I'm trying to get Linux working on a Lenovo Legion 5 with a Ryzen 7 processor and RTX 5060. Ubuntu worked otherwise, but the screen brightness controls had no effect. I then tried Fedora, where the laptop freezes during shutdown and reboot, forcing me to hold the power button. I've already tried troubleshooting with an AI assistant without success. What should I check next? I need a reliable setup for college.
3 Answers
First, check Linux compatibility for your exact Legion model and verify which graphics driver is active. Legion laptops can need model-specific settings, especially with hybrid AMD/NVIDIA graphics. There are community-maintained Lenovo Legion Linux guides that cover drivers, power management, backlight control, and shutdown issues. Fedora’s freeze may be related to the kernel or graphics driver rather than the distribution itself. If Ubuntu was otherwise usable, try it again with the latest available kernel, since some recent Ubuntu kernels had a backlight regression that was fixed in a newer update.
You could also test a setup with the proprietary NVIDIA driver selected during installation, and consider an X11 desktop session because NVIDIA support can sometimes be less troublesome there than under Wayland. That said, switching distributions alone may not fix the problem if the underlying issue is a kernel, firmware, or hybrid-graphics configuration. Back up your files and test one distribution carefully with current updates before changing again.
The Lenovo Legion Linux project may be useful for identifying the required settings. For some NVIDIA configurations, brightness control can work after adding the appropriate NVIDIA registry parameter to the GRUB kernel command line, then updating GRUB and rebooting. However, the correct setting depends on the exact laptop model and whether the display is driven by the NVIDIA GPU or the integrated AMD graphics.
If the laptop is currently using only the integrated GPU to save battery, an NVIDIA-specific brightness parameter may not help. First confirm which GPU is driving the display and test the matching backlight method.
I’m going to try Ubuntu again and focus on getting that setup stable, since I need it working for college.