I’m bought a new computer. Arrines on the Sept 25. It comes with Win 11ware. I want to make it a dual boot. - PureOS or Win 11 But that’s not today’s question.
The specs are below:
Question is, is there any foreseeable issues with proprietary drivers or other needs.to run PureOS?
Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop 1 $5,578.99 $4,031.09 > No FGA 817-BBBB Alienware Aurora ACT1250 210-BPDX
Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 Processor Label|389-FJTR 389-FGBD|
NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 5080 16GB GDDR7 490-BKXB BE200 driver 555-BLXQ
64GB Dual Channel DDR5 (2x 32GB - Green) 5200 MT/s 370-BBJM
Dell Wired Keyboard - KB216 - US English - Black 580-BCVG
4TB NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen4 SSD 400-BSGH
Dell Wired Mouse - MS116 - Black 570-BBKS
Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE200 (2x2) 802.11ax Wireless LAN and Bluetooth 555-BLMP
US Power Cord 470-AEJY
Documentation 340-DNBV
1000W Platinum Rated PSU, Clear Door & 240mm Liquid
Cooler with AlienFX lighting 321-BMFX
Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 processor 285K (24-Core, 76MB Total
Cache, 3.7GHz to 5.7GHz) > 338-CRNZ
Yeah. I know it’s AlienWare and Dell. HP wouldn’t swap out or add the RTX 5080. I could have bought a business machine, still HP couldn’t match price and power. My big interest is the RTX-5080 video card Intel 9 Ultra brain. Oh, and I can disable the colour shows from inside the box. Frankly, I got tired of shopping.
With the GPU … you can probably run Nouveau driver, but it does not have nearly the performance and features of the proprietary driver.
The Wifi and bluetooth drivers are almost certainly proprietary. [Edit: And, thus, aren’t available under PureOS]
I don’t think that the PureOS install ISO supports UEFI. Usually one would go into UEFI and turn on “Legacy BIOS Mode”. But I’m pretty sure that Alienware Aurora ACT1250 does not support “Legacy BIOS Mode”.
[Edit to add:] PureOS is based on Debian Bookworm. On such a hot + new desktop there may not be driver and motherboard support until Debian Trixie. It will probably be months before PureOS will have an install based on Trixie.
Question: If you intend to use proprietary drivers (e.g. for Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE200 and bluetooth) … is there any reason why you would want to run PureOS instead of Debian or something like Ubuntu???
Reason for PureOS is I’d like to be as compatible as possible so I can attach the L5 similar to docking. Too, I’m getting to know PureOS better than anything else. Keeping PureOS in the family so to speak.
Believe me, if there were any way to not use proprietary-ware, I wouldn’t use proprietary.
Thanks for the info. Looks more and more like I may have to go to Ubuntu. I’ll wait till it arrives (Sept 25). I’ll have a lot of -de-stalking, de-google, de-m$ it, and cleaning the spies out first.
Given the newness of your hardware and the oldness of PureOS, my advice would be to just run PureOS in a virtual machine inside Ubuntu (or Fedora, although Ubuntu is going to be more similar to PureOS) if you want to have a consistent experience for docking your Librem phone. The latest Ubuntu should be fine on that system (tho as mentioned the Nvidia drivers will be proprietary). There is an Intel Linux driver for the WiFi card but yeah, it requires proprietary firmware so it wouldn’t work in PureOS unless you installed it after the fact. But putting the outdated nature of PureOS aside (and the decisions to eschew proprietary drivers/firmware by default), your system should be able to work with the latest Ubuntu just fine.
Running a PureOS VM inside Ubuntu might seem silly but you’ll have enough headroom to do that without a problem. As you use Ubuntu, you could customize it to be more PureOS like too.
And NVidia was a bad choice anyway for running Linux (especially if you want it as close to PureOS as possible). It looks like you didn’t learn not to trust advertisement. Why not asking some tech people you know before buying tech? If you have no better ones → even here on forum you can ask. Anyway, it is as it is.
Your graphics card perform not really well on Linux, so if you run the same application on Windows and Linux, Windows performs minimum 10% better. On AMD that issue does not exist (with few exceptions), because AMDs (newer) drivers are free software (AMD supports this by publishing important documentations). Your graphics card in additional does not support Wayland, yet, as enabled by default on Librem 5. I don’t know what Purisms laptops are using (Wayland or X11), maybe other people can tell. But at least to Librem 5 it’s a difference you have to take.
However, let’s face what you can do to make it as close to PureOS as possible. As Privacy2 wrote, install Debian or Ubuntu. Since PureOS is a modified Debian (Ubuntu too), you probably want Debian 13, also called Trixie. You will be more modern than PureOS, but your hardware need it to run well. Once PureOS Dawn is released, it’s based on Trixie and so very similar.
As desktop environment choose GNOME. That’s what you have on PureOS by default. Some of your Librem 5 apps are also running on Desktop - like the file manager. But I can tell you, on Trixie they look different. It’s because on L5 the software is super outdated right now. These improvements also come to PureOS Dawn.
And Compatibility with phone: I’m running Debian Trixie and have no issues to connect to my phone. But I choose KDE as desktop where the app kdeconnect is preinstalled (I also have it on my L5) and it connected out of the box. You also can install it with GNOME environment. There are also other ways, but I guess you want the easier solutions.
Seconding the existing replies … YES, there are very foreseeable issues.
