Hello,
this one is a bit of a doozy, but as a Linux novice, I have no idea how to proceed here!
I have a Yoga Slim 7 ProX laptop, which came with Windows 11, Intel i7-12700H, and an Nvidia RTX 3050. I’ve been using Fedora 42 KDE with the proprietary Nvidia drivers on it for about 2 months now (and I’m loving it!), setting up a dual-boot with Windows 11, which works really well. The laptop also had a dual-booted Pop! OS on it for a year prior. I’ve updated the BIOS from within Lenovo’s Windows utility too before this issue.
Recently, the new Fedora 43 came out, and I want to do a full reinstall of Fedora for a fresh start and to clean up my old partitions setup. I’ve flashed the image on a MicroSD in a USB adapter, plugged it in, and navigated to the boot load menu.
First anomaly:
When I installed Fedora 42, I remember that there were 2 options for booting from the Generic STORAGE DEVICE, one called something something Fedora and the other one called “Linpus lite”. However, now it only showed the Linpus lite entry.
When I booted into the Linpus entry, the 3-option Live boot menu appeared like normal. However, here’s what happened when I tried to access each option (In order: Start Fedora 43 live, Test media & start, Troubleshoot):
Hm. Here, I tried a bunch of things, like disabling Secure Boot (which I’ve had enabled and had no problems with previously), trying out a different USB, trying out the GNOME Workstation edition, but nothing worked. Running out of ideas, I tried disabling this setting in my BIOS, “Intel Platform Trust Technology”, which I’ve never touched before:
And it worked! The Live USB could do the media check and run normally. However, I didn’t proceed with regular installation immediately. From what I’ve gathered, PTT is something like TPM, which apparently needs to be ON to have Windows 11 work as intended, so ideally, I’d keep it enabled, especially since F42 worked with it.
Skeptical, I wanted to try installing the system into a small 40GB empty space on the laptop (preserving my Windows and F42 partitions), just to see if things would work. I went through with the installer, backing up my EFI partition so I could restore it later:
(New Installer Feedback: it looks nicer, although it took me some time to figure out manual partitioning with it since it was hidden in the 3-dot > Storage Configuration option, and I ended up making the partitions in KDE Partition Manager anyway since the installer’s tool used GBs and MBs, which didn’t let me make those nice 1024 multiple GiB and MiB-aligned sizes)
When the installation finished, I rebooted the laptop, and the newly installed Fedora 43’s boot menu appeared. Selecting the first option to start Fedora 43, the Fedora logo and spinning circle appeared, but eventually, the system went into a black screen with only a static “_” showing, and seemingly no input responded.
I returned to the installation process again, this time formatting the EFI partition instead of just mounting onto it (don’t know if that really affected anything other than removing the Windows boot option). I also ran the Live environment in the Basic Graphics mode under troubleshooting, thinking it might’ve been some sort of video error. This time around, the installed Fedora 43 booted and loaded into the desktop environment.
However, it seemed like the basic graphics mode was still on, since the screen was locked to 60Hz and was oddly scaled, so I hastily entered these 2 commands from Way forward after installing with "Basic Graphic Mode" - #4 by vgaetera
sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --remove-args="nomodeset vga=791"
sudo systemctl reboot
After the reboot, the system allowed me to load into Fedora 43, but after a while of the Fedora logo and spinning circle, it didn’t work again, showing a frozen logo instead of the underscore, not letting me do anything. Although, I don’t think it was a true freeze, since when I pressed the power button, the circle started spinning again as if it was gracefully shutting down (I still force-quit it though).
My hypothesis: the new Fedora 43 has some sort of issue with my hardware in both PTT and/or graphics, since Fedora 42 worked with PTT on, and installed from the Live USB’s non-Basic Graphics mode. While I could live with PTT off (I don’t use Windows 11 that much, and I don’t know what PTT even does), the system still didn’t load into the desktop when installed locally.
I’m not ruling out user error from my little test, since it was just a haphazard installation into a small empty space between my still existing Fedora 42 and Windows partitions.
It’s weird though because with F42, everything worked smoothly on a fresh install even with 120Hz, even before I installed the Nvidia drivers.
I also installed Fedora 43 from this same Live USB on my desktop PC, where it installed properly even with a recently-updated Secure Boot and TPM-compatible BIOS (yeah it’s Battlefield 6), although, there’s this super weird issue where the monitor is really dark and flickers like a horror movie effect unless I either disable Secure Boot or set my refresh rate to 60Hz, but that’s a whole other thing.
Things I didn’t try: Upgrading my existing F42 to F43, disabling Secure Boot (it’s been on throughout), enabling PTT again to see if it has any effect on the locally installed F43 test.
For now, I’ve restored my old EFI partition so I can boot into my Fedora 42 installation. I have no idea how to diagnose this issue, and would be thankful for any help. I can repeat any of these steps if needed. Sorry for the long tangent!