I think I've found the right distro for my aging (older) laptop!

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Windows 10 reaches end of life next year. When my wife passed away, I ‘inherited’ her laptop, so I named it charpc. It is a Dell Experion 5000 series UEFI based device with TPM2, but the CPU will never pass the Windows 11 hardware requirements, so for about the past year (I like to be proactive), I have been trying various distributions on it in search of the one that will carry on after I remove Windows 10.

Since I have been running a lot of live distributions, I got a very large flash drive (a SAMSUNG FIT Plus 3.1 USB Flash Drive - 128GB (currently $14.99US on Amazon), and installed Ventoy (https://www.ventoy.net) to make managing ISOs easy. When I installed Ventoy, it created a ‘boot’/system partition (for the Ventoy system files) and another partition for the ISOs I want. When I boot the Ventoy drive, it lists all the ISOs I have stored in the non-system partition. When I choose an ISO, I get a choice of boot options, Normal and Grub2 Modes are the most useful for me. If the chosen image can boot with Secure Boot enabled, Normal Mode works well. If not, Grub2 Mode often lets me boot the ISO without disabling Secure Boot, although there are a few distributions for which I must disable it. Since I have plenty of storage space, I created a directory on the non-system partition (resources) to store any files/pictures I want available wherever I have the drive, and all-in-all, Ventoy has proven to be a very useful addition to my tool-set.

This past weekend, I gave Manjaro a try, albeit with some extra effort to get it to load with Secure Boot enabled, but that was much easier than I expected. I found a post that gave me everything I needed to know at [HowTo] Enable Secure Boot with rEFInd - Tutorials - Manjaro Linux Forum.

I disabled Secure Boot, then installed Manjaro. Everything went smoothly and the installation was very easy. After the initial reboot, I upgraded/updated the installed software, the began to follow the pertinent steps in the post I found (link above). When I got to the point where I was directed to reboot, I copied the remaining instructions to a text file so I could be sure to have everything I needed.

Following the reboot, I enrolled the newly created key using the MOK enrollment procedure, then enabled Secure Boot. At that point, Manjaro successfully booted up with Secure Boot enabled!

I now have a dual-boot system with Windows 10 and Manjaro, using the rEFInd Boot Manager (The rEFInd Boot Manager). My next step was to learn how to configure the new boot manager. The documentation on the rEFInd website is excellent (The rEFInd Boot Manager: Configuring the Boot Manager). I hid the unneeded boot options (there were several), and changed the background image to match what I use on my desktop and the Manjaro login and lock screens.

As a closing note, if you are not very tech savvy, you will be best served to get help from someone who is. I hope that someday, someone develops a rEFInd installation/configuration wizard to help non-technical users. UEFI and Secure Boot may not be the be-all-end-all of computer security, but it is another layer for the bad guys to get through. After all that work, won’t they be disappointed when they find that there’s nothing much to get on my systems.

I hope this post will help others,

Ernie

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@ernie
Have you looked at Tiny W11 to replace W10?

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Hi Ernie,
I was saddened to read about your wife. I still have my wife, but she is not well and needs a lot of assistence.

I think Manjaro is a fine choice. Because it is built on Arch you can include just the software you need . Just a few words about living with rolling reelease distros. You need to do frequent updates… about 2 weeks is as long as I would let it go between updates. You need some sort of rollback mechanism , in case an update misbehaves. Timeshift or systemback come to mind. You will have larger downloads than you would with a fixed release distro.

I keep Void, and I have never had any trouble with updates for that, but I still take precautions. Rolling release technology is getting more reliable than it used to be. The maintainers seem to have learnt how to manage it.

I am interested in rEFInd. From what you say it is well documented, but would be difficult for an inexperienced user.

Thanks for posting that, it is interesting.
Regards
Neville

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Well, you can do it a little longer then you thought. :laughing:
Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025 .

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I’m sorry to learn about your wife’s health issues. The only thing I can suggest from my own experience is that you should both treasure every day you have together because they will come to an end all too soon. I had forty-five years with my wife, and I wouldn’t trade a single day for anything. I ‘talk’ things over with her in my head when I’m faced with an important decision because I already know what she would say if she were still here with me. Even though I miss her more than anything, I’m comforted by keeping her in my heart, and knowing that she no longer hurts (she had very high pain levels during her final few yeasr).

Thank you for the insights on using rolling releases. I have used TimeShift with other distros, so I’ll make sure its installed and configured. The post I linked gave me everything I needed to install and use rEFInd, then after I had it installed and Manjaro was working well, I went to the boot manager’s website to learn how to tweak the interface. For example, it had every single boot option it found in the ESP. Many were remnants from previous distributions. I learned that I can hide an unneeded boot option by selecting it (from the boot screen) then pressing the minus (-) key. This works for any visible icon on the boot screen, so be careful what you hide. I also learned that I can use any background picture I want, provided it is in either PNG or JPG format. I used a picture sized at 1024x768, and it works perfectly. Now that is what I see on the boot, login, and desktop screens as my custom background.

