Trying to switch from Windows to Linux, ongoing issues thread

[Aaron44126]

Alright, I'm giving it a go.  Hoping some more experienced Linux users like @Etern4l and @Ionising_Radiation can maybe offer some tips.

 

This is on my Dell Precision 7770 (full specs in sig).  I actually had trouble just getting a distro up and running.  I want to use Ubuntu or a derivative mostly because it's what I'm used to — I'm actually pretty familiar with Linux from using it on servers, VMs, and WSL; it's just been a looooooong time since I tried to use it as a daily driver desktop OS.

• Tried Linux Mint 21.1 first and it installed fine, but I found that Cinnamon is "not there" when it comes to high-DPI support so that experiment ended quickly.
• I wanted to start by trying KDE instead of GNOME.  I found that kubuntu 22.04.2 locked up whenever I got a few clicks into the installer or when I tried the "Try Kubuntu" button.  (I tried two different USB drives to make sure that it was not some kind of storage issue.)  I did eventually get it to install but then it locked up after I entered my password at the login screen after first boot.
• Actually tried to boot Fedora-KDE but I got stuck with a black screen and blinking cursor when trying to boot the install media.  Possibly the NVIDIA driver issue (see next point).
• ...So fine, I'll give plain Ubuntu with GNOME a go.  I managed to install Ubuntu 22.04.2 and that went fine, but after installing the proprietary NVIDIA GPU driver I was again greeted with a black screen and blinking cursor after rebooting.  I figured out the solution to this which was to install the linux-headers package before installing the NVIDIA driver itself, I guess it builds some modules dynamically and failed without that package?

So, up and running on Ubuntu 22.04.2 with GNOME.  It's actually a pretty slick experience, with nice GUI animations and high-DPI looking really good.  I don't like the left-side app dock; I moved it to the bottom and put it on auto-hide, seems good enough.  (I'm more of an Alt+Tab user, and I also like how pressing the "Super" brings up all of the open app windows.)  I don't like that top bar either, it seems to be taking up space without really offering much value.  I'm sure it can be customized but I haven't messed with that yet; I did not see any options regarding it during my quick trip through the Settings app.

 

Anyway, here are my observations/issues after trying to use it for an evening.

• I'm using "hybrid graphics" ("Optimus") so the laptop display is driven off of the Intel GPU.  It seems to have a proper kernel module/driver for the 12th-gen Intel GPU (this was not the case with Ubuntu 22.04.1).  But, it will not let me select 120 Hz for my refresh rate, the only option presented is 60 Hz.  I didn't spend a whole lot of time trying to figure this out, but nothing jumped out at me when I Googled about this issue.  (No such issue with this under Windows.)
  • This was the case both under X11/Xorg, and under Wayland, which I did figure out how to get running.
• Also regarding the display panel, by default "automatic brightness" was turned on which is supposed to, I guess, dynamically change the screen brightness depending on your physical environment.  In practice, for me, it resulted in the screen brightness just changing randomly.  Like, it kept trying to compensate for light created by the display panel itself.  I turned it off in GNOME settings, and all is good, except it is still active at the login screen when the system first boots up.  The result is, after I reboot, the screen brightness level after I log in is "random" and I have to manually correct it.
• I wonder if there is any way to get the Precision 7000 fingerprint reader working yet?  I was mildly annoyed to enter my password every time I wanted to unlock the system, but I didn't actually spend any time trying to figure this out yet.
• Some apps don't respond well to high-DPI.  My first big example is KeePass, my password manager of choice, which on Linux runs under Mono.  The text is rendered well enough but all of the graphics and the toolbar are tiny.  Is there a way to run a specific app without scaling and have the system just blow everything up to 200%, so it looks blurry maybe but at least has the proper layout?  (Easy enough to pull off under Windows.)
  • I'll give KeePassXC a try, but I do rely on a number of KeePass plugins, so I'm not sure if it will support everything...
• I'm also annoyed that the GNOME file manager reports file and disk sizes based on "1000" rather than "1024".  A 32 GB partition (that is 32 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes) is reported as 34 GB.  Same for the sizes of various files.  I understand the reasoning, sort of, but I would prefer the option to switch to "MiB" 1024-based sizes if only because I am long used to it and also to have my file sizes match up with every other operating system.  There doesn't appear to be a way to do this.  It's not consistent, either, for example GParted does report things based on 1024-based sizes.  I'd expect Linux to be more about user choice, so the answer "No, you can't do that" makes me say "...Really?".
  • I saw reference that the KDE file manager also uses 1000-based sizes; they had an option to switch to 1024-based but it disappeared with KDE Plasma 5?
  • I'm not opposed to using a different file manager to "get around" this.  I was planning to look for a "power user" file manager anyway.  But I'll need it to properly register as the default file manager, so if I do something like ask Firefox to "show me" a file that was just downloaded, it will open in that and not the default GNOME file manager.
• I got VMware Workstation installed so that I can run a Windows VM (which I will probably have to do full-time).  I had to do some manual compilation to install some kernel modules that it wanted.  Not the slickest experience...
• And the actual issue that blocked me from proceeding for now.  I installed yuzu to play Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and I had no problem getting it up and running, but performance was poop.  It did identify and allow me to use the NVIDIA GPU for rendering, but struggled to maintain 20 FPS at 1080p.  It's a Switch game so its not that graphically intense, on Windows 4K/60 FPS is not an issue.  Do I need to do something to kick the NVIDIA GPU into a higher performance state?

