Linux Is Terrible

So a confession: I pretty much got the Yoga because I really like the keyboard. One thing I discovered with horror after I’d used it a little bit: I don’t like the trackpad. It just… feels… wrong. Frictiony. Like I’m scraping my finger across the surface. I’ve been plugging in a USB mouse every time I use it.

I now have a ludicrous solution:

So, today I: - Fixed my Linux install’s broken EFI bootloader - Got it hooked up to the Internet - Did a full apt-get update and upgrade. And then I did a restart, which froze up and turned into a hard power cycle.

It never came back up.

Any attempt to boot into my Ubuntu install now results in a plain black screen, with lit keyboard. If I muck with grub I get a startup text crawl, which ends with an announcement that “/sbin/init” is missing. That’s bad. Apparently somewhere during that package upgrade systemd disappeared.

This one is not Linux’s fault. This one is my fault. It is my fault because I installed the beta version of Kubuntu 15.04, and this is the kind of thing that can happen when you install a beta OS. That is okay, and it is something I knew was a possibility. It does not make sense to try to fix it. The only thing to do is reinstall, and even that doesn’t make sense because 15.04 final is coming out literally next week.

So: Linux working. Ready to use. Yay.

I have this really ridiculous story here about following the existing instructions written by Yoga 3 Pro users to get the Broadcom drivers working, and going to ridiculous lengths tricking apt-get into thinking the USB LiveCD was a CD-ROM so I could install the Broadcom drivers, but I’m not going to tell that story because it doesn’t matter. The end of the story is, I don’t have Broadcom wifi to start with.

Apparently, in the couple months between the release of the Yoga 3 Pro and the Yoga 3 (yes, the Yoga 3 is newer), Lenovo switched to from Broadcom to something called “Qualcomm Atheros”. This is apparently a good thing. The Broadcom drivers are closed source and apparently very, *very* poor quality-- their name seems to be cursed by everyone who has encountered them. The Atheros drivers are open-source, Qualcomm-blessed and from what I’m told pretty good.

However, the specific Qualcomm Atheros chip in the Yoga 3 ( “[168c:0041] rev 20″, according to lspci -vnn, and I guess if you’re a kernel engineer that means something) apparently is so new, it isn’t covered by the Atheros drivers. The Yoga 3 14″ is about two months old; as a coincidence of when I happened to order, I got one of the first ones. Apparently the Yoga 3 14″ is also the first time the Linux community had seen that particular chip revision.

So this is game over. There is nothing I can do, except wait a couple months for the Linux community to figure this out and write new drivers. This is being discussed on the Atheros driver mailing list, it’s on the Ubuntu bug tracker, but this just takes time, I guess.

Then somebody on Twitter mentions they successfully tethered their Nexus to Linux using USB. After some fiddling, it turns out if I (1) set my Android phone to be an MTP media device under “Storage” in Settings, then (2) turn on USB tethering under portable hotspot, when I plug in to the laptop Kubuntu cheerfully gives me a notification I have internet and everything works.

I now have my phone plugged into my laptop, connected to our wifi, serving as an external wifi card. Apt is downloading several hundred megabytes of updated packages as I write this.

I have been running this blog for two months. My original goal was to set up a Linux OS on my new laptop that I could use for day to day web browsing and development. This has not happened. My primary computer remains an obsolete Macbook. My new laptop is plugged directly into the TV and I run Windows on it for games and watching movies. It’s actually great.

But, I’m going to a conference tomorrow and I do need to get Linux working.

On my last post here, I had a successful Linux install, albeit lacking Lenovo drivers. The post ended with me happily booting back into Windows. What I didn’t mention here is that about a week after this I booted back into Linux, and it just… didn't. The GRUB bootloader no longer appeared at startup. The Lenovo BIOS-alike menu showed a list of bootable partitions, and one said "ubuntu", but when I selected that partition it just booted Windows.

The first suggestion I am given, when I ask around what might be happening here, is to debug with a Windows program called "Visual BCD".

…What? Never mind.

I dig around a little more and turn up these resources:

http://www.av8n.com/computer/htm/grub-reinstall.htm https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

The second one-- the one promisingly named "RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows"-- explains there's a nice, easy, GUI way to fix things from an Ubuntu LiveCD. However-- bafflingly given that this is semi-official advice from the Ubuntu website-- it requires you to set up a PPA (non-linux users, that's a third party package repository) and install something over the internet. The Kubuntu LiveCD doesn't have the Lenovo wifi drivers, so that's out.

