this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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I'm thinking of switching to linux and I'm looking for a lighter weight easy starter distro. Any tips or recommendations?

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[–] cfx_4188@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is a wifi/bluetooth module, the rtl8821. It comes with cheap or old Windows laptops, try to find an open source driver for it.

[–] TheyCallMeHacked@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I happen to have this exact chipset in my laptop (RTL8821CE to be exact), and it has driver modules directly in the mainline kernel (rtw_8821ce). The only possible issue would be firmware, but I honestly had absolutely no issue installing Arch, Gentoo, or Debian (with the non-free firmware iso) on it multiple times.

[–] cfx_4188@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

undefined> I happen to have this exact chipset in my laptop (RTL8821CE to be exact), and it has driver modules directly in the mainline kernel (rtw_8821ce). The only possible issue would be firmware, but I honestly had absolutely no issue installing Arch, Gentoo, or Debian (with the non-free firmware iso) on it multiple times.

We talked about using only free firmware, drivers, etc. I gave an example. For example, I am much more comfortable using OpenBSD than Arch/Gentoo/Debian. But I can't do that because the elements of the firmware are in the kernel, but not enough to make it work properly. With any Linux distribution this is not a problem.

We never mentioned the restrictions of only free firmware. In fact your argument of installing Ubuntu only makes sense in the first place, because Ubuntu ships non-free firmware