Weird Story of Troubleshooting a Weird Laptop Issue (Hopefully the last part)

Did the problem actually got solved? I think you already knew it. If it got solved, I won’t be writing this part.

Disclaimers can be skipped for this part because no conversations that might hurt any party are included. Apparently they didn’t call me back after that day so...yeah.

Right after installing the BIOS update, I tried to trigger the issue up again with my usual usage routine. That is the only way I can use to know if it fixed the issue. Sounds perfectly logical, but there’s one thing I have to make sure first.

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

I have to make sure that if the problem persists, it’s a hardware issue instead of a software one.

This is important, because I can only claim the warranty if and only if it’s a hardware issue. I nuked the Windows OS that came with the laptop, installed the Windows OS provided by my school, ran a bunch of scripts that heavily altered the Windows OS, and installed a Linux OS alongside Windows. There are more than enough reasons for them to ignore my complaints if it’s a software issue instead of a hardware one. So, how I should test if it’s a hardware fault instead of some code in the software?

I hate to admit it, but, it's true in my memory...as much as I love Linux, Windows never gave any errors on hardware. To some extent, I even agree that it has to be error-free to be idiot-friendly enough for more than 90% of the computer users all over the world. So, I decided to...just use Windows for the upcoming month and see if the battery screams at me.

Doesn’t sound like a very cool idea for me though, considering the fact that I have been using Linux for years…

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Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

First day in, nothing bad happened.

Second day, same.

Third, everything’s normal.

Fourth, can’t find anything to complain, except for the fact that Windows feels a little sluggish…and they forgot to call me back, I guess.

Fifth, okay...and so on.

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It’s been three weeks and everything works fine.

I decided to just break my plan by a little….since we’re already in the third week and the problem does not appear anymore, can we just assume that the problem is solved through the BIOS update?

Thinking so, I decided to just forget about Windows for a moment and booted into my openSUSE Tumbleweed OS. Three weeks, it must have accumulated a bunch of updates. Had a fun time with the Linux OS I loved and am used to, ran those updating scripts, did a bunch of work on it, and happily slept for the night. Nothing should go wrong, right?

Photo by Greta Pichetti on Unsplash

Well, oops, the charging problem reappeared.

Feeling a little bit puzzled, I tried to figure out what could be at fault...it shouldn’t be the charging component or battery itself, otherwise the issue should have made its appearance during the last three weeks. So the hardware stuff should be out of the question. Software. Linux itself should be pretty stable even for laptop use, did openSUSE did something weird to it? Probably the kernel...they ship their systems with a patched kernel featuring their own modifications…

I decided to get the unpatched kernel and see if the issue persists. It feels a little slower than the default one (because the latter got patched for responsiveness), but I just want to know if it solves my problem.

Quick information for those who need: The kernel is a huge piece of software in your computer system that manages the things that you don’t see, like what happens when an application wants to read a file, etc. It of course plays its role in managing the battery, so I decided to try my luck from there.

Looking at the scroll bar, I think you guessed it - nope, that didn’t make the issue go away.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

One thing that makes Linux systems that customizable and powerful is how the system is structured - you can literally take out anything you don’t like and put something else in its place and have the thing work in the way you want. It’s also the main reason why Linux systems can be mind-boggling at times - things never work in one way and there are many solutions to one thing. So, I started to think if openSUSE did some modifications in one of the many parts of their system that finally became the main cause of the issue…

In my memory, Ubuntu Linux and Arch Linux didn’t gave me similar problems on the same laptop. Probably I should jump back to one of them (or one of their good derivatives) and see if the problem persists.

Since I don’t like how Arch Linux works (the dependencies are weird and the AUR is quite messy to use) and I don’t want stock Ubuntu either (it uses the GNOME desktop environment which I know my laptop will cry running it, it’s even heavier than Windows), I decided to go for a Linux distribution based off Ubuntu. After fiddling around with bootable USB devices and installation ISO images, I got KDE neon working on my laptop. It’s lightweight, fast, smooth, beautiful, and works just as expected - well, except some parts that are slightly different from what openSUSE Tumbleweed does, but I could ignore that.

(Wallpaper by どうどう-peas(綠色豌豆) on pixiv, just in case someone needs it.)

Most importantly, the battery charging problem that troubled me for months doesn’t seem to appear anymore.

I think I can consider it solved by now. I still don’t know what openSUSE did to their systems that caused the weird problem, and honestly I would want to try to find out the main cause and open a bug report on it. Tumbleweed is still one of my favourite Linux distros out there and I would want to return to it if possible. But, for now, I guess I should just try to tame KDE neon and put the bug finding effort later when I have a lot of time to spend.

Hopefully there will be no more continuations to this :) I should really put this laptop to the repair shop now, it needs a thermal paste replacement pretty badly.

And...yeah, see you around.

--Lilacse