Taking the terminal route, the two guides actually just say to do the same thing. According to the guides, all I actually need to do is type `sudo grub-install /dev/sda`.

The worst imaginable thing happens.

It cannot find the cow.

My exact problem turns out to be on Stack Overflow, which is great, because there's nothing I love more than blindly copypasting commands containing "sudo" from Stack Overflow. (Non-linux users, that was sarcasm.) The answer requires me to know the exact "/dev/sda#" names of my partitions, at which point I feel really glad I set up this blog, because it means I have screenshots of my disk setup during installation.

My screenshots tell me that my Ubuntu is on /dev/sda6, which allows me to proceed with Stack Overflow's approach. I mount /dev/sda6 to /mnt and…

Let's do take a moment to reflect that this is the *most basic thing* you could be doing with Linux-- I am just trying to make Linux *boot*-- and the person who wrote this piece of "grub-install" software, this basic universal thing, decided to write error messages that could only be possibly understood if you read the program's source code.

On my first pass, research tells me that the problem is that I don't have a "/boot partition". Okay? Do I need a "/boot partition"? Nobody told me I needed a "/boot partition". I didn't even know such a thing existed as "/boot partition" until today. Multiple guides suggest I create a new 2MB partition to hold the "/boot", which makes tons of sense, except if that's how it works then why didn't the installer do it? And why was whatever-the-installer-did *working* until suddenly it didn't? At about this point I really want to stop and play some video games, but I can't because my gaming PC is in an Ubuntu LiveCD, admonishing me not to use "blocklists".

Somewhere around here I go to Twitter for help and what multiple people tell me is that pretty much all available tutorials, documentation, forum threads and wiki pages within the Linux community refer to pre-UEFI computers and will be incorrect for my case.

Okay.

A bunch of time on Google and several dead ends later, I have learned a series of things:

In the world of UEFI, every computer has a "EFI partition". This is a little FAT32 partition on every hard drive. Each OS creates a directory on this partition and installs their bootloader into it, in the form of .efi files, which are apparently just executables.

Before UEFI, when you installed Grub, you generally created a tiny partition and installed Grub onto it. Many walkthroughs and tools assume it still works this way.

But when Grub runs on a UEFI system, it installs itself into EFI/YourOSName on the EFI partition. It installs an executable named shimx64.efi, an executable named grubx64.efi, and a file named grub.cfg with information about how to find the OSes to boot. Grubx64.efi boots up, loads grub.cfg, and displays the boot choices menu. Shimx64.efi meanwhile does nothing but execute grubx64.efi; it's there because shimx64.efi is signed with Microsoft's private key, which means Secure Boot will execute it, but grubx64.efi is not.

Normally, the way to install Grub is to run a program called grub-install. This program *completely assumes* you are trying to set up grub to boot the same copy of Linux you are currently at that moment running. This means it does not work right if you have booted from a USB stick, which is why it was freaking out before.

The way to run grub-install off of a USB stick is to mount the drive you wish to set up grub with, then chroot into the mounted drive directory. However, this is not enough by itself-- you also have to do some weird tricks to make the chrooted directory *appear* such that it was the OS you actually booted from, so grub-install will work. You have to have the devices mounted in the normal places, you have to have the efi partition mounted at /boot/efi etc.

It turns out a program called EasyBCD exists which is more human-comprehensible than "VisualBCD", and it lets me get the list of items on the EFI partition which the Lenovo BIOS-alike is using to construct its list of boot options.

What this screenshot tells me is that at *some point*, *something* installed the Grub shimx64.efi, and that the "ubuntu" option in the Lenovo  boot menu is pointing at it. I decide that before I make any more attempts to install a new Grub, I should understand what happened to the old one. Is it still there?

I boot back to the Ubuntu USB stick. Because the EFI partition is just FAT32, I can mount it like a normal drive. I check, and the “ubuntu” folder is there!

…except, uh… yikes.

There's also a "Microsoft" directory there, and it contains… well, exactly what I'd expect you see if you looked in the install directory for Microsoft's bootloader folder:

You know this isn't Linux anymore because whoever created this knows what "locales" are.

So: I have an EFI partition containing a normal-looking "Microsoft" directory, and an "ubuntu" directory containing alien garbage. After a few minutes and an unmount/remount, I can't even see the alien garbage anymore; ls just says "input/output error" when I attempt to look at the "ubuntu" directory. A friend suggests dmesg might have more information about what "input/output error" means; it does:

My bootloader partition is corrupted. D:

Well… can I fix it? It's just a FAT32 partition, after all. It turns out there's a fsck-for-FAT32 utility in Linux called "dosfsck":

Notice what decade this utility appears to have been written in: "toggle Atari filesystem format". Also, "Drop that file", which sounds like the party hit of the summer.

