Running a couple of Pis with Gentoo myself right now. It works as well as anything, although unless you’re very patient you’ll want to set up a binary package host (or distcc or something) to take the load off the Pi’s somewhat anemic processor.

One thing to keep in mind about older versions of the nvidia proprietary drivers is that they will only work with specific kernel versions (and specific X versions—not sure about Wayland). Once the driver series your card needs stops being updated, you can’t update your kernel without patching the driver. Assuming you have the skills to patch the driver, or someone who does makes their patches public.

I went through this song-and-dance with a very old laptop that had a card of the NV40 generation as its only GPU (no integrated graphics). Eventually I did install nouveau on it, and used it for several years without any issues.

Trinity Desktop Environment, forked from KDE3.

TDE has this natively under the advanced window settings, so I would expect KDE to have it too.

Or ditch udisks in favour of pmount (or udevil?), which shouldn’t be affected as far as I can tell. That will get you a few months’ grace before a similar problem pops up there.

Based on what I’ve seen, for a DE to gain much traction, you need at least one well-known medium-large distro putting it as a default on some of their install media—MATE is well-represented these days because Mint backed it at a crucial stage in its development. I don’t think Enlightenment ever had that.

Is there a modern equivalent of that? Basically turn it into a thin client?

Well, X is still out there with its thin client capabilities intact. There are Wayland-compatible VNC clients and servers, if one isn’t big on X. SPICE is intended for connecting to VMs as servers. RDP if you want to use a Windows box as a server.

For a machine such as the OP describes, it would also be possible to install a tailored distro and software selection into the onboard space and place /home and such on a network drive, although that makes it impossible to take the tablet out of range of the LAN. If the touchscreen doesn’t work under either the Wacom or libinput drivers, it would probably be a waste of time, though.

(Really, 16GB is plenty for the distro itself—if I remove the three kernel source trees, a couple of games, and some FreePascal stuff, my desktop system minus /home would fit in that, and it’s anything but minimalistic.)

Yeah, that’s how I was taught in school in Canada in the 1980s, although no one ever explained why. It always did seem odd.

What’s the output of cat /proc/asound/cards on your system?

The 6.6.x kernel series is LTS and should be fine as a downgrade target (6.7.x not so much so). Unless there’s something specific from the newer kernel versions that you need to drive that system, there shouldn’t be any issues. I’m still on a 6.6-series kernel.

That being said, you could try troubleshooting this from the bottom up rather than the top down.

First, use lspci -v to verify that the device is being correctly identified and associated with a driver.

Next, invoke alsamixer and make sure everything is unmuted and your HD audio controller is the first sound device. The last time I had something like this happen to me, the issue turned out to be that the main soundcard slot was being hijacked by an HDMI audio output that I didn’t want and wasn’t using, and that was somehow muting the sound at the audio jack even when I tried to switch to it. A little mucking around in ALSA-level config files fixed everything.

Provided Fedora has the appropriate packages (and I expect they do), I can’t see why not. But see if there’s any distro-specific documentation on switching first.

Wayland’s nvidia support is improving over time, but although it’s becoming less popular, X11 isn’t likely to be completely deprecated anytime soon—I’d expect any mainstream distro to still at least have it as an option a couple of years from now, to handle corner cases Wayland still doesn’t support.

The last X11 stable version bump on my distro was about a month ago, to 21.1.16, so it isn’t like it’s abandonware or anything.

Wild idea: check the condition of the SDD (presumably) that you’re trying to install to. After all, an installation has two endpoints, and if the target disc is on its last legs and throwing SMART errors, it ain’t gonna be too happy getting written to.

Did you make sure that Nouveau was not loading? If both drivers are on the system, Nouveau usually ends up taking precedence unless it’s been blacklisted. Also, if this is a laptop type with a hybrid graphics setup, you may need additional software to manage the handoff between GPUs (optimus, bumblebee, etc.)

So, Poettering wants to make life difficult for everyone using something other than his precious again by transitioning from the normal standard for IPC to something hardly anyone has ever heard of or uses that’s based on JSON? Seriously? 🤢

Distro best added to the “Power-user distros to avoid” list: Gentoo (saying that as a Gentoo user).

I disagree with your claim that doing things like installation steps manually is necessarily a bad idea, though. It depends on your goal. Obviously it isn’t the fastest way to get things up and running, and as such it isn’t appropriate for newcomers (or for mass corporate deployments). If your goal is to learn about the lower levels of the system, or to produce something highly customized, then it becomes appropriate. Occasionally, it pays dividends in the form of being able to quickly fix a system that’s been broken by automation that didn’t quite work as expected. Anyway, I’d suggest rewording that bit of your Arch screed.