Ubuntu MATE - best Linux for low-ish specs laptop with ELAN touchpad?

Hello folks,

Just wanted to compare notes. As a bit of a fun Linux project, I have been looking for a distro to put on on a fairly new 4GB Lenovo Ideapad backup laptop. Sadly this has just 4 GB of soldered RAM and therefore RAM footprint is of essence. I tested a bunch of Live CDs and got the following post-boot RAM utilization numbers:

* Win 10 takes up 1.5GB after boot
* Ubuntu Gnome - 1.1GB, love gnome 3 but a bit too heavy for this
* Ubuntu MATE - 0.6-0.7GB, and MATE desktop is awesome
* Lubuntu - 0.4GB?, but the UI looks very 90s
* Linux Lite - very light, but didn't particularly like the UI either

There are other distros like Bodhi and Puppy which seem to target very old hardware, so I crossed that off.
I also skipped Mint variants, since I would like to keep as close to stock Ubuntu as possible (yes, still remembering the Mint security fail).

Based on the above Ubuntu MATE 20.04 was a clear winner, so I installed that and quickly ran into an issue whereby the ELAN touchpad causes an IRQ storm and freezes up the laptop. This is a known issue, so now upgrading to 21.04, with plan B being an attempt to further manually upgrade the kernel if the touchpad issue persists. Any ideas in case that fails?

Anyway, Happy NYE/2022 everyone - hopefully covid has finally mutated into a glorified cold, as seems to be the case so far.

 

So far 21.04 seems to have solved the ELAN touchpad issue.

 

The issue can back in 21.10, and looking at bug trackers, and there are lots of issues with Elan touchpad drivers. The conclusion seems to be that Linux doesn't support Elan touchpads well at present.

 

Try searching for your model number at arch linux in search query through Google/DDG.
I believe Mint cinnamon the distro that works on LMDE w/o Ubuntu base had the issue. MATE is modern and relatively less memory intensive.
I tried Mint Xfce and will be moving to Mint 22 from Ubuntu since Ubuntu is making snap install default on most apps starting from Firefox and slowly it will go to other apps.

 

What's the problem with snap installs? Security since they are prebuilt?

 

Easy fix with Snap is to uninstall it or disable it.

I like a bit more control on the apps side and something about snap just didn't feel right. If I see a ton of updates for things that don't correlate with what I'm running I tend to purge them if possible w/o breaking too much in the process. There's so much crap intertwined with different modules you have to keep an eye on the collateral damage when killing things off.

If you want to see how things are spying on you then run this in a terminal window

tail -f /var/log/syslog

This will show you all of the system activity going on behind the scenes. If you want to keep an eye on processes in real time then use glances.

 

Prebuilt is okay. By default snap/snapd runs in privileged/root mode and update packages silently. I disabled auto start of snapd service though.

 

Interesting. This sheds more light:

https://www.ghacks.net/2020/06/16/linux-mint-20-will-block-ubuntu-snap-by-default/

Some of tbe comments suggests flatpaks are preferable. Which ubuntu derivatives use them? Pop Os from memory

 

Any *nix based systems can use snap/d. It's just another program that can be installed. It's just that some options install / use it by default for a set of programs.

snaps are basically containers for apps installed via snap. For some it might take the complexity out of installing things but it makes tracking things a bit more difficult.

https://thenewstack.io/canonicals-snap-great-good-bad-ugly/
https://hackaday.com/2020/06/24/whats-the-deal-with-snap-packages/

https://phoenixnap.com/kb/snap-vs-apt


Automatic anything unless setup by you should not be the case in any OS. Automating things breaks things. For instance if I let linux auto update from 5.15 kernel to 5.16 I would end up with a broken system due to a firmware / kernel issue with my particular NIC resulting in needing to rollback the kernel to establish internet connectivity again. Sure I've got this fix down to about 5 minutes at this point but, if it happened at random times it would be harder to know why things aren't working.

Snap though is about Apps not the kernel / system. I wouldn't put it past someone though to try to move things in that direction eventually. Apps though if you're using this a daily driver can be a PITA to figure out why they're not working if snap pushes an update that's corrupted w/o notification. You might think it's something else with the file / program and damage something else.

