CV

Debian on brand-new hardware

PersonalAug 2026 – ongoingSolo

Running Debian as my daily system on a laptop newer than Debian's kernel, and rescuing my main workstation before the school year.

Context & objective

I use Debian every day, on a new ASUS Vivobook S16 (Ryzen AI 7 350, 32 GB, Samsung OLED panel, MediaTek MT7922 Wi-Fi) that keeps Windows 11 alongside, and on my main workstation. The laptop is 2025 hardware, newer than what Debian 13’s default kernel fully supports, and both machines needed work before Epitech started.

What I built

  • Laptop dual-boot: Windows 11 installed unattended from an autounattend.xml answer file, then Debian 13 (trixie) with KDE Plasma. GRUB restored after Windows overwrote the boot entry, Secure Boot settings handled, swap and hibernation configured.
  • Wi-Fi: the MT7922 didn’t work on the base 6.12 kernel, so I took the mt7921e driver from a newer kernel’s sources and built it for the old one. Today it runs on the driver included in the newer kernel.
  • Display: fixed a corrupted band on the OLED by moving to the trixie-backports kernel (now 7.2, updated through APT), keeping 6.12 in GRUB as a fallback.

Next: a Python/evdev daemon to bring back the ASUS edge gestures from Windows (volume, brightness, seek, app switching), and retesting the touchpad and audio on the newer kernel.

Challenges

  • Hardware or software? I first suspected the OLED band was a hardware fault. Reading the panel’s EDID with edid-decode confirmed it and its native resolution were fine, which pointed to the kernel’s display support, and the backports kernel fixed it.
  • Very new hardware: the touchpad and audio still behave oddly.
  • Unwinding drift: bringing a workstation that had slid towards Debian testing back to a clean state without breaking it further.

What I learned

I thought this install would go smoothly, and it did, but only once every problem was solved.

  • Laptop installs are never smooth. Every time I install Debian on a laptop, the graphics side causes problems. This time it was a corrupted band on the screen.
  • New screens are a pain. The OLED panel needed a newer kernel than Debian ships by default, so I switched to the backports kernel and kept the old one as a fallback.
  • Don’t blame the hardware too fast. Reading the panel’s EDID showed the screen itself was fine: the problem was software, not a part to replace.
  • Hypothesis, test, fix. I now work through a problem one assumption at a time, and always keep a way back, like the fallback kernel in GRUB.