[Etern4l]

Will read through sometime this weekend, however, for now I will just post what ChatGPT had to say :)

 

Advice #5 is an example of the algo being dumb and making things up - there is no setting of the kind in Tweaks under Fonts, and what would it have to do with Fonts and scaling in the first place. But sometimes, it comes up with something useful. I have no view on 1-4. 

 

It seems that you have encountered several issues while trying to set up and use Linux as a daily driver on your Dell Precision 7770. Here are some suggestions to address some of the issues you mentioned:

1. Regarding the refresh rate: Check if you have the appropriate driver for your display panel installed. You can also try running xrandr command in a terminal to see if it lists the 120Hz option. If it does, you can set the refresh rate using xrandr.

2. To disable automatic brightness at the login screen, you can try adding the following line to /etc/gdm3/Init/Default file: xbacklight -set 100.

3. The fingerprint reader on Dell Precision 7770 is currently not supported by Linux, so you won't be able to use it for login authentication.

4. To run a specific app without scaling, you can try using the "Scale Factor" option under "Display" settings in GNOME. Set the scale factor to 1 for the app you want to run without scaling.

5. To change the file size reporting unit to binary (i.e., 1024-based) units, you can try installing the gnome-tweaks package and using it to set the unit to binary under the "Fonts & Scaling" tab.

I hope these suggestions help you in addressing some of the issues you encountered.

[Aaron44126]

Man, ChatGPT is a bit creepy.  I will check this out.  I'm not sure if it really knows what it's talking about for at least a couple of these but has still put something together that "sounds" reasonable.

[Etern4l]

24 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

Man, ChatGPT is a bit creepy.  I will check this out.  I'm not sure if it really knows what it's talking about for at least a couple of these but has still put something together that "sounds" reasonable.

 

Yep, but basically it just spews out the most probable answers (in some obviously non-trivial sense), given the corpus of Internet material it's been trained on. It tends to be better than googling especially on trivia or if you are just looking for a quick and rough overview. Tends to breaks down on deep dives.

 

Yeah, it's hallucinating a lot on this Linux stuff - asked it a few Qs about Gnome, and got wrong responses each time (mostly referring to old versions of Gnome, even though I specified the version of Gnome I care about).

[Aaron44126]

Looks like I can't use Wayland if I want to use VMware Workstation, for now...

Wayland intercepts keyboard shortcuts like "Alt+Tab" and they are interpreted by the host OS, not the guest OS.  Doesn't look like anyone has figured out a way around this other than to switch back to Xorg.  Probably need VMware to address it themselves.