I run dosfsck three times with the "automatically repair errors" option; each time it finds a different error:

On the fourth try, there was silence:

And I awoke to a changed world:

I now have a working, repaired EFI partition, with a working Windows 8 bootloader (I reboot into Windows at about this point, just to make sure that's true). My corrupted "ubuntu" directory is gone forever. However, now that I have a usable EFI partition, and now that I actually understand what's going on, I can just reinstall it.

I find some instructions on the main Ubuntu site for doing the weird chroot procedure; they're pre-EFI instructions, but I'm able to adapt them to what I need. My adapted procedure is:

Mount the Linux partition to /mnt/drive

Perform the incantation:

for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt/drive$i; done

Mount the EFI partition to /mnt/drive/boot/efi

sudo chroot /mnt/drive

And then I can run grub-install. I take care to make it explicit I want the EFI version and I know where the efi directory is, since the errors the first time all seemed to indicate grub-install was failing to figure that stuff out on its own:

I then run update-grub to create the grub.cfg file, and I'm done.

Let us take a moment to reflect on how completely garbage it is that grub-install-- the tool you *use to install the software you use to boot*-- is designed such that it requires you to boot into the OS you're trying to boot before you install it.

I restart, and I'm in grub!

…except for some reason I don't have a menu.

At this point I am *totally lost*. I have never used grub, and apparently the grub console's normal mode of interaction is that if you type something incorrect it fails silently and prints no error message. This is what happens when you type "help" at the grub console:

Hm.

Someone on IRC tells me to run:

configfile '(hd1,gpt6)'/boot/grub/grub.cfg

I have no idea what this means. It works, but then when I do a test restart, I'm back at the grub command line. IRC person tells me that after I'm booted into Linux, I need to run this to build the menu:

sudo grub-install --recheck /dev/sdX; sudo update-grub

I have no idea what this means. It looks exactly like what I typed before when I was running grub-install, except for the "--recheck". That was something I had made a specific decision *not* to include, since the help said that --recheck means "delete device map if it already exists", which sounds bad. Whatever, I run it. I reboot. I have a menu! I can boot into Linux! I boot a couple more times. It doesn't magically go away! Everything seems to work! I try booting back into Windows.

…oh no.

I now have a working Linux, but my Windows can't boot. I try to boot into my Windows recovery partition, but I get this same screen. I dig out the USB key with my Windows install ISO on it, and I run their "Startup Repair" feature:

…but it doesn't work. A friend gives me a thing to type into the install ISO's command line prompt that's supposed to fix the BCD error:

…*this* claims that it can't find a Windows partition to boot to. (At this exact moment, typing "dir C:" reveals that it is, in fact, my Windows partition.)

I dig around on Google. I find bizarre but repeatedly corroborated claims that the /rebuildbcd command in the Windows 8 installer only works if you've booted off of a DVD, and does not work when booting off a USB key. I find an *INCREDIBLY* detailed article about BCD files on support.microsoft.com which unfortunately specifically refers to Windows 7.

Then I find this, on some StackExchange, and it actually works:

http://superuser.com/a/504360

The advice here is to leave nothing to Microsoft at all, and manually mount the EFI drive:

Then manually remove the old “BCD” file, and manually create a new one, specifically telling it where to find Windows:

This sounds terrifying, but it actually works! *Everything* works! When I reboot, I find it boots into Grub by default, I can pick Ubuntu from the Grub menu and it works, I can pick Windows from the Grub menu it works, I boot back and forth between OSes several times and nothing magically breaks. I have a working computer!

Oh, so something I never got around to posting: When I first started messing with USB keys, what I discovered is the only way to get into the BIOS menu on the Yoga— which is necessary to select a USB key as a boot device— is to press a tiny recessed red button on the case, sized for a paper clip.

The first time I hit this, I look around trying to figure out if I have anything like a paperclip. And then I remember my earrings.

I pull one out and they work PERFECTLY.

With Windows in place, FINALLY I get to go ahead and drop Kubuntu on the drive.

An awkward thing here is that Kubuntu 15.04 is slated to come out, like, in the next month, and it’s a big update because “Plasma 5″ (apparently this is just new KDE) is included. I’d rather not set up my OS with Plasma 4, only to install something that works differently one month later. When I played around with LiveCDs earlier, I downloaded a copy of “Kubuntu 14.10 with Plasma 5 Technical Preview”, but I lost that ISO when I reinstalled Windows. This time I instead wound up downloading the beta version of 15.04, for no particular reason except that there was a torrent of that one. (The KDE site was running really slow last night.)

