We ended up having to return to Best Buy much sooner than expected as Chris’s laptop suffered from some death woes the following weekend. It would turn on, but it wasn’t too keen to stay on for more than a few minutes. We decided to go with the same plan we had last time as it seemed even more pertinent with the current difficulties in getting Linux compatible PCs. We got him the same machine.
Have a look at a video about Best Buy, another new computer and Chris having to get used to an American keyboard:
Hi guys, I used your videos on the yoga 900 to install mint myself, so far so good 🙂 Did you have any issues with screen glitches/pixelation of the desktop/startbar. I found a forum post that has a solution, but so far I haven’t been able to solve the issue. Im on kernel 4.6 with everything else working!
If you experienced this and fixed it, any hints would be appreciated, last hiccup before fully leaving windows behind.
Thanks for the fun
Glad you found the video helpful.
The screen glitches seem mostly confined to window effects. I did try fiddling with the linux-firmware package. In /var/log/dmesg , there was an error loading i915 firmware. It turned out to be an issue with update-initramfs whereby if any of the files in /lib/firmware/i915 were symbolic links, they would not be copied into initramfs. I replaced the links with hard links and then got a better message in dmesg:
[ 0.911802] [drm] Finished loading i915/skl_dmc_ver1.bin (v1.26)
The screen glitches I hardly notice now. I’m hoping they’ll be fixed soon. There’s a new version of Mint coming out next month so I’ll be installing it and may well do a review.
A weirder and more amusing glitch is that if you rotate the screen 180 degrees (in Display), the touch part of the screen doesn’t logically rotate with it. When you touch the top right of the screen, the mouse cursor jumps to the bottom left.
There are many reasons to leave Windows. After years of using Linux distros, I now have to use a Windows laptop for work and it’s not pleasant. The windows console program is about as bad as something I might have written at uni. Even the windowing interface isn’t that amazing. I recommend putting up with the glitches if you can and don’t look back.