 

[Edit]

Switching to Xorg also seemed to fix my GPU performance issue in yuzu...

I guess it's just a bit too early to be trying to use Wayland?

 

[Edit 2]

Figuring out GNOME extensions, found this one that autohides the top bar.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/545/hide-top-bar/

[serpro69]

Try Dash to Panel , it's a really nice extension if you're using Gnome.

 

Also, If you want an Ubuntu-derivative and Gnome, I would recommend to try out PopOS. I've been using Ubuntu myself ever since I've switched to Linux years ago, but recently tried out PopOS on my wife's laptop (and she actually ended up using Pop daily), and was positively impressed by the smoothness of the experience I've had with it. It even offered me drivers for the Dell WD19DC docking station.

I'm definitely giving it another go on my next laptop.

[Aaron44126]

5 hours ago, serpro69 said:

Try Dash to Panel , it's a really nice extension if you're using Gnome.

 

Ah yeah, thanks for the tip, this is much better.  Don't need two bars... one is fine.  The autohide also works really well.  (I found that the extension that hides the top bar that I linked above isn't exactly perfect... for example, the top bar always reappears upon unlocking the system and you have to mouse over it to get it to go away.)  And it seems to have many options for customization.  I already shrunk the spacing between icons.

 

I'm definitely interested in any "tips and tricks" along these lines.

 

Anyone know if there's a way to get something more like the Windows 7 Start Menu in GNOME?  (CInnamon and KDE have something along these lines built-in by default.)  I know I can use the "activities" view and search for something, but sometimes I like seeing applications in a list.  When I used GNOME 2.x back in the day, it had an application menu available from the top bar where you could have the apps grouped into categories, but that appears to be gone.

[Edit] - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3628/arcmenu/

 

Also anyone know if there is a way to group "tray icons" into a container so that they aren't just hanging out on the right side of the bar?  I have a couple of icons there already and I have a feeling that this space is going to get crowded with stuff again that I don't feel adds real value to keep on the screen all of the time.  (I do see that Dash to Panel has the option to hide them entirely from the bar, but also looking for some way to quickly get at them on demand I guess?)

[Edit] - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloaded/ (Also, disable the stock "Ubuntu AppIndicators" extension.)

 

(I'm sure I could look into this stuff myself, and I will, just looking for any jumpstart from more experienced folks here.  :-P)

[Etern4l]

11 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

• Tried Linux Mint 21.1 first and it installed fine, but I found that Cinnamon is "not there" when it comes to high-DPI support so that experiment ended quickly.

 

One Ubuntu variant I really liked was Mate. Super light-weight yet aesthetic and customisable. My GUI requirements are otherwise pretty rudimentary, so no idea if it would do all you'd want it to do.

 

11 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

• ...So fine, I'll give plain Ubuntu with GNOME a go.  I managed to install Ubuntu 22.04.2 and that went fine, but after installing the proprietary NVIDIA GPU driver I was again greeted with a black screen and blinking cursor after rebooting.  I figured out the solution to this which was to install the linux-headers package before installing the NVIDIA driver itself, I guess it builds some modules dynamically and failed without that package?

 

If you said A and tried Ubuntu+Gnome, I would say B and try Pop! Based on Ubuntu, and advertised to have the best Nvidia/Optimus integration. This could also help address your last question.

 

11 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

• I'm also annoyed that the GNOME file manager reports file and disk sizes based on "1000" rather than "1024".  A 32 GB partition (that is 32 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes) is reported as 34 GB.  Same for the sizes of various files.  I understand the reasoning, sort of, but I would prefer the option to switch to "MiB" 1024-based sizes if only because I am long used to it and also to have my file sizes match up with every other operating system.  There doesn't appear to be a way to do this.  It's not consistent, either, for example GParted does report things based on 1024-based sizes.  I'd expect Linux to be more about user choice, so the answer "No, you can't do that" makes me say "...Really?".
  • I saw reference that the KDE file manager also uses 1000-based sizes; they had an option to switch to 1024-based but it disappeared with KDE Plasma 5?
  • I'm not opposed to using a different file manager to "get around" this.  I was planning to look for a "power user" file manager anyway.  But I'll need it to properly register as the default file manager, so if I do something like ask Firefox to "show me" a file that was just downloaded, it will open in that and not the default GNOME file manager.