I first started using Linux in like, the eighth grade or something, long enough ago I think “Animaniacs” was still on the air. In this distant past, installing Linux was a tortured, scary process, and there was one dominant reason why: Partitioning. If you could get past the partitioning you were fine, but repartitioning was a cryptic and poorly documented process that threatened to (and sometimes did) delete all your files. As of last night, despite nondestructive repartitioners now shipping with all operating systems including Linux, this doesn’t seem to have changed at all.

The UI on the Kubuntu installer’s partitioner actually was a lot friendlier *looking* than the one for Windows— there were a couple small GUI bugs, which I won’t bother mentioning those since this was after all a beta. But:

I have 150 gigs free space after Windows. What I want is to assign about 50 gigs (I chose this number arbitrarily) for the OS, then have 100 for /home. This means if I don’t like Kubuntu, or if upgrading out of beta turns out tricky, I can just blow away / without losing my files.

When I try to assign space this way, Ubuntu consistently makes the partitions about one megabyte less than I asked, and ultimately leaves me with a 1.4 MB free space partition at the end:

Which would be… harmless, but it bothers me I can’t tell why it’s doing this. What I later find out is it’s likely (?) doing this because partitioners like to align partitions on 2 MB boundaries on SSDs, due to a technical property called “erase block size”. Apparently whatever tool underlies this little pane knows this, but the GUI doesn’t. Worse, the GUI tool appears to be defining MB as a power of ten whereas the underlying tool is likely doing it based on a power of two, so maybe all my numbers are being rounded weirdly after I enter them. I start fiddling around and eventually— after a weird moment where sda5 was actually physically located after sda6 on the disk—

—I manage by complete accident to fit my partitions almost *exactly* on the disk, by putting /home before /. Oh wait, there’s still 400k of unused space. … Whatever. Without having any idea what just happened, I decide this is good enough.

But now I’m worried about something else: While making these partitions, I noticed one of the options for partition format was “swap”. Uh oh. Do I need to make swap myself? If I’d picked Kubuntu’s auto-partition option I bet it makes the swap for you, but I did “manual” (this is required if you want to preserve existing partitions for dual boot). Shouldn’t the partitioner be warning me if I’m about to doom myself to a swapless existence? I stop worrying about this upon discovering it’s possible now to have Linux swap to a file rather than a partition, which is how I’d prefer it to work anyway. People on Twitter promptly assure me simultaneously that file-based swapping is less efficient than, and exactly as efficient as, partition-based swapping. Since file swap can be set up after install, I decide to defer this. I then hit my last barrier:

…what?

What might not be obvious from the photo I got is that this dropdown has 7 options: /dev/sda then /dev/sda1 through /dev/sda6. And the box itself gives *no* indication what it’s about to actually do. Does it overwrite the Microsoft bootloader I already have? Is that what I want? Can it be undone? What the box actually does is you select a drive, it installs GRUB, and if the Microsoft bootloader is found it chains that in as an option for GRUB to select. It’s all completely safe, as long as you actually pick a drive (no one I talked to was able to figure out what selecting a partition device— one of the devices ending in a number— instead of a drive device would have done). And it only took me 15 minutes of external research to figure that out! So I step through that and—

Oh, now you tell me. Wouldn’t it have made sense to *include* that information in the pane where you make semi-permanent decisions about drive format, rather than telling me after (as far as I know) I’ve committed to a decision? Whatever, I’ve decided to use a file anyway. I step through that and—

At this point I found myself distracted by the question of why it is calling my internal SATA SSD a “SCSI disk”. I ask around and it turns out SCSI is in some sense a protocol that can be spoken over multiple different kinds of bus, and so from the Linux kernel’s perspective this SATA disk is really a SCSI. I feel like this reflects something deep about the Linux mindset: That this disk drive is being communicated to over the SCSI bus protocol is considered so important that it is surfaced all the way up to the user’s visibility in the installer GUI, but little bits of information like “what does 'device for boot loader installation' do?” or “do I need to create a swap partition?” are things they figure you can just work out on your own.

I step through this and after ONE MILLION YEARS, I am DONE WITH PARTITIONING! I set up my account and name my computer. I set my root password to “RODSTEWART1999″. I sit through a shockingly quick install to disk and:

…and GRUB does NOT run at a sensible font size for this laptop’s DPI…

And I’m in KDE! I poke around for a moment to admire that you can now drag windows around in a Linux DE without tearing. This setup still needs some work before I can use it for day to day use (I don’t have wifi drivers; DPI is wrong), but this is good progress for one evening.

