Hello everyone, recently i bought an Acer Nitro V 16 ANV16-41-R6B0 and it's a really impressive machine with a beautiful black and orange square-ish 16:10 design and with some really good specs. I have paid 900€ for it, brand new, and i really thought i had made a very good purchase, until now.
This computer has immense problems if you wish to install anything other than Windows in it.
At the start, all was well, installed a fresh copy of Arch Linux (the manual way) up to the point where KDE Plasma is all set and running. So far, so good.
That was until i could not edit ANYTHING in the pc's BIOS as they would crash, having to restart it.
Then, i could not even access the BIOS to change the order of another bootable flash drive without freezing in the ACER NITRO logo as long as the flash drive was connected to the pc… Turns out it was like because of the weird entry that was added in the device's efi boot order after installing Arch where it was named "1.".
Luckily Arch's Laptop/Acer page has addressed this issue and i was able to fix it.
Next big issue is that "sometimes", the SDDM service or KDE itself fails to launch on boot, sometimes just showing the mouse cursor in a black background with the terminal waiting (having then to press CTRL+ALT+F3 to return to the terminal and rebooting) and sometimes, successfully launching KDE and when i type my password only a black screen shows, needing to reboot.
This has never happened with the dozens of other computers i have worked with that also had a fresh install of Arch Linux with KDE Plasma.
Next are the fans. I don't know why this computer (as well as other Acer Nitros, more on that later) rev the fans up when in the BIOS screen, it is really weird.
Since there are no drivers for Linux there is no way to control the fans. Performing the smallest of tasks rev the fans up even when not necessary (CPU and GPU at 38/39/40 degrees celsius and fans blowing as they were in turbo mode).
Again, luckily, Div's Acer Manager X (DAMX) exists so this stops being a problem.
Lastly, and possibly, the most frustrating of all these… There are two keys in the keyboard hardware that have the exact same keycode!
What does this mean? It means that two completely different keys that do two completely different functions get called at the same time one is pressed.
In KDE, if i press Fn+F5/Fn+F6 to decrease/increase brightness, it works perfectly, as it should. That is until i press Fn+F12 to increase my keyboard backlight and now the screen brightness goes all the way down and the Fn+F5 key, specifically, stops working.
With the program "showkey", it allowed me to check in the terminal the exact keys pressed and key events (pressed, released, etc…). Apparently, both keys, Fn+F12 or "keyboard backlight increase" and Fn + F5 or "screen backlight decrease" share the exact same keycode (224).
In the Fn+F5 case, the key events are "pressed" and "released" when clicked, but in the Fn+F12 only the key "pressed" event happens, no "release" is ever seen.
So now, if i press Fn+F12, the system thinks that i'm permanently pressing Fn+F5 forever and thus decreases the screen backlight permanently (that's why i cannot use Fn+F5 anymore) and can only reduce it in the task bar BUT the hardware somehow knows i pressed Fn+F12 only once and does, also correctly, increase the keyboard light by one notch. This does not happen the other way around, pressing Fn+F5 does not increase keyboard backlight.
This also happens with other recent Nitro laptops. My friend has gotten herself an Acer Nitro V 14 - ANV14-61 and the exact same things happen except for the "same keycode" point. It doesn't happen there. Where if i use "showkey" in the V 14, the Fn+F12 does not show any key event at all, so it does not press the Fn+F5.
So my guess is that the V 16 has a bug where the Fn+F12 key is wrongfully pressing/calling the key 224.
But alas, these are all incredibly frustrating points, and the only reason i have not returned this pc yet is because of good looks, hot parts under the hood and excellent price. But i do not have to endure all of this, it is a real shame, it's a very good computer with a very good price but i have only met frustration with it.
Luckily for it, i did spend a good four hours gaming with it yesterday and it is really as good in playing games as i thought it would be.
Extra info:
Acer Nitro V 16 - ANV16-41-R6B0;
Bios ver: 1.12;
AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS;
Nvidia RTX 4060 (85w);
32gb DDR5-RAM 5600MT/s;
1920x1200@165hz 45%NTSC.
Sorry for the long post, i just wish these problems were fixed, some already are, like the BIOS bug and drivers on Linux not being an issue.