I wasn’t sure on exactly which CPU you have but even if you completely got rid of the nVidia graphics card, there is a risk that the CPU is one that has Intel Arc Graphics, which will then probably be a problem if you want purity.
Just throwing in my two cents, but I would agree with an earlier comment about installing Ubuntu. It will have more compatibility with the newer hardware, while also being somewhat familiar as it is still based on Debian like PureOS is.
Putting the “purity” of the drivers aside (and Nvidia now contributes way more upstream and to the kernel than it did even a few years ago), this just isn’t true. Thanks to the rise of AI and ML work, Nvidia cards under Linux often perform just as well as under Windows and in some cases, even better. Even for gaming, using Proton from Valve or a tweaked version of Proton alongside the Nvidia drivers (Nvidia-open) can deliver excellent gaming performance. Some DX12 games still run better on Windows but it’s much more competitive than it was.
And the 50xx Nvidia cards absolutely support Wayland. I don’t even know where you are getting this.
The whole “only buy AMD cards” for Linux advice is severely, severely outdated. Not only are the drivers for the modern cards better and more open (whether that is open enough for you is an individual determination but the kernel modules are upstreamed and the drivers have feature parity now, which wasn’t the case pre-2021/2022), but at this point since Nvidia sells more GPUs for AI workloads than for gaming (and by a large margin), their commitment to Linux in general has gone up exponentially. For AI/ML stuff, the tooling situation on Nvidia hardware on Linux is significantly better than it is on AMD (where ROCm is still kludgy as all get out). And it isn’t as if those AMD drivers or firmware are truly free in the libre sense. As I said, it’s up to each individual to decide what is “open” enough for themself, but let’s not pretend as if AMD is some bastion for hardware freedom; both AMD and Nvidia are deeply relient on proprietary bits. Intel is the most “open” in comparison, but you can’t do anything of any substance with Intel (certainly not at 5080 levels of substance).
But that is a practical issue for a new install anyway. That is, there are two pieces of hardware for which it is a pain if the operating system out-of-the-box doesn’t work with the hardware but which can be addressed.
WiFi (if ethernet is not available)
graphics (may have to work in VGA mode, 800x600, while stuffing around to install drivers)
So the above specification of hardware used with PureOS sounds like a pain.
There where a lot of tests this year of Linux vs Windows on gaming and NVidia was always 10% (often more) behind on Linux. I never saw anything this year where even just one game was at least similar to Windows. AMD was always on same level, sometimes even better than on Windows. NVidia makes lots of improvements nowadays, but still is not on the same performance level. There are also other issues with this company I didn’t even mention (and are much more K.O. criteria to me).
Anyway, about Wayland I maybe made the mistake to mixed the information of their open source drivers instead of the proprietary ones. The 10xx generation was the only one supporting Wayland well enough to be usable. I’ve got a graphic in mind I saw few weeks ago. This could happen, because I really don’t care about this company anymore.
I never said “only buy AMD”, I just said that was not a smart idea to buy NVidia in this case, because it still has issues. Especially beside of CUDA (who cares about common users if you can make much more money with AI-cores on data center scale?). And btw, the drivers of professional cards and consumer cards are not the same. So there is probably an even worse support for 50xx cards compared to a data center cluster card.
As I said, there are improvements and these cards are usable nowadays, but not on the same level.
Btw, what part of AMD drivers are not open source? The firmware is not, but isn’t mesa fully open?
I didn’t look at or see any ads. For this this new desktop, I went straight to the build section. Been there several times. I selected a rig that best matched my needs.with parts I wanted.
Only Dell let me change parts out. I would prefer HP - but…I have been eyeballing this setup for several weeks.
I know it’s compatible with Windows. I didn’t have to ask M$ if Windows is compatible.
Sorry, but you have it reversed. The post isn’t about viewing ads, nor about whom I should ask anything before buying anything. It’s about whether or not PureOS has issues with the hardware - not is the hardware having issues with PureOS.. I can pick and choose any OS, but I was hoping PureOS would work. If not, Meh.
And, I did speak with several techs - just didn’t do it here, until now and I got answers.
Okay than sorry about the part of “didn’t learn”. But still it’s not a system I probably would have recommended, especially since you want a similar OS to your phone.
Anyway, the part about hardware support is still wrong. You don’t need to ask MS for hardware support, because MS has a marketshare of about 70% (still falling). So everyone who build common hardware for desktop is supporting MS. But NVidia could have decided to also support Linux in the same way AMD does for years. They just start to do it for AI servers and because gamers are switching to Linux. So it’s a NVidia issue, no Linux one.
I wish I was made of money.. I had to pinch pennies, buy cheaper meat (*cat food), curb wine appetite, and saved months for a new desktop. I just realized - I didn’t buy a new monitor - yet.
Yes. I’ll take 1 and 3 as correct.
I want it to last and be ready for the Windows ###. down the road and the ones after that - 10 - 12 years - I hope. I chose the GPU so games and things like Adope ware are fast.
And… I want to brag about having the fastest, future ready overclocked system around the block. I won’t be here in a few years, or less, so I want to pass along something that isn’t just going last a few years before it’s outdated. I would have gone further and put the GPU RTX 5090 but that card is way overpriced for my budget.
Frankly Irvine, I am sick of having to upgrade software but upgrade OS before updated software will work, then software runs slow, Chrome says I have to upgrade and some sites are broken cause of my old Browser. It’s like leap frog game. Only we buy or own leash and hand control over to the lechers and predators using my information to sell me more garbage.