 

The biggest practical issue seems to be that snaps bundle dependencies. If I understand correctly that could lead to say shared libraries not really being shared, but private, leading to memory bloat. Did I get that right?

 

Snap's bundle everything needed to run into each container instead of sharing pre-installed portions that are needed. Whether this leads to memory consumption or not depends on the snap being installed.

Most of the time installing programs manually will have scripts within them that trigger the additional missing pieces to be installed as well. Once those pieces are installed though and you install something else that uses those same pieces they just pass the checks and skip installing them again.

Sometimes though installing a package will require adding the missing pieces manually by appending them to the installation line of packages. For my APT list I keep a couple of releases in the file that's checked during update / upgrade commands being issued as some maintainers don't update their repo with the newest names / folders and sometimes results in a failed install. Some legacy programs that haven't been updated in years though reference older versions of things like python that aren't published under the newer listings like Impish but could be found under bionic.

deb http://mirror.us.leaseweb.net/ubuntu/ impish restricted multiverse main
deb-src http://mirror.us.leaseweb.net/ubuntu/ impish restricted multiverse main
deb http://mirror.us.leaseweb.net/ubuntu/ impish-backports restricted multiverse main
deb http://mirror.us.leaseweb.net/ubuntu/ impish-security restricted multiverse main
deb http://mirror.us.leaseweb.net/ubuntu/ impish-updates restricted multiverse main

If you were to take this and replicate it to include the same lines but with older releases you'll be covered for missing things under the most current release.

hirsute
groovy
focal
bionic

It makes the update option take a bit longer sometimes but, you can also comment them out so they aren't checked every time you run updates. Once the piece is installed it should be updatable under the current release or isn't checked because it's already installed or deprecated by newer versions. If something fails during an update / upgrade session it's easy to find w/ google to grab that specific package for install. APT will tell you int he error what it's looking for and/or the dependencies it needs. The other option with the older releases enabled is to use aptitude instead of apt to automatically look for the best solution when the easy way doesn't work or you don't feel like looking for packages manually.

 

Yeah, this sounds like a poor idea from the system performance perspective. It just makes things much easier for devs and indirectly distro maintainers.

https://ostechnix.com/introduction-ubuntus-snap-packages/

Flatpaks are not much different conceptually though, so if someone is arguing that their distro is better because if uses flatpaks instead of snaps, I am not convinced.

https://www.atechtown.com/flatpak-vs-snap/

 

Neither is best for something with a small footprint if you're tryin to conserve resources. If you have a full blown device to put them into then sure if you're not smart enough to figure out how things are installed they're an option. Coming from windows / apple though after being brainwashed into simplicity and hidden junk when installing things makes for a bit of a learning curve converting over to a pure OS that doesn't bundle everything into a cute package with a bow on top. If you have some logic ability then you'll be just fine but, sheeple need not apply.

 

Actually, this ELAN thing is quite bizarre - it fixed itself after a suspend/resume...

 

Go figure!


I had an issue with my panel staying black after hitting the screensaver timeout if a flash tab was open upon attempting to resume the session. Flash is DEAD now so, that's one way to fix something. There always seems to be something wrong with a bit of a driver though. Mixing between W & L though usually helps narrow things down for me at least.

Touchpads don't seem to be a consistent issue though. I know for awhile IBM had issues with their stick / track for some reason. Pads though tend to be pretty solid since they're legacy. On my ADL server setup I had to blacklist a driver for the RTL 2.5ge port so it would use the updated / incremented one instead and activate the port. When I boot to 21.10 LCD it defaults back to the non-working driver and thus doesn't work. Doesn't really matter though since I have 4 more ports I can use instead but, if that card doesn't load it's back to basics with adding some additional drivers or chrooting into the system to grab them and activate things.

I've got the kernel rollback procedure down to a couple of minutes at this point nd most of that is waiting for the BIOS to post and boot the image. I wish the dev's would just fix the firmware issue and quite knocking it out of the new builds.

 

Debian 11 MATE is really lightweight compared to Ubuntu MATE. For hardware compatibility I'd try to search for 'Debian unofficial firmware' - there is a bunch of options. Runs like a well-oiled motor.

here it is:

https://cdimage.debian.org/images/u...irmware/11.2.0-live+nonfree/amd64/iso-hybrid/

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