As the title suggests, I have installed Majaro-i3. I’ll post more about that later. First, I wanted to record the solution to my first big problem. I don’t know to what extent it is unique to my setup.

My laptop is a Matebook X Pro. I couldn’t get the Calamares installer to work with LUKS so I used Architect (thank you i3 Community Team for including both) to install the i3 edition. I don’t know if that results in a different setup than the graphical installer. I also automatically installed the free drivers. (Edit: this also happens if you manually install the video-linux package which has both the i915 and nouveau driver).

After the install, everything was working well except that when I tried to exit i3, reboot, or shutdown, the computer would freeze and the CPU fan would kick on. The logs were unhelpful although it was clear that the computer was indeed shutting down. journalctl showed that the X session was ending and all the expected shutdown/reboot events were firing.

There were three notable errors:

1. The Intel graphics driver (i915) was printing “Atomic update failure on Pipe A”
2. The Nvidia graphics driver (nouveau) was printing a whole series of errors intermittently
3. There was a kernel error: “watchdog: BUG: soft lockup – CPU# stuck for 22s!”

Researching the third error turned up a bunch of posts about nouveau. So 2/3 pointed that way. I created a file called /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-blacklist.conf with the following contents:

blacklist nouveau
blacklist rivafb
blacklist nvidiafb
blacklist rivatv
blacklist nv
blacklist uvcvideo

Rebooted and things work fine.

Blacklisting is a bit of an extreme solution since I might want to get the hybrid graphics working at some point. On the other hand, the i915 is more than capable of handling my normal workload.