My home computing experience extends back to manually setting IRQs and programs that came in the form of booklets of code in text. I’m not a stranger to getting fiddly with my software. This laptop just will not play nice with linux. It’s from maingear, and not even windows 11 recognizes all the hardware without some proprietary drivers, for example the keyboard backlighting.
I had a similar problem with an NUC where the install would work but was unbootable after. In my case the USB showed up as both a BIOS and UEFI boot device and the mobo was picking the legacy mode. This made the install a legacy boot install which was not bootable.
To fix it I had to manually choose to boot the install USB’s UEFI mode.
Your laptop must be an exception. I’ve installed Linux Mint on an old laptop that couldn’t even run Windows 10 properly and it just worked with zero hiccup.
It’s a maingear laptop. Installation appears to proceed normally, however on reboot grub will absolutely not allow me to boot into linux. I’ve tried ubuntu, mint, and arch. I suspect it’s actually an issue with the uefi, but as the hardware isn’t mainstream trying to run that down is fruitless.
I’m not familiar with the brand, but general ideas that come to mind to troubleshoot are:
Disable secureboot if enabled. Understanding you’ll lose that security feature of course.
See if there’s an option to mark your storage as removable in the installer (–removable flag in grub iirc). My (pretty old) motherboard does not seem to respect attempts to add uefi entities but it happily boots off a “removable” uefi install.
Can’t get any linux to work on my gaming laptop
Skill issue.
My home computing experience extends back to manually setting IRQs and programs that came in the form of booklets of code in text. I’m not a stranger to getting fiddly with my software. This laptop just will not play nice with linux. It’s from maingear, and not even windows 11 recognizes all the hardware without some proprietary drivers, for example the keyboard backlighting.
What’s the model number?
And specifically windows recovery partitions enjoy nuking grub at every step.
ML-17. I have work software that must be run on Windows. Not able to dual boot is also a non-starter.
Does it allow for a second SSD?
I got a second SSD specifically for this purpose. Installing to either drive fails identically.
Well, there’s your problem. Windows nukes it in a blind panic.
As an alternative, windows in a vm for your work software, Linux as the only physical install.
What make and model, what problem is it giving you?
Maingear ML-17.
Uefi does not see any version of Linux as bootable after installation.
I can get it to see grub, but it fails to boot when selected.
I had a similar problem with an NUC where the install would work but was unbootable after. In my case the USB showed up as both a BIOS and UEFI boot device and the mobo was picking the legacy mode. This made the install a legacy boot install which was not bootable.
To fix it I had to manually choose to boot the install USB’s UEFI mode.
Can’t tell if you’re riding the cliche or serious
100%. Spent an incredibly frustrating weekend before surrendering and going back to win10
Your laptop must be an exception. I’ve installed Linux Mint on an old laptop that couldn’t even run Windows 10 properly and it just worked with zero hiccup.
How entirely unshocking that old, established hardware has support whereas brand new, non-mainstream hardware has issues
What distros did you try?
I assume this is either a meme or a very unique situation. “Not working” is too generic, if you can provide more details we could even help
It’s a maingear laptop. Installation appears to proceed normally, however on reboot grub will absolutely not allow me to boot into linux. I’ve tried ubuntu, mint, and arch. I suspect it’s actually an issue with the uefi, but as the hardware isn’t mainstream trying to run that down is fruitless.
I’m not familiar with the brand, but general ideas that come to mind to troubleshoot are:
Super weird. My laptop had a new enough GPU that Windows didn’t even have proper drivers yet and it worked out of the box on Linux.