Satisfied, I click to restart so I can reenter Windows. KDE pops up a little timer that counts down to 0…

…and, uh… keeps going.

…and keeps going.

I try clicking “Reboot” manually. It does nothing.

With a sense of resigned defeat I recognize from every other time I’ve ever tried to do something in Linux through a route other than the command line, I log back in, open a terminal, and `sudo reboot`.

It… restarts, but instead of going back into GRUB it boots me right back into KDE. I open another terminal, and this time try `sudo shutdown -h now`.

It boots me back into KDE again.

Ugh. I've had this tumblr for a month, and I'm still nowhere near to having a working Linux install, much less being able to complain about how terrible Linux is. I should get a move on.

To recap: My planned steps here are to clean-install Windows first to get a Lenovo malware wipe and free repartition; then install Kubuntu on what's left of the drive. I don't really know how to do the Windows parts of this, but there's a Windows support page which leads me through a series of candy-colored, slightly dubious buttons that claim they will "reset my PC". Booting into this drive-wipe-reinstall-everything process requires a system restart; Windows of course takes the time to finish downloading, then install, some system updates before rebooting to wiping the drive. Right.

I get to spend some minutes staring at this screen, having no idea what's happening. From the way my friend described this, I thought that I was going to be given a chance to run through a little installer and make decisions about partitions. Eventually it boots me up, forces me through the Windows account-creation process process, and…

I did not, in fact, just run the Microsoft recovery program and remove the Lenovo crapware. Rather, I apparently ran the Lenovo recovery program and in fact *restored* the Lenovo crapware I had *already removed*.

Okay. Try two. I find out about this page which embeds an app that lets you create a Windows reinstaller on a USB stick. Fantastic. This is the first thing I’ve encountered so far which is actually MORE pleasant than it would have been on a Mac. At least until the confusing dialogue which asks whether I want "Windows N". (Don't ask.)

I reboot, choose to customize my install, and am immediately presented with the WORST PARTITION SETUP PROGRAM EVER:

I eventually manage to use this to delete all the partitions and recreate new Microsoft partitions. Totally arbitrarily, I give Microsoft 100 GB, leaving another 140 for Linux experiments. Install finishes blessfully uneventfully from this point, and I find myself in what I guess is a "Boxed Copy" version of Windows. I *DEFINITELY* notice a dearth of weird irritating scary popups now that the Lenovo stuff is gone, although I do find it odd that this time it did not give me the offer to make my login account a Microsoft account. (I eventually realize this is likely just because I didn’t have wifi drivers yet.) Microsoft, showing their normal keen insight about users, starts me off with a desktop image with "Build 9600" in the corner.

Next step is to reinstall drivers. I pull up my backup drive where I stashed the contents of "LENOVO (D:)" before I deleted it and go down the line installing "Audio" (?), "BT_Qualcomm1", "Camera_Liteon", "CardReader", "Chipset" (some kind of Intel thing?), "CPPC" (More Intel?!), "DPTF" (More Intel, but at least something I recognize— hopefully this doesn't trigger the weird "transitions" stuff), "IntelVGA" (this asks me if I want to enable "Windows Aero". Um), "IRST" (still Intel), "MEI" (Intel, the "Management Engine Interface"— what even IS all this? Why couldn't Intel just give me a single "Intel things" installer?), "Synaptics_touchpad" and "WLAN_Qualcomm”.

The Qualcomm bluetooth and wifi driver installers are not even signed. Most of the installers don't support the Windows DPI features which the laptop put me in by default. The "Chipset" installer presents me glimpses of something inscrutable:

I choose not to install "Lenovo_Paperdisplay", "LenovoUtility", "OneKey_Recovery", and "Onekeyoptimizer". "Paperdisplay" is, dead serious, something that makes Notepad.exe look like the window background has a paper texture. "LenovoUtility" is the one thing I think I might actually need, but I don't know what it DOES, so I don't trust it.

I reboot and find I now have working wifi, the weird Lenovo "Transitions" thing is back (not sure if it's doing the obnoxious CPU-throttling or not), and my desktop pattern mysteriously no longer says "Build 9600". I grab Chrome and Steam, disable DPI scaling for Steam, and turn off "Fast startup" under "power options" (leaving this feature on prevents Linux from being able to mount the NTFS drive). I then, as a brief experiment, follow some dubious Internet instructions for using RegEdit to bypass the weird second lock screen Windows 8 has before the password login, but the instructions don’t actually work so I reverted the changes. Month two of using Windows, and I'm already running RegEdit. Unsuccessfully.

