Unlock the Power
Earlier this year I purchased a MSI Katana GF76 laptop from Microcenter. It was the first time in a while I owned a computer with Windows on it. At first my plan was to purchase this so I can use to game and do other little things. I still had my Linux daily driver in this old Dell Latitude laptop, which was running at the time Manjaro Linux.
So I got it home and started to set up steam, EA, Xbox and some other stuff to start playing games. I was good it did it's job but over time things weren't working out. The software from MSI was having issues after updates. So as any Linux guy would do I started looking in the communities and forums for answers. From my research I discovered a trend of updates and failures in the MSI software that goes with the system.Then the real issues started.
The MSI software wouldn't start up at all. There are two graphical sources in this laptop, an Intel one and a Nvidia Geforce RTX 30 Series. The system runs the intel until the 30 series is needed. But I kept hearing the fans spin up just doing light stuff on the computer. So I decided to reinstall Windows.
It seem to fix this issues, hated I had to reinstall everything but it did give me a chance to really clean the system of some junk I never should have put on it in the first place. Now with that done I was back to doing the things I wanted to do with this laptop.
I started working on my small homlab which consisted of rebuilds from parts and a Raspberry Pi. So I finished the initial set up then the issues started coming back. First with sound, then with video. All after a MSI software update. So I thought do I reinstall Windows again. I really don't want to. I did do a backup of the system, but being the issue is software that runs part of the hardware I didn't know how effective it would be to just reinstall from the backup.
I forgot to mention, I did say I wanted to run Linux on this computer when gaming gets to the point that I can do everything I do on Windows on Linux. So I did take a USB hard drive and install Linux on it via this laptop. It worked for the most part but it running on a spinning platter disk as oppose to the M.2 that's in the system it was working very poorly. So I abandoned it.
Well now faced with this issue I felt willing to try to install Linux on the system and give it a try. Now what distro would I do this with. I had worked with Manjaro on my old laptop but I tried to boot this PC with a USB with and it failed. Next was Ubuntu which worked but as I was using the USB live disk I saw a bunch of issues and eventually it crashed and I had to reboot. Next was Pop OS which was the system I installed on the USB drive. I decided against them because of some community news I heard and in testing it some functionality just didn't work. Lastly there was Fedora. I used a USB live disk and it was the second system I tried to install on the USB drive. It ran good but with some small issues. I looked at the community of Fedora and the support it has. Its been the one distro I think it steady and I wouldn't have to worry about too many drastic changes. So I went with that. Plus I found out I can boot into the USB with Secure Boot on the system.
Its been day 3 of Fedora on this system and I have to say its great. Most of the basic function buttons work including turning the fan on and off, turning off the screen, all the sound buttons and the buttons to dim and brighten the display. Enough for me.
The amazing thing when I looked at how this was running. On windows the display was kinda boring. On Linux this display stands out. Its running at 1920x1080(16:9) which is expected, but the refresh rate is 144.03Hz which was advertised on the MSI Katana website that it could run. Its never ran like this on Windows.
Also the fans only run when necessary not randomly like they were before. I don't think this all falls on MSI though. When your dealing with all these vendors and their ability to update their software that goes with their hardware you get incompatibility issues. I think running Linux reduces those type of things. You usually get some kind of warning from the Linux community of some issue coming soon. On Windows it happens and everything is reactionary. So I'm happy that I'm back on Linux. Some of the unfortunate things is their are some windows only games that I need to see how to run. I'm using a program called bottles to solve that. I did already get Paltalk running in bottles. The only issue I have is I can't use the webcam. So I'll have to reach out to the bottles or wine community for a solution which is probably already out there. I haven't totally abandon windows. I'll probably run a VM either on my truenas server or on this laptop just in case I need it for something which right now I don't see.
