Not the best advice but:

• …Do you need secure boot? The absolute easiest solution would be to disable it in the BIOS, as it’s quite finicky. This is what I do.

• When you get to the part of “enable no free repositories” in any distro to get Nvidia working, that’s code for “we don’t support Nvidia, we aren’t responsible for something breaking and you’re on your own.” Nobara is not a bad choice (as it does support Nvidia), but in general I’d recommend a distro with 1st party Nvidia support. Probably openSUSE if it’s a workstation. Long term, this is how you avoid Nvidia problems.

Again, I’m not trying to say “you’re linuxing wrong,” but with my lack of knowledge on secure boot, I’m emphasizing my extremely poor experience of distros that do not directly prioritize Nvidia support/fixes.

This probably won't help you now (unless you decide to re-install Debian) but just for reference Debian's wiki does have some very through documentation on the Nvidia driver installation process

https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

Judging from your post / the wiki page, assuming you do have Secure Boot enabled it looks like you forgot to enroll the MOK before installing the Nvidia driver. The steps also mention using dracut to add a .conf to blacklist (disable) the default nouveau driver so typically that's done before your reboot.

PS - If you started out doing this with a fresh Trixie install would it be easy enough just to re-install and then re-do the Nvidia instructions? Plus technically if you wanted you could disable Secure Boot in your BIOS before the install and skip the extra Secure Boot configuration entirely.

Oh god no. I think you're fucked. Wait for someone who knows what the hell is going on and rephrase your problem as a secure boot issue

yes, this is what I tried to find after going back through the tutorial steps. But this file path is the Linux filesystem right? I wiped the Debian earlier this afternoon (to try Bazzite, then Nobara), I imagine this file has been wiped with it?

I assume this file?

/var/lib/dkms/mok.pub

Should I reinstall Grub ? from my searches I found this thread https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/unable-to-boot-after-importing-key-with-mokutil/155830

And this answer does a good job of explaining what MOK is. But it doesn't help me fully understand what is happening to my machine.

Ok, I will look this up and try to understand what it means. I do remember the pass I set, it's just my regular password. But not sure where to type it, because when I choose "enroll key from disk" it opens a file browser where I can navigate between my disks, then into the file systems...... but I don't know what I am looking for

I think you need to enroll the mok key. I hope you remember the password you set when going through those steps.

NB : I have no fucking idea on secure boot.

The install process for Bazzite and Nobara seemed to go without a hitch, made me think I was out of the woods...

reposting my previous comment to help troubleshooters :

you done fucked up the secure boot settings I think. I am in no way qualified to help you.

I don't even understand how you can install a different OS. Work off a live USB if you even can.

As far as I understand this is the bit you fucked up. btw, the images in the debian forum post just show "filename1.jpg" as text and don't display. post on !/c/linux4noobs@programming.dev

Step 2: Enroll MOK key for Secure Boot

Debian updates its kernel (minor versions) regularly for security updates and fixes. Without re-building kernel modules every time, DKMS is used, which however needs be signed for secure boot using a machine owner key (MOK).

1. First, run the command below to check if Debian was installed with UEFI boot by running the command below in terminal:

ls /sys/firmware/efi

The command tells to list the /sys/firmware/efi directory content. If it says “No such file or directory”, then you have Debian installed as legacy boot.

2. Next, run command to check if secure boot enabled:

sudo mokutil --sb-state

If both UEFI and secure boot enabled (as the screenshot below shows you), then you need to run commands below one by one to create and enroll MOK key.

3. First, run the command below to manually generate a mok key.

sudo dkms generate_mok

Run sudo apt install dkms if the dkms command not found, and set a password for the key.

4. Next, run command to import the key:

sudo mokutil --import /var/lib/dkms/mok.pub

5. Finally, reboot your computer. At next boot, it should pop-up a screen (see the screenshot below), asking to perform MOK menagement.

There, just choose to Enroll MOK -> continue -> confirm -> enter password (you set when creating the key) -> reboot.

After enabled non-free repository and enrolled MOK key, you may then run the commands below to install NVIDIA driver.

First, install the kernel headers for DKMS:

sudo apt install linux-headers-$(dpkg --print-architecture)

It depends on the notebook. In general, Linux is much more efficient than Windows (much less bloat), so in theory it should automatically lead to better battery life, However, on some (or even a lot of) notebook models, there are all sorts of weird manufacturer hardware choices, UEFI settings and whatnot which don't always fully conform to specifications or have other quirks which the proprietary Windows drivers for that device circumvent and thus deal with in a way that leads to the intended positive result, but the open-source Linux drivers which usually follow the specifications will then lead to a negative result (usually: less power efficiency => increased battery drain). So it's best to stick to notebook models and manufacturers which are known to be good devices for running Linux on them (or where the manufacturer even directly supports running Linux on), and not blindly or randomly buy a notebook hoping that Linux will run at 100% efficiency on every weird hardware combination.

