Over my summer vacation I got myself a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H and an Nvidia RTX3070. Though this post is not about the legion, I have to say it is an awesome laptop. What this post is about is how to make Ubuntu with i3wm run on the Lenovo Legion.
Installing Ubuntu
Create Bootable USB Media
You need a USB stick as well as a Ubuntu ISO image. Plenty of tutorials exist on the web to create a bootable Ubuntu USB stick. Ubuntu.com provides official documentation, coming from a device running Windows, Ubuntu or Mac OS X.
Boot USB Media
Once you created your boot device, boot up the Legion and press F12 to get into the boot menu. From there, select the USB stick.
Next you are presented with the GRUB interface, where you have to select Ubuntu (safe graphics) and then press RETURN. After a while (length of the while depends on the speed of your USB stick) you should see a window asking whether you want to Try or Install Ubuntu. Select Install Ubuntu.
There is only one part in the installer you need to select a certain option to not run into issues. At some point you should be asked whether you want to have a Normal Installation or Minimal Installation. See this image in the official guide. In the bottom of the window, below Other options, you have to select Install third-party software. This is necessary to install the proprietary Nvidia driver. If you don’t, you will most likely be presented a black screen after booting into Ubuntu.
Finish the installation and reboot into Ubuntu.
i3
Install i3
Once you booted to your freshly installed Ubuntu, it is very straightforward to install i3. Run this command in your Terminal.
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sudo apt install i3
That’s already it.
Replace gdm
The next step is to replace GNOME Display Manager, abbreviated gdm. We will replace it with LightDM. It is as easy as installing i3.
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sudo apt install lightdm
At some point during the installation, a window pops up in your terminal, asking you to select your display manager. In the list, use the arrow keys to navigate to lightdm and hit RETURN to confirm.
If you ever want to go back to gdm, you can do so by running below command.
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sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm3
Why replace gdm?
This is the part where I ran into a problem that may only be with my setup. When having multiple screens connected (1 over HDMI, 1 over Lenovo Dock), I could login to i3 but then everything was frozen. But it was not Linux that froze, as I could tell from the clock continuing to run. Logging into Gnome worked though. Also, logging into Gnome before logging into i3 made it work. But neither do I want to use Gnome nor do I want to take extra steps every time I boot Linux. So I tried back and forth, and the only way I got this to work is to use lightdm over gdm.
The fact that I wasted quite some time on this motivated me sharing a short blog post. Using a different display manager might not suit everyone, but probably for most users this does the job.