Hi everyone. Much like @JasonEvangelho, I have a System76 laptop with Pop!_OS that’s running smoothly - but I’m curious if anyone has had experience running other Linux distros on this model. I see Jason and others have had issues with fan control and hybrid graphics switching. I’d prefer to run Fedora on this machine but I’m hesitant to mess with a working system. My specs are below.
System76 Gazelle 15.6" (gaze14)
CPU: i7-9750H
GPU: Nvidia 6 GB GDDR6 GTX 1660 Ti
RAM: 64 GB Dual Channel DDR4 at 2666MHz (2× 32GB)
HDD: 1 TB NVMe
OS: Currently Pop_OS 19.10
I believe my Gazelle is based on the Clevo NH58RCQ.
Well, I kind of answered my own question last night in case anyone is interested. I installed Solus 4.1 on my Gazelle and everything seemed to work fine (after the initial software updates). In theory the System76-power graphics switcher could be compiled on it, but I didn’t really want to dig into that.
I also installed Fedora 31, and most everything worked fine - but I did notice that it took an awfully long time to boot up. Looking at the boot messages it was trying to ping something and it ended up timing out. Not sure what exactly; all I saw was a countdown and timeout error.
For now I’m back to Pop, since everything works. I imagine with enough time and/or whiskey I could probably hack Fedora or Solus to my liking on there but at the moment I’m good with “just works.”
Small update - as it turns out the thing that was causing my slow bootup/timeout issue was the nouveau driver. There’s a support article about it on the System76 site where they mention disabling it from GRUB. Once you install the proprietary driver (or just blacklist nouveau) the issue goes away.
Just FYI if anyone else runs into this problem.