Anyway, whatever, I'm… done! I have an install that is as close to what I want out of Windows as I am going to get, I have 140 GB of free space on my internal drive, and I am now ready to finally install Linux.

My Linux install project is on hold because I am at GDC this week, demonstrating the game I made with Michael Brough (BECOME A GREAT ARTIST IN JUST 10 SECONDS) at the Independent Games Festival. Turns out the Yoga 3 is great for demoing something at an exhibition, and for this purpose I don’t need my OS tweaking done; Windows is fine, and it’s probably better I don’t have anything *important* on the machine yet.

Except!

So let me explain something about the Yoga 3. The reason (at least as far as my own decision making process went) to get a Yoga instead of any of the other laptops with touchscreens on the market is the weird hinge thing. The thing is set up to bend into four different configurations (a laptop, a tablet, two kinds of stand) and Lenovo thought out software to handle clean transitions between these states. If you fold over the keyboard, it realizes you’re trying to use it like a tablet, disables the keyboard and rotates the screen like an iPad. When I first got this thing, something I was concerned about was the forewarning that these features would not work in Linux, and I’d have to hack something terrible together, probably involving manually selecting one of the modes.

Once I started using the Yoga with Windows, I stopped being worried about losing access to the state transition software, because it doesn’t… work very well. Or at all really. I spent an evening shortly after I got the Yoga reading a comic in a web browser in tablet mode, and it was great!— like, just a wonderful user experience that feels like the way I’d like to interface with a computer— until I put the machine down for two minutes. Then it went to sleep, it turned out about half the time it sleeps in tablet mode the touchscreen can’t wake it up, the only way to wake it up again is to unfold back into laptop mode so you can use a keyboard, and half the time when you transition from laptop mode into tablet mode it gets confused about which orientation you wanted. So every time I picked up the Yoga to resume my comic, waking it up again was this obnoxious process of repeatedly sweeping the hinge back and forth until I could get it awake and in portrait mode at the same time.

Okay, whatever, halfassed UX, I can deal. That wasn’t the problem.

So: GDC. I’m going to be demoing a game in a large expo space. I might switch between the game we’re demoing and a couple other games by me or Michael I want to show. The games all use either a single gamepad, or the special keyboard we designed for GREAT ARTIST (the keys are covered in cryptic sigils). What I need the computer to do is look inconspicuous, be a pretty screen and not allow anyone to accidentally quit the program.

So I set up like this and everything seems PERFECT:

Except I suddenly realize that the game is running really slow, like, what feels like 10 or 20 FPS (whereas I get 60 FPS with the same program on Fluttershy— a much weaker computer). Wait, I think. Didn’t my roommate say something about the Yoga CPU throttling in tablet mode?

An hour of scrounging through Lenovo support forums later, I discover:

The Yoga, when it’s in a mode it thinks is a “tablet”, goes into a power-saving mode with enormous impact on performance, and

…apparently it goes into this power saving mode even… if it is plugged into… a wall outlet.

I can’t demo like this. The Lenovo support forums make it clear this is a huge problem for Yoga owners and propose various throttle prevention measures, none of which seem to help. Most people suggest going in the BIOS (!) and disabling “DPTF”, which turns out to be Intel’s power management technology (which sounds… like something you don’t want to turn off?). But disabling this changes nothing for me. The most useful post on the Lenovo forums says you need to disable DPTF *and* uninstall Lenovo Transitions (at which point you won’t get nice things like the screen rotation or keyboard lockout, but I can fake those other ways while GDC is going on), but— I do not have any such program on my machine. I have the Yoga 3, and all the forum posts are about Yoga 2 variants, and apparently at some point Lenovo changed the name. Because Lenovo’s development appears to all take place in China, the English-speaking support team appears to little or no communication with the people who actually made the product, and all actual support is provided by volunteers on Lenovo’s web forums, I have no way to find out what process is doing all this tablety rotatey stuff until enough people have Yoga 3s to build up that volunteer support base.

I’m on the verge of uninstalling every single piece of Lenovo software one by one in case any of them stops the throttling when I suddenly think to try something:

… and … instantly … my … problem … is … fixed.

