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November 12, 2023

I backed the Kickstarter for Khadas Mind: Your Next-Gen Modular Workstation and today (2023-11-11) recieved the Khadas Mind Premium.

Needless to say, that I didn’t plan on using Windoof 11 on this beauty. 🤓

So this page is all about me figuring out how to—best 🤞—use Linux on this device—as a daily driver.

I’m planing on leaving Windoof 11 on the SSD—a.k.a. going dual boot—to ease up my life with firmware updates.
That’s actually something that I recently learned from my ~~struggle~~ experience running Linux on the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Gen 1—where I ended up NOT having a dual boot setup in favour of Debian/ Ubuntu Full Disk Encryption (FDE).

I’m planing on evaluating these Linux distributions/ flavours, in no particular order:

✅ Intel’s Clear Linux
✅ elementary OS
✅ Stock Debian
✅ Pop!_OS
✅ Bluefin
Stock Ubuntu
Vanilla OS
OpenBSD (did I say “Linux-only” 🙃)

Clear Linux

I’ve opted NOT for dual-booting Clear Linux* OS and Windows* 10 11 OS on the same disk, but rather installed a 2nd SSD for installing Clear Linux.

The installation worked w/ out an issue—though the installer did not recognize the Wifi card, thus I had to fall back on Ethernet via external USB-C hub.

Also, after the installation Gnome seems not able to activate Bluetooth. I didn’t drill into this issue, so I can’t say whether it’s an issue w/ the Bluetooth stack in general or (just/ likely) a driver issue, or…

BTW Suspend is working.

elementary OS

Only tested w/ live medium. Worked flawlessly. Though I didn’t want to install right now. I’m rather waiting for the already in the works/ upcoming 8.0 release, which will be based on Ubuntu 24.4, thus expected for 2024.

Debian 12 (bookworm)

Installation and FDE went pretty straight forward—from debian-12.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso (not so much from debian-live-12.4.0-amd64-gnome.iso, b/c of issues w/ encryption on boot, likely installer issue?).

Went w/ minimal tiling DE leveraging Wayland and Sway via my beloved Regolith Desktop.

Pop!_OS

Only tested w/ live medium. Worked flawlessly. Of course 🤷‍♂️

Bluefin

REALLY curious about Bluefin. Even more though, after reading about how Brian is Bluefin…

Installed the latest iso (bluefin-38-2023-10-27-x86_64-rc.iso), even though still beta (“This is an Beta and will remain a Beta until Fedora 40 is released.”).

Install worked w/ out any issues, even though I opted for full disk encryption.

Now need to figure out all this Silverblue/ Bluefin “magic”:

Bluefin Developer Experience (bluefin-dx)

Bluefin Developer Experience (bluefin-dx) is a dedicated developer image with bundled tools. Unlike traditional Linux systems, the operating system and developer environment are explicitly and purposely decoupled.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Linux on Khadas Mind