 

This was configurable in Gnome 3, I looked for a bit and gave up. If you wanted this really bad you would probably have to patch.

As an alternative, PacManFM seems to come recommended. Just tried it:  a bit less pretty, as in less similar to MacOS, but looks lightweight and more configurable, Windows XP kind of feel. Units are base-2 as desired.

 

Good luck and have fun!

[serpro69]

16 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Also anyone know if there is a way to group "tray icons" into a container so that they aren't just hanging out on the right side of the bar?  I have a couple of icons there already and I have a feeling that this space is going to get crowded with stuff again that I don't feel adds real value to keep on the screen all of the time.  (I do see that Dash to Panel has the option to hide them entirely from the bar, but also looking for some way to quickly get at them on demand I guess?)

[Edit] - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloaded/ (Also, disable the stock "Ubuntu AppIndicators" extension.)

 

Haven't really wondered about that. I've never had more than a handful of icons in the tray, and I have same application windows "stacked", so having the entire dash filled out has never been a problem for me.

 

I would suggest to not overuse the gnome extensions though. I've had issues in the past (16.04 / 18.04) where having too many extensions would give me all sorts of troubles. Since 20.04 I try to keep the extensions to absolutely necessary ones without which my overall experience with the DE would be noticeably worse.

 

  

16 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Anyone know if there's a way to get something more like the Windows 7 Start Menu in GNOME?  (CInnamon and KDE have something along these lines built-in by default.)

 

Not sure about the Windows 7 start menu per se, but when I think about "windows-like experience in Linux", the first thing that comes to mind is Zorin OS (which is also based on Ubuntu btw)

[Ionising_Radiation]

@Aaron44126, thanks for the quote. I don't use Ubuntu + GNOME, but rather Arch + KDE Plasma, so I'm not sure how much translates to that, but the key ideas should be the same. 

The biggest sources of headache with Linux are NVIDIA graphics cards; I get a feeling your woes with KDE Plasma have to do with Wayland + NVIDIA, which isn't a great combination (yet). Here are some relevant tips...

• Blacklist the nouveau open-source module during install, if you're using NVIDIA-only: 

  nouveau.blacklist=1

• Use the latest possible proprietary driver from apt, not NVIDIA's official sources. Ampere and later require no additional configuration for PRIME nor Optimus power management, unlike Pascal or Turing. Linux works well with both Optimus and discrete-only.
• Ensure the 

  i915 nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm

  modules are in your initramfs. This allows the Intel and NVIDIA drivers to be loaded as early as possible. 
• You may need to add

  ibt=off

  in your kernel parameters, again, because of NVIDIA shenanigans. Apparently the newer 500.XX drivers don't have this issue; I haven't tested this yet. 

Other tips:

• Disable Secure Boot. I don't know if the Ubuntu bootloader is signed, but this really makes life easier.
• Consider installing Linux on its own disk to make life easy (Windows updates may mess with GRUB). 

My own setup involves the following specialities:

• BTRFS subvolumes instead of ext4 and partitions to allow for dynamic resizing
• LUKS-encrypted drive, keys enrolled in the TPM to automatically decrypt on boot
• systemd-boot instead of GRUB
• Copied-over Windows bootloader from Windows' EFI partition to the Linux EFI partition, which systemd-boot automatically recognises and lists in the boot list
• Unified kernel images which are also automatically recognised by systemd-boot. 
• These are self-signed with sbctl for Secure Boot, but I have since disabled it altogether because I was facing issues with hibernate on Windows. 
• I use the linux-zen and linux-lts kernels, so it's easiest for me to use DKMS with nvidia-dkms to automatically generate the modules every time I receive a kernel update. These require the linux-zen-headers and linux-lts-headers packages, of course.
• iwd wireless backend, but NetworkManager front-end so KDE Plasma has a nice settings menu

Others are mostly personal preference (zsh over bash, custom icons), but by and large I use Plasma almost stock. 

