I finally took the time to install Linux on a laptop that was no longer being used. This Asus VivoBook was only 5-6 years old, and my only concern was that it would require proprietary drivers or that alot of the hardware would not be supported. I can lay my worries to rest because as write, I am typing from a fresh install of Deepin Linux.
Actually, there’s a little more to the story. I was in the process of just cleaning up the Asus laptop because my son was getting frustrate with how slow it was running, prior to him buying his first gaming pc (used). I managed to get it thoroughly de-bloated and it seemed to run much better. I opened it up to blow out the fans and see if the HDD was mechanical or solid state. It turned out to be mechanical and I had 2 extra SSD drives in storage, so I swapped it out to see if I could succeed in installing linux.
I grabbed an old thumb drive that I knew had some version of linux on it - but no clue which distro I had last burned onto it. I started the install and to my suprise there was still a drive with the windows install on it. Yeah, I know I could have look more at the sys info from Windows, but I didn’t.
After a little tinkering with the BIOS to fix the boot order and disable secure boot, I continued the install. Much to my suprise, my last ISO burn on that thumbdrive happened to be Deepin Linux. I said to myself, “Hey, why not!”
Several minutes later I was setting it up and connecting to the network without any issues. The only problem that I seemed to have was that the touchpad would not work, so I plugged in the mouse and figured I would sort that out in a bit.
Several minutes later I was installing apps and then was prompted with system updates. It began upgrading to the latest version of Deeping and when that was all done, I logged in and had touchpad support without having to do anything.
And now I am writing this blog post with no known issues and a fully functional development setup.
In conclusion, I couldn’t ask for much more from Deepin at this point. And I especially love the quake style dropdown terminal, which I use to ssh into and monitor my Dell mini pc with 1.5 TB external storage. It’s currently running a very minimal version of Arch Linux.