Ernie

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Yes I have, and I may use it if it matures a bit more. At my most recent experimentation with it, I found a few issues I’d prefer not to deal with, but it does look promising.

Ernie

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@ernie
It is a no-frills clean install of W11, and it is so far running well on this old
Dell XPS L702X Laptop.

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Thank you. I’ll check it out again :slight_smile:

Ernie

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My thoughts go out to you, the loss of a loved one hits hard. Sadly I lost my first wife and then some time later my youngest daughter… Took a struggle but have moved countries and found a new special girl to share our life together, not easy but you just have to live your life to the full as tomorrow…
Interesting article and choice, I went down the Linux mint route via Ubuntu and now a big fan.

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I’m pleased to learn I’m not alone in learning to live life to the fullest after losing a life long love, and I appreciate your thoughts.

After using reEFInd for a few days and learning to tweak it’s appearance and displayed features, I am now considering using it on my production desktop and primary laptop systems too - I like it that well, and I suspect that I can use it to enable any distribution to successfully load and run on most any UEFI system with Secure Boot enabled, and based on the documentation, it appears to work with BIOS systems too (I’ll have to do more research on that). I am truly impressed with it. It may well be the best boot manager I have ever used. So far, I have used lilo, Grub, Grub2, and now rEFInd (I’ve been using various GNU/Linux distributions off and on since the late 1990s along side various versions of Windows.

Around 2015 I had hopes that Microsoft had learned from their past mistakes, but based on their recent behavior those hopes are now growing dim. If things don’t change for the better soon (prior to the release of Windows 12), I may have to drop Windows all together. I currently use the Fedora-KDE spin on my desktop and primary laptop, dual-booted with Windows 11, and Manjaro dual-booted with Windows 10 on my older laptop, so I may be removing Windows from all three machines sometime around the end of 2025. Another possibility may be switching Windows out for tiny11 or some similar de-bloated version of Windows. Perhaps I’ll try out Windowsfx to see how it works on my oldest box someday.

So many possibilities, life with my PCs will never get boring. This is getting way too long, so I’ll stop now,

Ernie

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@ernie
Really sorry to hear about your wife, I lost my first wife too cancer, several years ago, she was only 38 years young, at the time of passing. But time does not stop, and I have since remarried, too another lovely lady.
I got into computers around 1995, and have since owned several, built 5 more and have repaired more than i can remember. My last two builds were built solely around W11. I too have distro hopped but have settled down too mostly using Gentoo, why, mainly because I build what I want, and it keeps me occupied, when I can’t sleep at nights.
Windowsfx may look like Windows, but it is far from being Windows.I am currently installing Gentoo in VirtualBox, using Tiny W11 and my Dell laptop, that was a hand-me-down from my Son. The only thing that was broken was W10 and the charging adapter.

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I had 45 great years with my wife and I’m grateful for each and every day we had together. I’m in my 70s, so I’m not looking for a second love, but I won’t run if someone comes along. I wasn’t looking when I met my wife and that turned out really great, so if it happens again, it was supposed to and if not, I have all those memories my wife and I built up over the years.

My first computer was a Gateway IBM compatible PC powered by an 8088 CPU with 640KB RAM, a 100MB MFM HD, and a 14" EVGA color display. We got it so my wife could do homework - she was taking a business machines course at a local ‘college’. The school gave her a copy of WordPerfect 5.1, so I helped her install it. When I saw it load up for the first time, my reaction was “I just got’ta know how they did that!” Several years later the HD suffered a head crash and the MFM technology had become obsolete so there were no replacements available. I found a used full tower from an old server, a motherboard with an i386 CPU and some RAM soldered on. It supported the then current hard drive technology, and the local computer shop where I got everything else added in a 150MB HD for free (I think the owner liked me, or he felt guilt about selling me all that old used hardware). I went to a local book store and got a copy of “Upgrading and Repairing PCs”. I read that book to get an idea of how to go about putting all that hardware together to assemble a PC. When I finished, and booted it up, it worked. I kept reading that book and I learned a lot about how my PC works under the hood. As a result, that Acer PC we bought was the first and last ready made desktop PC I ever got. In fact I just put together the box I’m writing this reply on this year.