[Aaron44126]

20 hours ago, Etern4l said:

My GUI requirements are otherwise pretty rudimentary

 

Likewise, mostly what I want from the desktop environment is for it to just stay out of the way.  I'm getting along well enough with GNOME as it is set up.  I rather doubt that I will be keeping its file manager and I will check out PacManFM, or maybe look at something like Krusader.  (I use(d) an alternate file manager and Start menu on Windows as well.)

 

6 hours ago, serpro69 said:

I would suggest to not overuse the gnome extensions though. I've had issues in the past (16.04 / 18.04) where having too many extensions would give me all sorts of troubles. Since 20.04 I try to keep the extensions to absolutely necessary ones without which my overall experience with the DE would be noticeably worse.

 

I think I'm good with just the three (Dash to Panel, ArcMenu, Tray Icons Reloaded).

 

The one thing I'm wanting now is a better app launcher.  I like having one keypress to bring everything up on one screen and then one click to open what I want ... Windows 8/10 tiles were good for this.  GNOME "sort of" has this with their iPhone-like app menu, but at the very least I'd need to find a way to be able to freely place items rather than have them arranged in forced left-to-right rows.  (Maybe there's another extension for that.)

 

5 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

I don't use Ubuntu + GNOME, but rather Arch + KDE Plasma, so I'm not sure how much translates to that, but the key ideas should be the same.

 

Thanks for the tips.

 

I don't suppose you've seen anything more recently on the Precision 7000 fingerprint reader?  I have seen that I could use "howdy" to set up facial-recognition login, and I do have an IR camera.  I'd rather do fingerprint login, but I will take face login over typing my password.

 

Secure Boot seems to work fine with Ubuntu (though I find that I have to disable it to boot a USB drive that I made with Rufus -- but not if I burn it to an actual DVD...).  I'm not too worried about Windows messing with Grub, I think worst case I would have to go to BIOS and re-point it at the Ubuntu boot manager instead of the Windows one.  Normally the Windows boot loader doesn't get refreshed unless you install a "feature update" and I might never do that again.

 

...I actually had Ubuntu install the boot loader on the Windows EFI partition and it indeed automatically added the Windows boot loader as an option to Grub.  I can also choose whether to boot the Windows boot loader or Grub from the F12 boot menu.

 

Yesterday, I was booting Windows pretty often to go pull files that I wanted to move over to Linux or my new Windows VM.  Last night I got my Windows data drives attached directly to the VM, so I don't think that I'll need to reboot into Windows as often.

 

I know that KDE has experimental Wayland support, but kubuntu doesn't enable Wayland by default yet.  In fact, when I installed regular Ubuntu+GNOME, it didn't even have Wayland enabled by default, though I thought that I had read that it would be for 22.04.  I enabled it myself (and then disabled it again after issues).

 

I will be looking at LUKS at some point, I am interested in having an encrypted disk with "seamless boot" similar to BitLocker.  I have bookmarked a tutorial on switching over an already-existing Linux install.

 

Ubuntu seems to automatically invoke DKMS and build new stuff when a kernel update shows up, I'm not too worried about having to figure that out.

 

I will look at BTRFS for my data drive.  I've freed up one of my 8TB drives to use as a "bulk storage" drive for Linux but I haven't formatted it yet.  I'm going to set up up as a single-drive RAID0 array with mdadm, so that I can add my other 8TB drives as I free them up and just have one giant partition, without having to shuffle everything around again.  (I've also found directions for everything that I will need regarding this.)

 

————————————————

 

I spent some time just now figuring out how to do keyboard button remapping with xmodmap.  I now have the same keybindings that I had set in Windows (i.e. right Alt/Ctrl mapped to PgUp/PgDn, messing around with the positions of F11/F12/Home/End; all of this because of "deficiencies" in Dell's laptop keyboard layout).  That had been driving me crazy for the past day or so.

