ve started to doubt my decision and I want to swap to KDE. Simply installing KDE on top of Gnome is not a good option, because two desktop environments are sharing some files and locations, so this is one thing that I heard that Linux does its wall, but in real world it doesn’t go well. Multiple desktop environments. If they are light, or maybe just windows managers instead of desktop environments, that can work fine, but in my case I got a lot of problems after I installed KDE on top of Manjaro.

But why did I decide to switch from Gnome.

After Manjaro Install

When I installed Gnome some things were not working on my system:

  • Touch Screen
  • Auto Rotating
  • Fan Control
  • Power Management

Let’s go over this.

Touch Screen

In Manjaro Gnome 40 the touch screen worked funny on my system. It’s maybe older system and that was the problem but I need to solve it. It basically detects touch as a mouse click always. There was solution for this, but then there was strange behavior after exiting from sleep, because then I was getting multiple touch detection for one, and in main search for one key press I was getting multiple detections.

Auto rotation

This wasn’t working as well from this box. This was the easy fix, just a couple of minutes of googling and it was solved. When it was working it didn’t have problems later. The solution was to install iio-sensor-proxy.

Fan Control

I could find laptop fan control inside gnome for in needed to install one. I installed the program called nbfc. Some controls are:

nbfc set -f 0 -a
nbfc set -f 0 -s 50   % to set to 50% 
nbfc set -f 0 -s 100 % to set to 100%

This was a good solution for my use case, I didn’t configure the GUI for this but for me this was OK. I could set the manual fan to the desired presentation and that was everything that I needed.

Power management

I tried playing with power management program tlp but I didn’t spend much time on it, but in the time I spent on it I was getting good battery usage and I couldn’t use my external USB mouse, or not so good battery usage, but everything was working. But this is my fault. I should spend more time on it.

Final words

But because of this for Start with Linux Manjaro I wanted to have a clean install of KDE Manjaro and then start documenting all of my struggles on creating the OS as I wanted. So stay tuned for part 2 where I will start with a fresh install of Manjaro and then check everything that I need. So, please stay tune for next post in which I will started from clean install of Manjaro KDE and comment down below and check my other Manjaro posts at next link https://bln364.com/stm32-on-linux-in-2021/.

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