Updated 2025-07-28
This is a short post about running Ubuntu 24.04 on the Acer nitro ANV15-41 aka Nitro V15. If you are interested in previous post about installing Ubuntu on various laptops, maybe check out Acer Nitro 5, HP ProBook, Asus VivoBook, Lenovo Thinkpad and HP Victus.
Installation
Installation from an USB SSD worked fine albeit excruciatingly slowly – it’s best to perform a minimal installation without updates and install updates and additional software after rebooting from the laptop’s internal SSD.
Hardware quality
Not Linux-related, but since I’m writing this anyway…. the housing quality is ok, as is the (backlit!) keyboard albeit a bit wobbly. The stroke distance is fine. The 1920×1080 screen contrast isn’t as good as on the Victus, colours are a bit warm – the screen isn’t this laptop’s strength and it barely reads in sunlight. Screen brightness is adjustable, but can’t be dialled down enough for working comfortably in the dark.
What works
Overall, Ubuntu on the Nitro is fine. It runs stable, the integrated Wifi, sound, microphone, USB ports, Bluetooth, keyboard backlight and camera work. Video runs well, the few games I’ve tried, too. Fn shortcuts work well, too. Screen brightness can be adjusted. Wifi is fast, at 5Ghz it surpasses 60 MB/s. A quick disk read benchmark with dd clocked around 3,4 GB/s. Computing on the nvidia GPU works well – I’m running plenty of Ollama containers on it!
Unknown
I have not tried HDMI output.
Issues
Power saving: the laptop won’t wake up from sleep when the Nouveau driver is installed. That issue is partially resolved by installing the proprietary Nvidia driver v570, but resuming from standby remains a coin toss. Update 2025-07-08: standby/resume absolutely doesn’t work with the nvidia driver. I decided to go without it.
External microphone: since about a week, external analogue microphones aren’t recognised when plugged into the jack connector.
Noise: fans come up on even the slightest load, I’m running the laptop mostly in power saving mode, except for the few times I’m installing or compiling something.
Text size: the default 100% screen scaling renders UI elements too small for my old eyes, the alternative 200% scaling too large. I tried 125% fractional scaling, which is a mess – the UI is slow, video is unstable and programme windows sometimes just vanish.
George's Techblog 