 

The next thing that I need is a proper backup solution.  I had yuzu throw out my XC3 save files yesterday after a crash — luckily, I had a copy of those sitting around so I only lost about five minutes of progress.  I'm looking at an automated solution that runs every so often and makes folders of hard links (sort of like Apple Time Machine).  I forget what it is called.

 

Overall, this "experiment" has gone more smoothly than I thought and I find myself increasingly committed to keeping Linux as the daily driver.  I'm pretty happy with how it is shaping up, though there is still lots to do and figure out.  I'm not sure what would happen at this point to block me from proceeding.  I do have the Windows VM which will host some Windows-only software that I need and it will probably stay running at all times.  At some point I'll look into seeing if any of that stuff can be moved over to Wine.

 

(That said, there is no way that I could switch to Linux on my work PC, that will continue to be Windows for the foreseeable future.  My workflow is very Windows-dependent.)

[Etern4l]

18 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

The one thing I'm wanting now is a better app launcher.  I like having one keypress to bring everything up on one screen and then one click to open what I want ...

 

I have the most used stuff in the dock, otherwise Super-A shows other applications.

[Aaron44126]

45 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

I have the most used stuff in the dock, otherwise Super-A shows other applications.

 

Yeah, that's the "iPhone-like" interface I was referring to (...though I didn't know the keyboard shortcut, thanks).

 

It's not terrible, but I don't like how the icons have to be laid out left-to-right and you can't just place them anywhere on the grid.  (Same complaint about an actual iPhone... and with the Windows 11 Start Menu.)  I might have a spot that I like to keep an app for muscle memory access, but its position could get jumbled up if I mess with anything "before" it.

 

Also need to figure out some more about how apps work in general.  For example, I use "Beeper" for communication and the Linux version is distributed as an .AppImage file that you can just run directly.  Because it is not "installed", it doesn't show on the app grid nor can I pin it to the dock.

[serpro69]

47 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

I have the most used stuff in the dock, otherwise Super-A shows other applications.

 

Same here.

  

1 hour ago, Aaron44126 said:

The next thing that I need is a proper backup solution.  I had yuzu throw out my XC3 save files yesterday after a crash — luckily, I had a copy of those sitting around so I only lost about five minutes of progress.  I'm looking at an automated solution that runs every so often and makes folders of hard links (sort of like Apple Time Machine).  I forget what it is called.

I never used TimeMachine and don't know what's your requirements besides using hard-links, but take a look at https://github.com/bit-team/backintime and https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift if you don't want to deal with setting up a cron job which runs rsync directly.

 

  

4 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

It's not terrible, but I don't like how the icons have to be laid out left-to-right and you can't just place them anywhere on the grid.

 

I don't think you'll be looking at them much though.

Super+A -> type app name -> press Return -> profit :)

At least I can't recall the last time I manually scrolled through the apps.

[Etern4l]

26 minutes ago, serpro69 said:

I don't think you'll be looking at them much though.

Super+A -> type app name -> press Return -> profit :)

At least I can't recall the last time I manually scrolled through the apps.

This.

 

Just Super -> type app name ....

 

 

Edit: @Aaron44126 I believe this covers adding new apps to Gnome

 

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/103213/how-can-i-add-an-application-to-the-gnome-application-menu

 

I wish there as an app for that, maybe someone knows?

 

Edit 2: Reading fail, it's at the bottom, installed, looks good

 

Graphical solution is to install MenuLibre

It is available for Ubuntu-flavored distributions via

apt install menulibre

or you can install it from source

It allows to categorize apps per Gnome categories and plays well with Chrome apps.

[Aaron44126]

I was actually just playing with MenuLibre before I saw your post, ha.

[Aaron44126]

Took a little bit of trial-and-error but I figured it out.

