Hello there all, I purchased an Acer Predator Helios 500 yesterday exclusively for use under Linux. I'm going to use this thread/post to document my experience.
Some basic questions out of the way:
WHY Linux:
I'm a developer that occasionally runs a game or two, Windows environments are crippleware for folks like me. The design goals of Windows is to hide from the user what's going on under the covers as much as possible, and what's under the covers is precisely what I'm interested in. You can look at this both ways : "But I have to use the command line to do something" vs "But I can just issue a command to do anything". Some people prefer the safe and rigid boundaries a GUI keeps you in, others prefer the limitless power of the prompt.
WHY Arch:While I have nothing bad to say about alternatives, its minimalistic and really balances well. Beware that it has no GUI installer.
What Works:
- Booting and Installation.
I had to disable secure boot (and I think TPM for the nvme card) in the BIOS to get this booting, which oddly required setting a BIOS password. I guess that's understandable? On that topic, the Helios 500 BIOS is extremely basic and rudimentary by today's standards, not a plus in my book. Virtually everything is hidden from the user. If your nvme card doesn't show up, you're likely experiencing a security issue.
- Graphics, 3D, etc.
The 1070 is a fairly new card, so nouveau drivers are ineffective. Use the official nvidia driver... performance is amazing. I've never seen such a smooth desktop, ever. G-SYNC is enabled and works flawlessly. KMS, high res framebuffer console, etc all look good.
- Sound
Out of the box, loud, crisp, and deep- surprising for a laptop. Very good sound.
- Games!
Keeping in mind this is day one, I tested on Wine, both Tales of Zestiria and Skyrim. Again, never seen framerates like these... my desktop I'm replacing has a GTX 760 and I've grown used to Intel graphics. They're buttery smooth at max settings. Next in line are Crysis, FFXV, and Far Cry 5.
For Linux native games, haven't tried any yet. Have quite a few on Steam. Unigine Valley runs, again, excellent on Ultra.
- Wifi
Not in the installer, but post-installation this fired right up.
- Trackpad
Out of box, smooth and accurate.
- Anything else I haven't listed under "doesn't work".
What Doesn't Work:
- The Wifi card during Installation.
I had to use wired ethernet to run the installation, after booting worked out of the box. The card is one of the newest I've used, so I imagine this is just a matter of Arch updating their installer image at some point. Intel wifi chips are among the best supported in the kernel due to Intel's direct contributions to both the kernel and firmware trees.
This may mean that other distros not as bleeding edge may have this problem, and for a while. Its also entirely possible they don't have it at all, and things work out of the box for them.
- RGB Control of the Keyboard.
I'd like to contact someone in Acer about how they implemented the RGB control in Windows. As said, I'm a developer and would like to write RGB control functionality for Linux if possible, perhaps add some effects and/or hooks to tie it to things like CPU usage, temps, etc... Acer: How do you talk to the RGB controller? I thought there might just be entries under /sys/class/leds or something, but no luck.
So far this is all I've got, will update as I go along. If you're interested in this or have a question, ask away.
