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Re: Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a Thinkpad X11 Carbon Gen12

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john doe <johndoe65534@mail.com> writes:
> On 4/13/26 12:56 PM, Bjørn Mork wrote:
>> Tried something new today:  A fresh install of trixie on a "modern"
>> (2 year old) laptop.
>> First boot, after what I perceived as a successful install, resulted
>> in
>> a black screen with a frozen cursor on top left.  No response to any key
>> press.  Hard power off was the only way out.
>> Booting in recovery mode and installing firmware-intel-graphics
>> fixed
>> the problem.
>> 
>
> For now, we have no idea how you did install Trixie.

Sorry, tried to not be too verbose.  Wrong decision, I guess.

I downloaded
http://ftp.no.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz
and UEFI netbooted from it from a tftp/dhcp-server using a realtek USB
ethernet dongle.

I chose "Install" (i.e no advanced settings). Did manual fdisk with
everything in one big ext4 partition and a separate swap partition,
reformatting both (the goal here was a fresh install with no leftover
cruft from the previous system). The existing EFI system partition was
reused without formatting.

The only non-standard choices made was deselecting GNOME, and selecting
xfce and ssh-server.  Everything else was left up to the installer
defaults, including verbosity.

>> But how many new users will know how to
>>   - boot into recovery mode,
>>   - configure networking manually,
>>   - guess that a firmware is missing,
>>   - know which package to look for, and
>>   - how to install it from the command line?
>> 
>
>
>
>> My guess is that approximately 100% of users facing such issues will
>> simply try another distro, until they find one that works out of the
>> box.
>> This is NOT a question about non-free firmware blobs.  I'm fine with
>> asking users to explictly install those.  The problem is that there was
>> no such question, 
>
> What verbosity did you use?
>
> Look in "/var/log/installer" to see what went wrong..

I didn't do this to test the installation process. I had no reason to
expect it to fail.  The laptop was already running Debian, but the owner
wanted to scratch it and have a clean trixie installation.  So the
verbosity was the default, and I didn't think or care much about the
installer logs.  My priority was to make the system bootable again, like
it was before I started.

The laptop is now returned so I don't have access to the logs.

Just thought I'd let you know about the issue since I suspect it might
affect a number of systems from the same generation, and I assume you
won't hear much from all the users ending up with Ubuntu or Fedora or
whatever becasue "Debian doesn't work"

If these assumptions are wrong, then I'm happy.  Nothing is better than
that.



Bjørn

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Thread

Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a Thinkpad  X11 Carbon Gen12 Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no> - 2026-04-13 13:30 +0200
  Re: Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a Thinkpad  X11 Carbon Gen12 Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> - 2026-04-13 15:00 +0200
    Re: Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a  Thinkpad X11 Carbon Gen12 Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no> - 2026-04-13 15:50 +0200
      horribe developer experience to get bug reports while buying bread  (Re: Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a Thinkpad X11  Carbon Gen12) Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> - 2026-04-13 20:40 +0200
  Re: Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a  Thinkpad X11 Carbon Gen12 Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no> - 2026-04-13 16:10 +0200
    Re: Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a Thinkpad  X11 Carbon Gen12 Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> - 2026-04-13 18:00 +0200
      Re: Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a Thinkpad  X11 Carbon Gen12 Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> - 2026-04-13 18:40 +0200
        Re: Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a  Thinkpad X11 Carbon Gen12 Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no> - 2026-04-13 20:20 +0200
          Re: Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a Thinkpad  X11 Carbon Gen12 Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> - 2026-04-26 20:20 +0200
      Re: Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a  Thinkpad X11 Carbon Gen12 Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no> - 2026-04-13 21:10 +0200
    Re: Horrible user experience with fresh trixie install on a Thinkpad  X11 Carbon Gen12 Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> - 2026-04-13 18:00 +0200

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