Today I was installing Debian on the old laptop of my sister-in-law. We bought it in first place in 2016 for my daughter, with Windows 10, “because of compatibility”, because at school they “required” the proprietary OS. Then we discovered that it wasn’t required that much so I installed Ubuntu in multi-boot with Windows, and I had to resolve using too many UEFI enchantments I couldn’t remember today to enable multi-boot. Then it ended up being used by my sister-in-law as she actually required Windows to work during the lockdowns and we got a better laptop for my daughter in 2021. These days she told us that it tooks minutes just to open a browser windows and it was slow as hell. Of course. it got 4GB of RAM and the CPU is a Core Duo.
I just tell you that it takes almost 30 seconds to start booting. Not booting. Just to load GRUB. Using it with Windows is a real pain. It was really unbearable slow. So Windows had to go since she luckily don’t require Windows anymore.
I backed up her data, mainly videos and photos related to her Ju-Jitsu courses and erased everything. I wanted something lighter than Ubuntu. Debian with XFCE, coupled with ZRam, the compressed RAM-based block devices which is a boon for memory starved machines such as this.
I downloaed the Debian installer – the version I have on an USB stick was two released old and I discovered that I shall have tweaked that machine a little too much, or that my knowledge of the infamous UEFI is lacking as I hit the “MokManager mmx64.efi Not Found” error. I shall thank Nav for his solution that basically is renaming “boot/grubx64.efi” into “boot/mmx64.efi” in the EFI partition on the USB stick.