Ahhhhh... the house technology cascade! My wife had a pretty nice XPS15 that she got from me many years ago when I upgraded to a really nice gaming laptop. But thanks to Windows 10 support coming to an end, and a dead end for the upgrade path of that model of XPS15, we were faced with a choice.... upgrade to a new laptop for her or to bump her to Ubuntu or some consumer friendly Linux distro.
... and due to a bad experience with a much much older version of Ubuntu in the past (my wife is also not very tech savvy...), she asked for a new laptop instead. More on that in a later post... she got a very nice one!
Anyway, that meant that the XPS15... was pretty much still very useable... except for the end of life operating system.
... and thus the cascade... my older daughter is pretty happy with her Chromebook at the moment, but the younger one has been itching to play some typing games (Epistory in particular) that I have on our family Steam account. And I thought that the easiest thing to do would be to try out Bazzite... which I have heard so much about as a Steam OS alternative on the Steam Deck.
Bazzite has an easy usb installation route... super simple... mount the image on a USB and then essentially just follow the instructions... until you hit a roadblock and just look up what other people have done.
In my case, the installation wasn't detecting the actual windows drive that I wanted to replace with Bazzite. But a quick google showed up the solution... Intel's Rapid Start thing... which just needed a quick trip into the BIOS to disable... and then voila! Visible drive!
... and in no time at all... we have the XPS booting up with Bazzite, and it was just a few short moments to load up the family Steam account!
Now, Bazzite seems to be best optimised for AMD GPUs... and Nvidia cards have a generic install instead. It didn't seem to be a problem... but for some reason, when we fired up Epistory... it ran well enough (a little slow to load than I remembered...)... and there was some jankiness with the sound... but it was pretty hard to trouble shoot... and then after a couple of reboots... the problem went away. So, I'm not sure if it will be a persistent thing... or just a weird glitch.
I will research it more... because when it happens, it is really annoying... it seems like the sound is occupying the entire system... and everything gets echo-ed and sluggish as all hell.
Anyway, whilst it was working... my youngest had a go at Epistory... man, she needs to learn a bit more typing skills first... the first boss battle slaughtered her, and she wasn't able to progress.
So, I've set her up with Typing.com account ... so that she can start to learn the home row and how to move around efficiently. In a couple of months, she'll be able to start tackling those Epistory monsters again!
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