I want to move to Zorin, but there appears to be issues

Hello Everyone.
I am kind of tired of Windows 11, i am considering moving to Zorin, as it is the most good looking OS out there in my opinion.
Thing is, my laptop is kinda complicated.

Here is the link to my machine:
Stealth 16 Mercedes-AMG Motorsport A13V – Luxury Gaming Experience (msi.com) I have the VG version.

I installed the OS on a USB, and ran it and here are some concerns:

  1. Appears, that it shows my Intel Graphics, machine runs on 2 GPU's the integrated and a dedicated 4070, now, it does appear to know there is a Nvidia GPU in it, but on about page, it showed the Intel XE. Will Zorin be able to switch between dedicated and integrated automatically, so i don't have to do it?
  2. While I was able to connect to wifi, i think Wifi 6 wasn't present, I have a killer Wifi AX1675i, with wifi 6E, am I going to be able to take advantage of that?
  3. I got a IR blaster for windows hello, will i be able to utilise it? Could not get that option from USB installer.
  4. There is a fingerprint reader on the laptop, will that work?
  5. How will the TB4 port perform?

Thank you in advance for your support and help.

I'm no expert in two GPU's, but I think the answer is no. However there's an easy switch to use on Gnome DE -
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5009/gpu-profile-selector/

It's hit or miss in most cases. A search on these forums shows it well.

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About 1, you can right-click on any application icon and choose "Start with dedicated video card". There is also the NVIDIA X Server Settings application where you can view/change the settings.

You can install some command line utility like inxi to display detailed machine information.

inxi -b will display many details including graphics cards.

image

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If you are afraid Zorin can't handle the specs of your machine you can also look at MX Linux with AHS (advanced hardware support). They have a forum that is almost as friendly as this one. And the devs of that distro are on the forum regularly. You can post your machine info there and they can probably tell you what will work and what won't if any.

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Thank you. See, this is what makes Linux so complicated, I have a feeling, I will spend days trying to get my stuff to work! :frowning:

It may not be as hard as you think. I have installed MX Linux KDE on 4 machines now and each time it has found and correctly installed all the drivers for whatever was on each machine. It even found my network printer and asked if that was the printer I wanted to use. When I said okay it then installed the drivers for that printer and when I printed a test page it worked fine.

You can try it out with a USB stick just like you have tried out Zorin.

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As a follow up to my previous post. MX Linux has a very helpful feature built in to the OS. You go to the MX tools menu and near the bottom of that menu is an app called QSI or quick system info. When you click that a window opens that loads up all your hardware and driver info. At the bottom of that window is a button to click on that copies the info into a format for the MX forum.

If you are having a problem you can start a post in the hardware configuration section of the forum. After you describe your problem, then below that you just click on paste and your info is included into your post. Then someone on the forum can easily see what you have and recomment a solution. If you browse the MX forum you can see that method being used a lot.

I wish other OSes had that feature.

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