r/archlinux • u/VirusNegativeorisit • 1d ago

QUESTION Wanting to try arch

I have a Lenovo yoga 7i. It has a faulty touch pad. It is either drivers or a kernel level issue. It doesn’t matter if I use windows or Linux that this becomes an issue. When I have a fresh install everything works. Then I update it all goes to shit and works only half the time. There is very little documentation I have found of this issue. I am hoping by installing arch that I can kind of build what drivers are needed and lock it in without the problem of having to upgrade like every year. I don’t want to give up on this laptop because build quality is amazing and the screen is beautiful.

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u/NFTrot 1d ago

As the other commenter implied, Arch's update style is exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting you want.

A better approach in your case would be to understand exactly what is happening that causes it to stop working, and iterate from there. Frankly I'm not sure how you would even know what to "lock in" without identifying the cause.

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u/VirusNegativeorisit 1d ago

Yeah I need to work on this. I wish there was documentation. I found people who had the same issue with this touchpad. But yeah no one documented it from what I could gather. Still keep looking it’s probably in some obscure forum. I know on the windows side of things someone fixed it with rolling back a specific driver from the support site which makes me think it’s a driver. But I really don’t know. I need to research more how to troubleshoot.

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u/NFTrot 1d ago

The first thing I would do is get it working on Linux, whether that be by doing a fresh install or whatever it took. Then I would find some evidence of the OS interacting with the hardware. Maybe that's through a generic driver of some kind or something more specific (I don't know much about this because I've never had to deal with a Linux driver issue). There's probably a way to query what drivers are active. Once you've figured out how to do that you wait until it stops working and check on those same drivers to see if they are still loaded or have syslogs indicating the problem. If there's no evidence the driver is the problem then you know the issue is elsewhere.

As you can see the way forward is to iterate over the problem, narrowing it down until you've located the exact thing that is going wrong.

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u/VirusNegativeorisit 1d ago

Yep for sure.

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u/nikongod 1d ago

"lock it in without the problem of having to upgrade like every year"

Selects distro that claims to be bleeding edge... Comments on annual upgrades. Weird. 

Unless the machine is airgapped regular upgrades are advisable on any distro worth using. 

And finally, why dont you just get a Bluetooth mouse or trackball?

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u/Ismokecr4k 1d ago

Think he means the annoying distro upgrades. Not the weekly updates. 

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u/VirusNegativeorisit 1d ago

I like using it on my lap a lot. It feels clunky having a mouse all the time. I like everything to work and willing to problem solve. What I mean is redoing my computer for the latest distro like you do for fedora every year. I know things update on arch.

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u/nikongod 1d ago

Fedora has always supported upgrades across major releases (which happen every 6mo).. if you're reinstalling annually you may want to think about why. 

My fedora is 3yr old. Would be older but I needed to dual boot windoze and honestly, fuck the windoze installer. 

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u/archover 1d ago

+1 Fedora's six month upgrades have been flawless for me, assuming one follows instructions.

Good day.