My brother’s cheapie I-Life laptop started having problems a few weeks back with the microphone sound not working. I spent two days trying to fix it until I discovered a Windows update apparently overwrites the Realtek sound drivers. But running updates etc also produced a further issue with the video often just booting to a black screen (I could still work as luckily I had installed Teamviewer and could remotely access and see the desktop). I even re-installed a fresh copy on Win10 but as it was drive related this did not resolve the issues and installing the proprietary drivers was also not resolving it.
In utter frustration I tested a live-USB version of Manjaro Linux and realised all the hardware worked fine. So I installed Linux and wow microphone, screen, etc all works 100%. Only issue was that as I installed a light version, so I had to also install gnome-keyring to remember the Skype login details. Normally this is part of a standard installation.
Pure pleasure, free, and just works… as it’s the rolling distro version Linux will just keep updating in the background.
#technology #opensource #linux