There are various tools to optimize battery life on linux, most prominently:

• laptop-mode-tools (https://github.com/rickysarraf/laptop-mode-tools)
• TLP (https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html)
• auto-cpufreq (https://github.com/AdnanHodzic/auto-cpufreq)

But at the end of the day it depends on various factors, so it will be a tinkering process.

thank you to everybody who commented and gave some useful input! it definitely helped me a lot!

In this situation I proably would just go for the most afforfable option, for example a Linux distro that most suits your needs (have a check at website like distrochooser[.]de or similar website), and then ask LeChat or ChatGPT for advice on how to optimize the power settings

Yeah I guess it probably depends if you get lucky and have a laptop that happens to have a load of effort put into power management optimisation put in by some random Linux dev. It would be really helpful if there were benchmarks for this stuff. Super tedious and expensive to do though I guess. Maybe we could crowd source it somehow.

Interesting, I put linux on my work laptop and I always get hours more out of it than my colleagues using windows. And I'm the type of guy having 200 tabs open and carrying extra peripherals around which probably also take some power.

Anyway ymmv of course

thank you! your reply sent me down another rabbit hole and gave me something to think about.

Yeah. If you pay a few dollars for a product key from one of those grey market sites (legally dubious but there's no danger to you) you can get Windows 11 IoT LTSC which is a version of Windows without all the crap that people complain about.

I've been running that on my desktop for a while and the only problem I ran into was that Winget doesn't work by default and it is quite a pain to get working (I did manage in the end but it involved downloading some core windows file from a random windows help website which isn't ideal).

The only reason I needed it is because OCaml is only distributed on Windows with Winget. I think the Windows Store also probably doesn't work (never tried) but that's a bonus. Same for the Windows game bar, whatever that crap is. (Steam and games themselves work fine.)

Other than that it's rock solid and a nice improvement over Windows 10. It can even install printers quickly and reliably which I thought I would never see in my lifetime (Linux still can't).

hmmm. So you'd recommend just working with windows 11 then? cuz basically battery life is what's most important to me. can't afford new stuff, especially not a MacBook.

The output from razer-cli --dpi print is just my dpi (1400).

Okay. Something like this should work:

#!/bin/bash
dpi=$(razer-cli --dpi print)
case $dpi in
  1400)
    razer-cli --dpi 20000
    ;;
  20000)
    razer-cli --dpi 1400
    ;;
esac

If the resolutions you want are 1400 and 20000 dpi.

save it as cycle.sh or something like that in a directory in your PATH, and chmod +x it to make it executable. Every time it runs, it'll cycle though resolutions. Can add more resolutions or fiddle with the colors or whatever there too.

Cinnamon

Okay. I haven't used any GNOME stuff in ages, but it sounds like Cinnamon's keyboard applet only does keyboard bindings, so can't bind a mouse button to a command.

https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/12840

I don't know what the best route to run a command on mouse click is under Cinnamon is.

God damn that's so good to know.

I've been neglecting this issue on a subset of vms. At work, no less.

No real issue just a headache.

Thank you. Deobfuscated a pain point I never bothered to look into. I can probably work around it now.

1>Says it can also print the current DPI, so I imagine that it’d be pretty straightforward to do a shell script of maybe three lines or so that cycles resolution through your favored resolutions when invoked. Doesn’t show an example of the exact output of the command, though, so I can’t tell you exactly what to run.

I installed it. The output from razer-cli --dpi print is just my dpi (1400).

11>I use Sway, and Sway can be configured to invoke commands when a button or key or whatever is pressed, so you’d just have it run said script.1

1I'm using Cinnamon, on Linux Mint

I haven't used it, but it looks like you can change DPI with the razor-cli command.

https://github.com/lolei/razer-cli

Says it can also print the current DPI, so I imagine that it'd be pretty straightforward to do a shell script of maybe three lines or so that cycles resolution through your favored resolutions when invoked. Doesn't show an example of the exact output of the command, though, so I can't tell you exactly what to run.

Looks like you can also set the LED color, if you want to have it indicate the DPI or something.

If you can't figure out the script but can paste the exact output from the command printing the current DPI, I can probably help you with the script.

I use Sway, and Sway can be configured to invoke commands when a button or key or whatever is pressed, so you'd just have it run said script.

https://man.archlinux.org/man/sway.5.en

You don't say what desktop environment you're using. If you're using Gnome or KDE, I expect that there's some similar utility, probably built into the desktop environment, to bind mouse buttons to invoke commands.

xinput will work under Xorg, but not Wayland.

I actually don't think I've needed to remap mouse buttons on Wayland. Most stuff like that got pushed to the compositor in Wayland. I assume that, given that I'm using sway, sway has some mechanism. Probably Gnome and KDE do too. OP didn't indicate what environment he was in, though.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Input_remap_utilities

Has some packages.

Yes, mine does use an on-board memory profile. Hope you are able to find a solution.