>DATE: Mon Jun 14 14:15 MDT 2021

I ditched my Pi 4 and am back to my laptop

So, one day I was doing something on my laptop (on Windows 10) and just left it when I was done. Windows then proceeded to preform automatic updates overnight, as it somewhat frustratingly does on occasion. This frustration is amplified by the fact that I have been trying (and failing) to get Linux to work on my laptop and just didn't bother to change the boot order. The result is a frozen laptop with the fans whirring away because it booted into Pop!_OS. Now, I have the fortune/misfortune of having both Intel and Nvidia graphics in this laptop as well as some funky audio hardware — I hope you can see where my problem(s) lie.

Strangely, several weeks ago my laptop actually booted into Pop!_OS successfully. In my disbelief, I updated the system and everything is working great. It even works as expected with a Thunderbolt 3 dock using two 1080p 60 Hz monitors with Nvidia graphics enabled. This was the primary reason why I was using my Pi 4 instead of my laptop: the hardware configuration was just too finicky for Linux, but that is why I am using Pop!_OS. I know that System76 uses similar graphics hardware in their laptops, so I thought this would be the best way to go.

Bear in mind that I have had a mixed experience with Linux distros on this laptop since I bought it in late 2019, and its OS has been Windows 10 more often than not. Maybe if I had put in the time to get Arch running on this thing my experience would have been different, but I needed it to work for college and was too busy to continually break and fix some of the most essential pieces of software a computer has.

As for why Pop!_OS suddenly started working, I have no good answer. My experience is that very rarely this will be the case with this laptop with most flavors of Linux that manage to boot at all, but usually that is in the case of a cold boot, not a restart from Windows. Whatever the case may be, I'm just glad that it finally works.

I've also recently re-partitioned my SSD, so I nuked Windows 10. Soon I realized that one of the reasons I bought an HP Spectre x360 was for its pen and touchscreen's usefulness in digital note-taking. Reinstalling Windows is actually a pain in the ass since HP did all sorts of proprietary enhancing to the typical features of a laptop. This means that Windows needs some special nondescript drivers to be installed on my laptop. Go figure. Maybe I'll just tough it out with the sub-par touchscreen note-taking software in the FOSS community. I have to admit though, that Microsoft OneNote (which I think is 'free' now, so long as you have a Microsoft account to sign in with) is actually a pretty decent application most of the time, and that HP and Microsoft have done a good job of ensuring that their touchscreen and pen support is up to modern standards.