Although from a user perspective (mine) this configuration is exactly the same thing as the “tent” mode above, from Lenovo’s perspective it is TOTALLY DIFFERENT and the CPU throttling does not activate. Apparently as far as Lenovo is concerned, rightside up screen == computer and upside down screen == tablet and computers need performance but tablets do not. I think the keyboard is still activated in this mode, but it’s facing the ground so that doesn’t… matter. I guess.

The first step in installing Linux is to clean-install Windows. Absolutely everybody tells me this. Okay.

I got a Toshiba backup drive at the same time as the laptop, and my first goal is to back up some stuff there. I start by repartitioning the backup drive. Apparently the way you do this in Windows is the "Create and Manage Hard Disk Partitions" item in Control Panel, which is one of those things that has a name like DISKMGMT.MSC that windows users memorized the name of in 1996 and it has not changed ever since. The GUI appears to have not changed since then either.

• Displaying a list of items • Left to right • No horizontal scroll bar. …Right. Lots of foresight in this UI design.

I've never actually used this program— actually pretty much anything Windows-related I mention in this post, it's going to be my first time using it. My experience is mainly with Linux and Mac. On Mac, there's this really nice tool called Disk Utility, which shows you all your drives and partitions, lets you make (compacted, encrypted) mountable disk images out of any of them, lets you resize existing partitions by dragging the edges, lets you create new partitions out of the blank space, and if any verb you commit is gonna require a reformat it pops up a box warning you. It is great. Instead on Windows, we have… this… thing… which *does* show partitions, but what else it can do seems pretty vague. Right-clicking on a partition *does* bring up a menu with with random verbs, one of which is a "shrink volume" option that brings up a modal dialogue. I wanna post another screenshot for the "shrink" dialogue because I am just MARVELING at this UI. Was this the most straightforward way to convey to the user what they are doing here?

Okay, whatever. At least "shrink" is nondestructive. I shrink the NTFS partition on the Toshiba down to 1/3 of the disk, I'll add another 1/3 for ext in gparted later, I'll keep the last third blank in case I wanna put on HFS+ or something. Next step: Backing up. Lenovo gave me, as you can see above, a weirdly large number of partitions: A "Recovery Partition" (I'm told this is the Microsoft/Windows recovery partition); an EFI partition (I don't know what this is, but okay, I can believe it's needed somehow); a "OEM Partition" (??); the actual C partition; a "LENOVO (D:)", containing installers for the drivers that shipped with the system plus MacAfee; and a second, larger "Recovery Partition", apparently the recovery that resets the system to *Lenovo's* base notion of Windows (Windows, plus drivers, plus a bunch of awful junk).

Apparently reinstalling Windows will recreate the MS recovery / EFI partitions, so I don't need to worry about that. It appears the only things that came with the computer I *need* backed up are the LENOVO (D:) files, and the only thing I've created on the C drive so far is a save file for "Long Live the Queen". I copy all that over. Fine.

I decide though that I want to have some sort of copy of the Lenovo recovery partition— this laptop came with no install media and has no DVD drive, so I don't want to just *delete* this partition Lenovo gave me. I feel like I want to somehow make a bit-for-bit backup disk image in case for some currently unfathomable reason I realize I need one of those pieces of Lenovo crapware back. I know how to make such a partition backup image on Mac; I know how to do it on Linux. How does one do this on Windows? I fish around for help on Twitter and I am informed that there *is* no good way to do this on Windows, I'll want to drop into Linux and use something like gparted, and I'll want to make a copy of the partition table too in case there's something magic about the partition's metadata. I spend a bunch of time getting ready to boot into my kubuntu install image and do that. Then I find out that Lenovo actually has a built-in tool for backing up the recovery partition, intended for users trying to do exactly what I'm doing. … Oh. Okay. I decide to use that.

The recovery-backup utility seems to want to install its partition onto a USB stick. I decide to get clever. I shrink the Windows partition on my backup disk another 16 GB, create a new G: drive partition which is just large enough for restore-backup to run on it, and point restore-backup at G. "Everything on the drive will be deleted," it says. "Aha," I say. "That means it's going to delete the partition". No, it means the drive. It formats my 1TB backup drive and replaces the whole thing with a single 32GB partition containing the recovery partition. Well… I think. Maybe this is what I want? I could just slap my NTFS backup partition after the recovery partition on my backup drive, and slap my other partitions after that. I then realize that the process of putting the restore partition on the Toshiba somehow replaced the original "GPT" partition table, with "MBR". I don't actually understand what that means, not really. I know just enough about what "MBR" is to know it stinks of the 90s, and death, and lost hope. I don't know exactly *why* I'd rather have GPT than MBR, but I know whatever I do here I'm stuck with for the next four or five years, so I do want GPT.

