Sorry in advance for writing a book here, but I’m frustrated with Parrot, Debian, and Linux as a whole. I’m trying to break away from Windows and want to migrate to Linux. I don’t know a lot about Linux, so I wanted to set up a dual boot system so I can learn Linux, but if something comes up that I need to get done and haven’t yet learned in Linux I can boot to Win10. I keep running into one issue after the next though, and it really hasn’t been working out.
I started out trying to install Pentoo because I’m an amateur radio operator and wanted to get into SDR. My SDR has a lot of tutorials and it recommends Pentoo. I couldn’t get it installed. I tried Gentoo thinking if I could get that working I could install the tools I want that are in Pentoo, but had the same issues.
I then tried Kali, and it’s the one distro that’s worked! But I’ve read that it’s not good to have as a primary operating system since it runs in root, so decided against it after about a week.
I then moved to some others like Zorin, Ubuntu etc. (even though there aren’t many tutorials about them for use with Software Define Radios), and two of them worked initially, but I ran into issues with the dual boot set up. The computer would turn on and load grub, and let me select the Win or linux OS, and if I selected Linux it would work, I could turn the system off and it would restart to grub, but if I selected Windows, when I would finish my session and turned the computer off, upon restarting I would find Windows automatically changed my boot settings to load windows. I spent about a week working on it, and found Refind. I installed it in the EFI partition, which fixed the problem for about 2 weeks. Then about 2 weeks later Windows updated, and changed things, and the problem came right back. I tried reinstalling Refind and everything else about 10 times, it wouldn’t work, and I ended up giving up.
After a year, I’m trying again, and starting to regret it. I’m now trying Parrot (I’ve tried MATE and KDE) home version and sec, but can’t get my network card to work. Intel AC 8270. I’m reading online that the driver is the same as the Intel AC 8260 according to a few forums I’ve found. I’ve followed directions and put the Linux driver (iwlwifi-8265-22.ucode)(from the intel website) on a flash drive during my several attempts to install Parrot, but every time I get the same error that everyone else has listed on forums, which is something like “ethernet adapter not found”
I tried Debian since Parrot is based on it, and ran into the same problem, but at least with Debian (most current stable version) it gave more detail as to what drivers are missing iwiwifi-8265 drivers (which is the one I’ve been trying to install by putting on a flash drive during the USB install with the full versions of Debian and also Parrot)(I’ve tried putting the extracted driver from the intel website in the root of install flash drive, which didn’t work, and also on a separate flash drive which didn’t work).
My questions are, is there any Linux OS out there that a new user can attempt to learn Linux with that is more or less capable of operating out the box? (I’ve tried multiple types of virtual machines within Windows, each with their own issues). Not trying to complain, but if I was to put all of the time I’ve spent trying to get a dependable and functional Linux OS on my computer, including all of the forums I’ve spent time reading, I’ve probably spent a good 500 hours without any luck (aside from Kali which runs as root). What makes it more difficult is answers and questions I’m reading in forums are typically geared to those with experience in Linux, and it makes it hard for someone to even get to that level of being experienced if they can’t even get a Linux operating system running dependably. I’d also consider myself computer tech savvy, albeit in terms of windows, but have enough ability to usually learn new things. Some people have mentioned in forums that they have got their systems running (The same system as mine, Huawei Matebook X, with Intel AC-8270 adaptor), but different people are telling them in the forums to download all these different drivers and things to try, but from my experience, I’m not used to just downloading and installing a bunch of random things that people say to download and install in internet forums not knowing if they are trust worthy. How do people know which places to download drivers and programs from for Linux that can be trusted? Do the developers of distros like Debian or Parrot update their distros to include such drivers to work upon install at a certain point? (It’s been out for over a year, and Kali put it in their install package). Any advice on how to actually get this this driver installed and how to do it by discerning that the downloads involved are from a dependable source? Thank you in advance.