I initially discovered GNU/Linux in the late 1990s. I suppose I wanted to see what all the noise was all about so I downloaded installation media and tried to install ‘Linux’. I tried with RedHat, Suse, and Debian, but no joy. Then I heard about a distribution called Mandrake so I decided to give it a try. Everything worked right out of the ‘box’ except the network adapter. From Windows, I went to the Mandrake forums to ask for help. A day or so later, I had all the information I needed to get that network adapter working. I was thrilled and that experience sold me on GNU/Linux and Open Source Software for life. I used Mandrake until the company stopped developing it (as Mandriva), then I switched to Mageia until I ran into issues I could not resolve in version 8. I found Linux Mint Debian Edition and I liked it a lot but it always had what seemed to me to be a really vintage kernel, so I decided to try Fedora 37 out. It turns out I’m not a fan of the Gnome desktop environment so I tried the KDE spin. I like it a lot but it doesn’t run so well on my wife’s old Dell Insperion 5000 series laptop. For that I found Manjaro, but that’s a story I told in my original post above.

I’m no computer hardware expert and I’m no GNU/Linux expert, but I certainly have a lot of fun tinkering around with both!

Ernie

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Thanks for the idea of Windowsfx, first time I have come across this one. Don’t think I am going in that direction anytime soon, looks too much like windows for me and I wonder about applications running, support, updates the usual issues.
Happy to stay mint side and as most of my clients are older they also prefer the look and feel. Bit like most prefer libreoffice to ms office as it looks like the version they used before retiring.

It’s been interesting to follow your guide and path of discovery

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Paul, Linuxfx also has a Windows 10 look-alike distribution. I don’t use either at this time but I did think the variants were interesting, the look of Windows with the security of GNU/Linux. That is why I included them in my evaluations for my wife’s laptop. She wasn’t a GNU/Linux user, and she had absolutely no interest in trying it out, but she did have things she enjoyed doing on her system.

Ernie

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This is an update/addendum to my original post (above):

I’ve been dual-booting Windows 10 with Manjaro (using the rEFInd boot manager with Secure Boot enabled) for the past few weeks, and I found that when I upgrade the Linux kernel during a system upgrade, the only thing I must do after completing the upgrade and before rebooting is to execute the following command in the terminal:

sudo sbsign --key /etc/refind.d/keys/refind_local.key --cert /etc/refind.d/keys/refind_local.crt --output /boot/vmlinuz-6.1-x86_64 /boot/vmlinuz-6.1-x86_64

The result of this command is that the new kernel image gets signed. This authorizes Manjaro to boot with Secure Boot enabled. This command must be edited to match the newly installed version of the vmlinuz image (for example, if the full path to the file on your system is “/boot/vmlinuz-6.1-x86_64”, that is what you must include in the command (no double-quotes).

Note: When you upgrade to a newer minor version of the kernel, the name of the vmlinuz image file may not change, but it’s content will, and the new image will not be signed until you execute the command described above. I keep a text document with the most recent version of this command in my Documents directory so I can easily edit it when I upgrade to a newer major version of the Linux kernel. This makes it child’s play to copy the command and paste it into the Terminal window to execute it (SHIFT+CTRL+V to paste into the terminal).

I hope I’ve made this clear enough without too much complexity,

Ernie

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Thank you Ernie.
I did not know the kernel image had to be signed.
If Manjaro is like Void you will roll to a new kernel about once a month.
I use grub ( not rEFInd) so I have to do an update-grub every time it updates a kernel, but I dont use secure boot (my machine is too old) and I would not know how to sign a kernel with grub, or even if it were possible to do it.

Did you choose to go to rEFInd because it can manage secure boot?
Do you know whether it can be done with grub?

Regards
Neville

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Yes. rEFInd provides an easy way to manage booting GNU/Linux distributions on Secure Boot enabled systems.

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Yes, again. An example is any version of Fedora (my primary go-to for my newer UEFI/Secure Boot enabled computers - I use the KDE spin on them). Sadly, I don’t know enough about managing Secure Boot on UEFI systems to do it myself. I just know that it is possible.

I tried to switch my Fedora installation on my primary laptop to use rEFInd after I got it working on the older DELL Inspirion 5000 series laptop PC, but I was not able to get the switch to work. I suspect that it was due to the way my Lenovo Legion 5 laptop PC implements UEFI/Secure Boot or the fact that it may recognize that the shim-signed-15-2.src.rpm is outdated. I haven’t tried it on my home-brewed desktop PC yet. It has an ASUS Tough Gaming motherboard and peripherals I chose for the build. Perhaps I’ll give that a shot at some point, probably after I learn a lot more about Secure Boot and how UEFI works.

Ernie

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@ernie ,
Thanks Ernie,
I just think it helps peopke to know what is possible
I dont think my newest desktop has secure boot, so I cant try it out
Let us know when you do a bit more.
Regards
Neville

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I’ll keep adding to this post, or start a new conversation. :slight_smile:

Ernie

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