Aside

Installing EndeavourOS on ThinkPad X220

(Writing this within Firefox on EndeavourOS!) The sister came by & we sipped spicy cinnamon tea as we installed Linux on our laptops.

She decided on Linux Mint Cinnamon, while I chose EndeavourOS i3.1 (She wants something that Just Works, while I enjoy tinkering.) We both went into this expecting it to be much more complicated to install & start using, but it was surprisingly simple.

What we did

We followed the instructions for creating bootable USB sticks, then booted from our USBs (with f12), ran the installers, restarted, and things mostly just worked. (We went all in; we are not dual-booting.)

Firefox would have been my first download, so I appreciated that it was included as a default. The first thing I did was go in and install uBlock Origin.

The parts that didn't just work

EndeavourOS i3

For my install, I needed to connect to the internet via ethernet (while my sister's Mint install prompted for WiFi). Post-install, I turned on WiFi via command line:

  1. Open terminal with win + enter
  2. nmcli dev wifi
  3. nmcli device wifi connect MyWifiName password MyWifiPassword

I later left my laptop idle (twice) & ran into an issue with unlocking, since blur lock refused to accept my password (both times). Despite typing my password correctly, I would still hit Wrong!. So I restarted my laptop & turned off blur lock:

  1. Open terminal with win + enter
  2. nano "${HOME}"/.config/i3/config
  3. Add # in front of the xss-lock line

I'll look into it more later.

Edit: I ended up reinstalling because I broke the config file. 🙃 It turns out I didn't connect to WiFi during the USB boot before install. When I did that, WiFi was set up automatically & I didn't need to command line it. And with the new install, I didn't have the same blur lock issue either.

Linux Mint Cinnamon

For my sister's install on her Dell Latitude, Mint wasn't automatically loading on boot (she'd get an Invalid partition table! error). She poked around her BIOS settings, turned off secure boot, and adjusted the boot order in BIOS Setup, which fixed it.

When she went home, she wasn't able to connect her Keychron K12 keyboard via Bluetooth (despite following guides & attempting to fix via terminal multiple times), so she has it wired for now. She says she’ll try again later when she feels like it.

First impressions & thoughts

  1. I originally wanted to use Xfce DE + i3 WM and intended to follow this setup tutorial, but the installer no longer allows selecting two desktop environments (and apparently this combo no longer works?), so I just went with i3. I like the tiling windows. ↩

  2. my entry for a zine: desktop ricing ↩