Manjaro Linux on Dell Inspiron 7506 2-in-1

Introduction

Please see previous article for the first distribution of Linux I used on this computer.

Anyways, so this article will help you with how to install Manjaro on this laptop. But the usual riot act: I am not responsible for anything that happens as a result of you following these instructions. This article is just me telling the story of what worked for me, until it didn't and Manjaro stopped working.

HARDWARE COMPONENTS	STATUS UNDER LINUX	NOTES
Intel 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1165G7 @ 2.80GHz	Works
System Memory: 16GB, 2x8GB, DDR4, 3200MHz	Works	Upgraded w/ Kingston KCP426SS8/16 (32GB)
Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics with shared graphics memory	Works	Works, including HDMI
Seagate Technology PLC Device 5012 (Barracuda 510 SSD) (added)	Works
4-Cell Battery, 53WHr	Works
Dell back-lit keyboard	Works	Can change settings in BIOS; can update any time.
Dell 512GB factory Solid State Drive (removed)	Works
Fingerprint Reader (built into power button)	Doesn't work	Works in Windows
15.6-inch FHD (1920 x 1080) Truelife Touch Narrow Border WVA Display with Active Pen support	Partially works	Touch input transfers to the other screen; screen input identifies as "touchpad."
Intel Audio	Works

Installation

In the previous article, I went over how to open the laptop and upgrade items.

In this article, I go over how to install Manjaro. The first thing you will need to do, unfortunately, due to Microsoft's apparent ongoing attempt to shut Linux out of everything, is to disable Secure Boot. Funny: it seems like Microsoft would rather shut others out than fix their own security problems. Note that if your Dell is still mostly new, you may have an encrypted hard drive and your onboard NVME controller in RAID, two issues you'll need to fix. See my previous article.

Anyways, after you disable Secure Boot, the USB or DVD installer should load.

Installation was not very fun. I attempted to open my LUKS+LVM partition that stores my /home and swap but this crashed the installer every time. So I installed only to root (/) and then added my LVM and LUKS later. This worked, for the 2 days Manjaro was working, but it means the installer has problems that need to be fixed. I installed Manjaro around April 23, 2021, using the current version (not a network installation).

See towards the bottom of this article for how Manjaro eventually broke.

Installing software that I needed once I was up and running was actually very easy, and I was pleased with the ability to compile my own software if it wasn't in a repository. That was impressive, to say the least. Too bad Manjaro eventually stopped working.

This is my opinion, and you may feel free to disagree with me: rolling release distributions should only be used by those working to put out stable releases. I used Slackware-Current, the rolling release testing, for years, but Slackware was super stable even when using the testing branch.

Recent distributions of Linux, in my experience, that have rolling release versions, are not even close to Slackware's stability, and I cannot recommend them. This includes using Tumbleweed as your daily distribution, or in this case, due to my experience, Manjaro. Having release targets helps you weed out bugs and ensure a higher level of quality in "snapshots."

Devices

Here is the output of lspci. As you can see, this more modern kernel (5.10.30) recognizes more of the devices I have.

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 11th Gen Core
        Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 01)

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation
        Iris Xe Graphics (rev 01)

00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel
        Corporation Device 9a03 (rev 01)

00:07.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP
        Thunderbolt 4 PCI Express Root Port #0 (rev 01)

00:0a.0 Signal processing controller: Intel
        Corporation Device 9a0d (rev 01)

00:0d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Tiger
        Lake-LP Thunderbolt 4 USB Controller (rev 01)

00:0d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation Tiger
        Lake-LP Thunderbolt 4 NHI #0 (rev 01)

00:12.0 Serial controller: Intel Corporation Tiger
        Lake-LP Integrated Sensor Hub (rev 20)

00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Tiger
        Lake-LP USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 xHCI Host Controller (rev 20)

00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP
        Shared SRAM (rev 20)

00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 6
        AX201 (rev 20)

00:15.0 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel
        Corporation Tiger Lake-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 20)

00:15.1 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel
        Corporation Tiger Lake-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #1 (rev 20)

00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation
        Tiger Lake-LP Management Engine Interface (rev 20)

00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP
        PCI Express Root Port #9 (rev 20)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP
        LPC Controller (rev 20)

00:1f.3 Multimedia audio controller: Intel
        Corporation Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Technology Audio
        Controller (rev 20)

00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP SMBus
        Controller (rev 20)

00:1f.5 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel
        Corporation Tiger Lake-LP SPI Controller (rev 20)

2b:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Seagate
        Technology PLC Device 5012 (rev 01)

So this kernel seems to work better with my devices.