Hello, I’m new to building Linux desktop PCs and I’m going to install KDE Neon 5.23.5 (User Edition) and would like to know how to setup the UEFI settings properly. It’s possible I may later switch to Kubuntu 22.04 LTS later on.
This is the hardware that I built the system with…
Fractal Desing R5
Asus HCG850 Gold
Asus TUF Gaming B550-Plus
AMD Ryzen 5 5600G
Corsair LPX (2 x 8 GB) 16GB (CMK16GX4M2B3200C16)
Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 NVME 250GB x 2
D-Link DWA-582
Noctua NH-U12S Redux
Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM x 2
The plan is to configure UEFI as follows…
Boot → Secure Boot [ ? ]
Boot → CSM [ ? ]
It would be great to hear if anybody has some of the same hardware or
experiences and some additional information that I may need to know.
Thank you.
The best resource I’ve seen for UEFI is the plethora of pages at “rodsbooks” which are support notes for the rEFInd boot manager. I read them over and over as part of my research for making USB Linux booting work how I wanted - and which I’ve documented here.
Something that he didn’t cover, but which I found very useful for changing the boot order - at least within the UEFI process - was efibootmgr which is in the Ubuntu repositories, so likely to be in those for other distros.
I suppose I’ll just keep Secure Boot set as Other OS and CSM set as disabled. The problem is that my system will work just fine and boot properly for a while (a week to a month maybe) and one day I’ll get a black screen (still with a monitor signal). After this happens, the system will reproduce the same behavior each time I turn the computer back on. When I re-install, everything is fine. I believe this is a result of bad updates. I’m not an expert in updating a Linux desktop. I just use Discover to update everything. I’ll just re-install again. I don’t really know what I’m doing. I would appreciate the help from anybody who knows what may be wrong.
I think part of your issue might be the use of KDE Neon. A lot of people claim that KDE Neon is just Kubuntu with newer Plasma but this is not accurate.
KDE Neon is a development project intended to be used only by developers.
When you view their FAQ page it states that it is not a distro and that they only focus on the KDE stack not the core system itself.
I recommend using Kubuntu instead and that should be much easier to set it up.
Secure Boot is not available with all Linux distros, in fact most don’t support it. I don’t know for sure if KDE Neon does or not but I would assume it doesn’t support it because it’s not meant to be used by non-developers.
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I’ve been aware that KDE Neon is not technically a distro. The reason that I’m using KDE Neon is because I’m afraid that the kernel may not be compatible with my hardware. I’m not sure what would happen in that case. My intention with my last desktop was to use Kubuntu all the way, but when Kubuntu 20.04 LTS first came out then KDE 5.18.0 was very unstable. I later found out that the desktop version increments which indicates the expected stability… Now I know. Kubuntu is really my distro of choice. I’m currently awaiting the release of Kubuntu 22.04 LTS. I have not idea what do to at this point.
KDE Neon is a development project which means the core is locked to the same core that 20.04 is because neon is based on Ubuntu 20.04 so it does not receive updates outside of what Kubuntu 20.04.
Kubuntu gets core updates every 6 months with continued support for the LTS.
- Kubuntu currently has version 21.10 and 20.04 still being maintained
- KDE Neon is exclusively LTS so it has only one version based on 20.04
This means the hardware support for KDE Neon is practically identical to the support of Kubuntu 20.04.
On the other hand, Kubuntu 21.10 is available for newer hardware.
The way I see it, your best options are the following.
-
Install Kubuntu 21.10 now and upgrade to Kubuntu 22.04 when it comes out.
-
Choose a different Linux family like Fedora and install Fedora 35. Fedora always has a much more updated Linux kernel than Ubuntu as it moves much faster than the Ubuntu family.
-
Wait until 22.04 for a full reinstall. I wouldn’t recommend this though.
I have flashed a Samsung Duo 32GB USB drive using Etcher. Well, I’m going to install Kubuntu 21.10. I hope that disabling Secure Boot and CSM will solve a majority of the problems that
were occurring.