 

It was not enough to just add a new launcher via MenuLibre; I had to set its "Startup WM Class" (hidden down under the "Advanced" tab) in order for it to be properly identified and pinned in the dock.  (Without the WM class set, I was able to pin Beeper to the dock but when I clicked it, it just added a second unpinned Beeper icon to the dock that was the actual running application.)

[Aaron44126]

Now that I'm starting to get busy, I'm mildly annoyed that Alt+Tab in GNOME just shows one row of apps instead of expanding to multiple rows like Windows does (...so not all open windows fit on the screen).  Guess I've got to get used to using the "activities view" if I want to do something other than flip to one of the most recent apps.

 

Solved poor responsiveness in VMware by disabling hardware graphics acceleration...  Huh.  (Lots of people complaining about this, so not just me.)

[Etern4l]

Annoyed me as well. You can Go to settings->keyboard and remap to get the usual ALt-Tab behaviour..

[Ionising_Radiation]

9 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

I don't suppose you've seen anything more recently on the Precision 7000 fingerprint reader?

You'll need a fork of libfprint, libfprint-tod to get started. Presumably the Ubuntu package is libfprint2-tod1.

 

As for your desire for a more Windows-esque workflow... You should really consider trying to get a KDE Plasma-based distro to work, you might end up fighting with it a lot less than with GNOME.

[serpro69]

Last time I tried KDE (I think it was around the time Ubuntu 20.04 came out) - I got stuck on getting Network Manager working properly, namely could not get VPN connections to work properly :/

While I do prefer command line for most things, VPN connections is one thing I'd still like to keep out of it.
The same thing works just fine for me on Gnome without jumping through any hoops whatsoever

[Ionising_Radiation]

5 hours ago, serpro69 said:

5 hours ago, serpro69 said:

Last time I tried KDE (I think it was around the time Ubuntu 20.04 came out) - I got stuck on getting Network Manager working properly, namely could not get VPN connections to work properly

 

Which distro? KDE Plasma is the desktop environment. 

 

I'm also using NetworkManager, and have had no issues with VPN. 

[Aaron44126]

What does everyone use for email? I haven’t decided if I’m going to try Thunderbird or Evolution first. (Coming from Outlook on Windows.) Any chance for proper Exchange or Exchange ActiveSync support …?

I am familiar with Thunderbird, I used it for a few years (a long long time ago).  Evolution looks more... Outlook-like, at a glance.

 

[Edit]

I take it back with Secure Boot being OK.  It was OK, but I realized that I had left it disabled while mucking around, so I enabled it again this morning.  Everything booted up fine, but VMware Workstation would not start any VMs, and it took me a bit to figure out what was going on — I had built some of the kernel modules myself (noted in a post above), and those weren't signed, so they would not load while Secure Boot was turned on.

 

Maybe at some point I will figure out how to sign those, but for now, Secure Boot off is OK.

[Aaron44126]

14 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

You'll need a fork of libfprint, libfprint-tod to get started. Presumably the Ubuntu package is libfprint2-tod1.

 

Thanks for the nudge in the right direction.

I found this Reddit post which helped me get it sorted (but I did have to modify his directions a little bit).  It looks like it was set up (by Canonical/Dell/Broadcom/whoever) for Ubuntu 20.04 and needs some tweaking for Ubuntu 22.04.  I'll post a step-by-step here later.

 

Also helpful was a comment further down in the Reddit thread about the fingerprint read timing out.  I had to enroll a second finger in order for it to start working for authentication.

 

What's pretty nifty is that I can use my fingerprint to bypass sudo password prompts, too...  I wasn't really expecting that.  One slight disappointment is that I can't unlock the system by just touching the fingerprint sensor while it is locked with the screen powered off.  I have to do something to "wake it up" and then do a fingerprint scan.  (Windows would be "listening" for a scan even with the screen off.)

 

Oh, this means ChatGPT is a liar!! (again)

[Etern4l]

Great to see you're getting on. I don't know how you are feeling about it, but to me the existence of an open system like Linux in today's world is a borderline miracle to be cherished.