Mint 19 on Coffee Lake Running Okay?

[Acheron]

I am thinking about building a new system with the latest Gen Intel processor (Coffee Lake), using the on chip graphics.
Still undecided whether to do a new build with the more established Kaby Lake, and even that platform seems to still have issues from time to time.
So the question is, are there any happy Mint 19 users on Coffee Lake, running with a plain install with just the minor upgrade to Kernel 4.15.0-23 without having to jump trough hoops to get it going?

I'm sure other people about to make the jump would like to know too!

Thanks in advance for your input.

[xenopeek]

Coffee lake was released 10 months ago and Intel generally have kernel drivers in place before chips are released; fine tuning and fixing any bugs in the months after release. So you can expect it to work without issues on Linux kernel 4.15.

I'd be more cautious with the motherboard components. Check its audio and network chips. You generally want Realtek audio chip (like ALC1220) and Intel ethernet chip (like WG-I219V) for Coffee lake. Those have the best support on Linux. If the motherboard also has wifi and bluetooth that might be a bit of a gamble.

Things like suspend and power saving may have some issue as per usual due to lack of good support on Linux for this from manufacturers.

[Acheron]

I am thinking about building a new system with the latest Gen Intel processor (Coffee Lake), using the on chip graphics.
Still undecided whether to do a new build with the more established Kaby Lake, and even that platform seems to still have issues from time to time.
So the question is, are there any happy Mint 19 users on Coffee Lake, running with a plain install with just the minor upgrade to Kernel 4.15.0-23 without having to jump trough hoops to get it going?

I'm sure other people about to make the jump would like to know too!

Thanks in advance for your input.

Well I got the answer to my question and thought I would share it. I was able to borrow a i7-8700 system and just tested it with the UHD 630 on chip graphics.
Unless you want to do lots of futzing around with kernels and MESA PPA's, Linux Mint 19 at the Kernel~4.15.0-23 level is just not ready yet. It is not Mint, its the stack it is on. There were graphics issues (flickering) in SuperTuxKart and I never saw that before on a Kaby Lake system. Also, unless you are going to step up to M.2 NVMe drive, things are just not going to run noticeably faster than a high end SATA SSD on a i7-4790, my other computer.

The real shocker was the performance wasn't a quantum leap from a well configured AMD A8-5500 APU based system - Samsung_SSD_850 with 16 GB of Dual Channel DDR3 memory. With 6 cores and 12 threads and the newer UHD 630 on chip graphics, I expected it to run rings around the older system with the same Samsung_SSD_850 in it just doing ordinary tasks like installing and unpacking files. Looks like SATA III is the real limiting factor and Linux does a good job on older machines.

And because the new machine spent so much time in firmware with all the ACPI errors, the two older machines actually booted faster.

I think I will stay with the two older computers for every day use.

[Neil Darlow]

I've just built a system with the following specification:

Code: Select all

CPU: Intel Core i5-8400 2.8GHz
Motherboard: ASUS Prime Z370-P
RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200
HDD: 4TB Western Digital Blue
SSD: Samsung 970 Evo 500GB NVMe M2.2
Graphics: ASUS Cerberus GTX-1050 Ti OC 4GB DDR5
Wireless: Wircard RTL8821ae Dual Band PCIe with Bluetooth 4.0

The system boots via UEFI and has /usr on the NVMe SSD. All partitions (/ and /usr) are BTRFS.
Integrated graphics worked fine throughout the install and post-install configuration. Afterwards I installed the NVIDIA graphics driver and have had no issues.
The RTL8821ae Wireless Card required disabling of ASPM in UEFI and addition of the "pci=nomsi" kernel option.
Onboard audio works out-of-the-box.

The performance of this system is excellent and Tara has been running very well on it.