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Comment by ReverseCold | Hacker News Reader

Razer Blade

Are you able to have a functioning linux installation with a razer blade, without doing too much sorcery? For example, this is the case for plenty of Dells that I have tried. I have never used a razer blade, but I have been through the forums and it seems that having linux work properly is not that straightforward.

I have a 2015 Razer Blade Pro and it worked very well under Ubuntu 16.04. The touchpad, touch screen, wifi, etc. all worked well, at least on newer Linux kernels (the trackpad had issues on older kernels). I did some 3D graphics work, and the Nvidia drivers were much better than other drivers I've used on Linux. There wasn't really any "sorcery" involved from my experience; I just installed from the official iso.

I followed this guy's blog for some further configuration: https://alexcabal.com/get-a-working-touchpad-on-a-14-razer-b...

My main problem was that battery life was pretty abysmal under Linux. With Windows, I would get 4-5 hours under light usage, but under Ubuntu I would pretty much only get ~2-2.5 hours, even without doing much on it. Stressing the CPU/GPU made it die even faster. But that thing isn't really known for its battery life anyways.

Unfortunately I don't have Ubuntu installed on it anymore because I couldn't get Windows and Ubuntu to happily coexist side-by-side. Windows (10) always gave me a boot failure when Ubuntu was installed next to it.

A friend had the same problem, of windows and ubuntu not willing to share the same machine on another laptop (acer). He was able to solve it by disabling secure boot and using UEFI as boot mode plus one magical command to show grub boot menu. Maybe it is worth a try, if you have not already.

My issue with Razer: As far as I can tell, they only ship laptops with the country's keyboard layout. I move around a lot and always buy laptops with US keyboard layout. At the moment, I'm in Germany and can only order Razer Blades with the awful German layout :( I know, pretty niche, but both Apple and Dell allow you to do this.

This page gives a drop-down with the choice of an American or Nordic layout. There's clearly something dodgy with the site, when the German page offers me the Nordic layout.

http://www.razerzone.com/de-de/store/razer-blade-2015

Thanks for your detective work. Unfortunately that's the 2015 Razer Blade, not the 2016 model. Very weird site indeed.

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