Hello to all!
I just got a brand new Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Series 3511 laptop. Came with Windows (ugh!) preinstalled.
My old Dell Inspiron 15 3000 Series 3542 laptop (made in 2014) just died. So this one should work, right?
No.
Unfortunately the new 3511 is quite different from the old 3542. It mostly "sort of" works.
But the sound will not work at all on Debian.
Not wanting to immediately remove Windows and thus make it unreturnable, I have been trying to run it using a
Debian 11 "Live" install USB thumb drive (Cinnamon desktop). No sound at all.
But . . . it DOES work when running the computer from a USB thumb drive of the most recent version of
SystemRescue! So, it CAN work (somehow) on (some) Linux setups.
Note: System Rescue is now based upon Arch Linux.
Using the Debian 11 USB thumb drive, I was not able to do a complete update and upgrade - not enough room on the
USB thumb drive. I was able to install the pavucontrol package, which I recall has sometimes helped in the past.
But still no sound.
The dumbed-down make-believe BIOS on the new computer lists the Audio Controller as:
"Cirrus Logic CS8409".
SystemRescue reports under PCI devices:
Intel Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Technology Audio Controller.
"Driver in Use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel, snd_sof_pci_intel_tgl".
In Debian 11 "Live", lspci -nn reports:
"00:1f.3 Audio device [0403]: Intel Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Technology Audio Controller [8086:a0c8] (rev 20)".
I poked around in the Debian wiki about fixing sound problems, but to be honest, much of it is over my head.
So . . . any advice on how to get sound to work on this computer?
Or, failing that, any suggestions for a good (preferable affordable) laptop that plays nice with Debian?
I guess I could try to use Arch or some other Linux distribution, but I have used Debian for many years, and would
really hate changing to something else.