Okay, I think. I can still work with this. What it did to the Toshiba is no good to keep *on* the Toshiba, but it's less messy to back up the new recovery off the Toshiba up than the old recovery on the *main* drive-- since the new recovery is at least at the start of the drive. So I'll boot into Kubuntu, back up the *Toshiba's* recovery partition and partition table, and—

— oh, never mind. I give up and try again the next day with a new 16GB USB stick.

My resources, going into this:

Lenovo Yoga 3 (not pro), factory settings

1 TB Toshiba portable drive, blank

Two 8 GB USB sticks

Cheap USB mouse

Fluttershy, my old Macbook

And my goals:

Be able to use Linux as my day-to-day operating system for things like using the web, developing Emily, etc.

Have access to a Windows install for playing games.

Be able to *develop* games, for the purpose of running on Windows, from the Linux install. This means my Linux install is going to need relatively adequate GPU support. It also means I will sometimes need to use my TV— the Yoga has HDMI out— as an external monitor.

I would like to be able to play around with touchscreen controls— eventually, I want the touchscreen to be integrated into how I use the laptop in some kind of natural way, and for the Yoga's "tablet mode" to be something I can use when I feel like it.

I want the flexibility to play around— try out different DEs, switch to another Linux distro later if I feel like it— without breaking anything or getting into a state I can't easily roll back from. I'm very picky about GUIs, and if I'm going to be putting up with all the downsides of Linux, I would like to at least get to enjoy its one advantage (its alleged customizability).

I would like to get on Wayland as soon as possible. Seriously, it is not the 1990s anymore, compositing should be GPU native.

I would like to minimize the amount of tedious garbage I have to put up with.

I'm willing to tool around for a little bit until I attain these goals-- I'm perfectly happy using Fluttershy as my day-to-day laptop until this stuff is working.

Here is my working plan for this:

Clean-reinstall Windows, so I can (1) clear off bizarre Lenovo preinstall cruft, and (2) get in a stress-free repartition.

Three partitions to start: Windows, Linux, /home. (I want the Linux OS and my Linux user files on different partitions so that I can blow away the Linux partition without cost later.)

For the Linux partition, I think I'm going with Kubuntu 15.04. I've spent the last few days trying out different LiveCDs, and I think Kubuntu is the one that I found most bearable. Plus, it conveniently turns out to fit most of my political preferences: It uses Ubuntu's package system, which I prefer over anything else. The software bundled with it is KDE, which means it uses Qt, which I have used a lot and like. (If I wind up writing some software, it would be nice if it fits in with the rest of the OS.) And apparently Kubuntu not only declared for Wayland over Mir (don't ask), but is planning to jump to Wayland sooner rather than later; 15.04 already uses KDE Plasma 5, which is still based on Xorg but apparently uses OpenGL for all drawing.

A complication: Kubuntu 15.04… kind of isn't out. If you're not familiar with the Ubuntu version numbers, the reason they look so funny is they're not version numbers, they're dates. Ubuntu 15.04 is the April 2015 release of Ubuntu. It's February now. This doesn't really change anything— Kubuntu has install images for a special variant of 14.10 which ships with a Plasma 5 "technical preview". So I can install that now, upgrade to 15.04 in a few months, and at least the GUI parts won't change.

But: This means I'm going to be going in knowing ahead of time that I will very soon be reinstalling the OS. Two OSes, actually, since Windows 10 is almost out. Since I know this, I think I feel comfortable being a little reckless (doing things like, uh, installing an OS with "technical preview" in the name) with the knowledge if I make some bad decisions I can wipe them out with at 15.04 reinstall.

This is a bad idea. I know it is. I'm doing it anyway.

I have a brand new "Lenovo Yoga 3" here. It seems like a sorta nice piece of hardware. It has a new Intel chip. Keyboard feels nice. Trackpad feels like it's fighting me in a weird way. Pixel density is odd— Windows runs at "1.5x" DPI. It has a touchscreen, which is exciting to me.

I named her Ada. She is the first non-macintosh computer I have ever owned.

My hope is to install some version of Linux as soon as I can. I have had some experiences with Linux before, and what I found every time was that it took a lot of fiddling to get things to work, and when I was done fiddling I couldn't remember exactly what I'd done to make it work. "Wow", I think every time. "I should have been writing this down as I went." Okay, well, this time I'm writing it down. I'm going to catalogue my experiences here, which will mean that if something goes wrong and I have to start over, I'll have archived instructions for recreating my setup.