I needed to put Linux on an Acer Nitro 5, an absolutely glorious luggable machine from a line of pretty hefty budget gaming "laptops", putting that word between quotes since they are definitely too heavy for continuous use on top of your lap. Indeed, it is the fatbike, the SUV among laptops, satisfyingly, if not intimidatingly large but made from cheap materials. Its huge casing makes full versions of HDMI and other ports possible and the airflow inside so good, they could have left the two fans out. It's a good thing the machine is fully made from plastic, or I'd need a golf cart to carry it around.
The Nitro 5 in all its glory, together with a 10 Liter Swiss beer mug for scale
This particular beast is the N517-52-59J model, with a 17.3 inch 1920x1080 pixel screen, 8 GB of DDR4 RAM, an Intel Core i5-10300H CPU and a still respectable Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 dedicated GPU. There was a 512GB NVMe drive inside as well. I decided for Pop!OS, made by hardware manufacturer System76, who have a good enough relationship with Nvidia that their OS' support for Hybrid graphics is outstanding.
The Nitro 5's intimidatingly efficient grills and full-size Ethernet, USB3 ports and analogue headphone jack under luxuriously brushed black plastic.
After turning on the machine, I held F2 to enter into the BIOS. There I turned off fast-boot. Fast-boot is a mechanism to boot Windows faster and is not needed under Linux. To even be allowed to install another OS, I also had to turn off Secure Boot. The option to do that became available after I had set a supervisor password. When that was done, I booted the laptop from a USB stick on which I had put Pop!OS 22.04 LTS (Nvidia variant). There I encountered a little problem because the installer didn't see the NVMe drive. In fact, it only saw the USB stick it had booted from. This was because the disk configuration was set to something called Optane and had to be AHCI. Acer's community forum taught me that the option to do this was also hidden. Ctrl+S in the main tab of the BIOS menu made it available.
Be sure to turn off Fast boot
Now that the NVMe was available, I could install Pop!OS, which went so easy and smooth, it was boring. After the first boot, Pop!OS told me there was a CVE inspired BIOS update I needed to install. It warned me that maybe I had to reboot the machine a few times afterwards. Nothing like that happened. In fact, I find that I don't remember the CVE, or its significance, as indicative of the smoothness of the whole procedure.
Beforehand, I had bookmarked this blog because it listed some solutions for problems like a malfunctioning camera and screen brightness adjustment that apparently wouldn't work. Since I experienced none of the problems listed, I deleted the bookmark. All hardware seemed to work as it should as did all controlling buttons.
The hinges scream industrial ruggedness like nobody's business. The DTS logo must be the only subtle element on this laptop.
Oh, and one other thing. Because laptops are, in fact, always a compromise between carryability and usefulness, most of them are as light as they can be. Since good speakers are heavy, I have never as much as tolerated laptop speakers. The Nitro's speakers, though, well, I've definitely heard worse.
Installing Linux on a laptop isn't as difficult as it was two decades ago, in fact, there's hardly anything to it. Were it not for the obfuscated BIOS switches, this wouldn't have been worth this blog post at all.