Good day to you all,
This isn’t supposed to be a review, but I’d like to input in some of my thoughts for the Matebook D14 (intel i7, 16GB ram). Before buying this PC I was wary of huawei’s ridiculous prices for their laptops, and have scoured reddit for reviews regarding its performance on linux. I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts as well as problems I have still yet not found any fixes for here. Hopefully, we can solve them together, and people would know that there is people who tried installing Linux, in this case Manjaro for the Matebook D14 intel variant.
Installation
Installation require unchecking the secure boot option on Huawei’s BIOS, before running the live installation USB.
First install was coupled with many issues, as I have checked many weird things, and have not chosen non-free drivers for the WiFi, and Ethernet. I have setup the partitions to have a hibernation swap, and the normal partition that comes with the system. However, the installation has issues from random wifi disconnects to not showing wifi at all (iwlwifi drivers not found). This caused me to try most tutorials on the forum without any success unfortunately; hence fresh installing the operating system. (Psst: I was running an unsupported kernel that came with manjaro, but couldn’t remember the number, It was neither 5.9 or 5.8).
Now to the 2nd install, I have reset my bios into factory settings just to make sure that there is no options I have unchecked for some of the tabs, and proceeded to disable only secure boot. I ran the installation CD, and luckily, it was installing properly, and was able to choose non-free drivers. This caused the laptop to work better than before, with better display settings, and WiFi has not had any issues since. I have even tried using a USB-C to Ethernet dongle to make sure that everything is working properly, and what do you know? everything is running perfectly. I have used the Application center thing (GUI) to update all kinds of software, and it hanged for a while there with no progress at all. I have read about this here on the forums, and proceeded to format to fresh install again.
3rd fresh install, I have applied everything from above exactly, and it was working perfectly, however, I chose to update the programs, and kernels from the pacman -Syu command. I have not believed that the command has updated everything successfully without one issue (this pacman is powerfullllll).
By the way I am running Linux kernel 5.9 stable on the device for whomever is curious.
Jokes aside,
Running the laptop was a breeze, too bad the touchpad is rough so you can’t really do much like those macbooks’ touchpads. Battery life is nice, it gives you 6.5 hours worth of battery life when watching anime online, or youtube. 3-4 hours on virtualbox.
Now to the problems that exist within the laptop:
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When using the touchpad, it registers a normal click as click, hold and drag; so it randomly selects, and highlights everything without me intentionally doing it. So usually you should press hard and drag to select.
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After few sleeps or actions of closing and opening the lid (computer sleep), you are normally greeted with a login screen. Trying to login with the correct password doesn’t work, and registers it as wrong password after computer sleep. Only way to resolve it was by pressing the power button until it suddenly closes (force power off).
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Last issue that I have encountered was when watching anime, I have went to bar below and pressed on the drop down terminal. After pressing it 2 - 4 times, the mouse pointer dissapears in the menu bar of that’s what it is called, but reappears upon hovering away from it. I have tried to open the terminal using ( Ctrl + Alt T), but nothing came up, and the system hanged or freezed to be exact. I closed the lid hoping it would solve the problem, but again i was greeted by a grey screen with no gui or anything indicating signs of fix . I attempted to forcibly power off the machine as I only excel at that when problems occur.
Hopefully, we could fix those issues together, and help serve whomever is going to use a matebook in the future.
If you require any outputs or information, please do not hesitate to reply. I will do my best to share whatever information is necessary to those issues.
Also, if you have any general questions about the laptop, please go ahead and ask!
I look forward to hearing from you soon!