I originally tested quite a lot of distributions to use with this laptop. Main problem with most distributions is their inability to scale the UI to a reasonable scale. For Desktop environments like GNOME or Budgie, the interface is incredibly small. While it is possible to fix these issues, it is pretty troublesome. I currently run XFCE Manajaro Linux on this machine.
Sound
White noise when plugging in headphones is unfortunately the standard. In order to temporary fix this issue, simply run alsamixer and set the internal microphone boost to 22 (up a notch).
Otherwise, simply refer to the arch link for the older model. This fixes the problem completely, but again reduces the volume slightly.
Display
In my daily work I plug the laptop to a external Monitor. There are two major problems with that (On XFCE Desktop):
- Plugging a monitor in while running opens a dialog asking where the monitor should be placed. On XFCE there is no option to put the display at the left of the laptop display ( whereas the VGA outlet is [type-c]).
- The new display mirrors the current one as default.
Up to this point I did not create not find any script to change the “Display to the right” option to a left one. My current fix revolves around creating a new file in the xorg configuration which by default sets the correct parameters ( new display left of the laptop display ).
Create a file: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-monitor.conf and fill it with the following:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "eDP1"
Option "Primary" "true"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "DP1"
Option "LeftOf" "eDP1"
EndSection
In order to identify your display device simply run xrandr and check the output ( e.g. DP1 is in my case the external display ).
This fix works, but only when the machine is started with a plugged in display, otherwise one needs to manually put the new display to the left, by running:
xrandr --output eDP1 --auto --output DP1 --auto --left-of eDP1
Touchpad
I currently run XFCE Manjaro Arch on this machine and simply love it with all its perks and it’s easy customizability, but miss one single thing: The touchpad precision and smoothness of Pantheon (Elementary OS). Up to this date I do not know why the Pantheon based libinput driver did work far better than any other I have seen within ubuntu or arch environments, but am investigating. Currently I only use libinput drivers and uninstalled all synaptics drivers.
sudo pacman -S xorg-xerver libinput
#Shadowsocks Proxy
If youre behind the GFW, you might need a proxy or VPN to access some blocked content. I use a simple shadowsocks proxy, which can be installed over python pip:
pip install shadowsocks
Then configure your shadowsocks proxy with:
vim /etc/shadowsocks.json
To autostart the proxy on every system start create this file as e.g., /etc/systemd/system/shadowsocks.service :
[Unit]
Description=Shadowsocks Client Service
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=nobody
ExecStart=/usr/bin/sslocal -c /etc/shadowsocks.json
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Finally, enable it!
systemctl start shadowsocks
systemctl enable shadowsocks
