Currently, running Debian Bullseye I had to use a workaround to get my wifi adapter working. Therefore I want to switch to Gentoo or Slackware if it recognizes my wifi adapter.

Wifi Adapter: Realtek rtl8821ce

OS: Debian Stable-NonFree "Bullseye"
System Name: Laptop-Debian
System Model: HP Laptop 15-db0xxx
System Type: x-64 PC
Processor: AMD A9-9425 Radeon R5
Memory: 4GB
Storage: 930GB
UEFI

Of the two above options, I'm most interested in which would work best for me. I don't mind learning new things to get it to work properly without using a workaround that's not supported by the operating system out of the box.

PS: I don't mind compiling from source code. Or Learning new things.
Pat

Gentoo will not recognize your adapter. Gentoo will not recognize anything. It is not what Gentoo is for. Gentoo is a set of tools to build your own GNU/Linux. That's all. It is you who must recognize your adapter and make it work if you use Gentoo.

2 members found this post helpful.

Fair enough but is it possible on this laptop, forgive my dense mind.

I will give you a nasty advice.

Go one step further and try Linux From Scratch: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Once upon time I wrote a little article about this, can be seen here, that is, if my internet is up. It is in my home router.

With Gentoo everthing gets compiled, will take a good length of time to install with only 4G of memory. Slackware is a complete system installed from packages, anything beyond the default system will need to be compiled

Not sure about those gaming laptops, never had one, but a regular laptop is not designed for sustained 100% load. This is what it gets when you build whole Gentoo, hours and hours of full load. My first Thinkpad died while compiling. Now I throttle down the CPU and use distcc as a precaution when running Gentoo upgrades in my laptop. May take a little longer with capped CPU, but it runs alot cooler.

Googling: rtl8821ce "slackware"
Will give you your answer!!!

Before you 'hop', try 2 things:
mll in (apt install) virtualbox.

Seriously, complete these first!!!

P. S. A Goo'e goldmine: linux HP Laptop 15-db0*
Fanatics love: Pop_OS! & Arch derivatives.

You might be able to change your laptops wifi/bluetooth if its m.2 adapter and not built into mobo.

Slackware 15 will work okay on that system 4gb of ram is terrible.be sure to setup a swap partition for memory.
Realtek devices usually depend on firmware slackware includes some non free firmware.

Some software for slackware will be found in slackbuild form.basicly have to compile it but slackbuild has scripts basicly that do the heavy lifting for ya.

your system would benefit from more ram and a ssd instead of old platter drive. I have a old Acer Asprire with A12 apu that came with m.2 adapter for bluetooth/wifi which was barely ac spec and wouldnt do full speed for n or ac wireless way under 300mbps
upgraded that. came with 8gb ddr4 and 1 tb platter drive. I boosted the memory to 32gb and put in a 1tb ssd. its way faster than before. I also changed out the lcd screen from hd 1280 x 768 to fhd 1920x1080.

Also you may want to lookup your hidden/advanced bios menu if HP doesnt include everything in bios menu everybody seems to have hidden/advanced section thats hidden by default.

Linux works fine with 2 GB of RAM. BTW, it is not gb (gram-bars), it is GB (gigabytes), literacy is not the strongest side for some. 4 GB is already deluxe for normal usage. Indeed, it depends on what you do with your computer. For compiling certainly 8 GB is better than 4 GB. You need up to 2 GB per one make job. With 8 GB you can safely run '-j3', with 4 GB you better stay at '-j2'.

Thank you so much for the advice and opinions.

plpip,

You have Arch Linux listed as one of your distros.

It appears that installing rtl8821ce-dkms-git does the trick in the following 2 distros.

1. In Arch Linux (via AUR):
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=271506

AUR:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rtl8821ce-dkms-git

2. Or, in EndeavourOS using:

https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/wifi...8821ce/6356/12

I run Slackware 15.0 on an old Compaq laptop with 4GB RAM and the original HD. It is fine, but I use xfce as the window manager, because loading KDE takes a bit too long. I can't comment on the wifi adapter. You can try a live version of Slackware from here:https://download.liveslak.org/

With all due respect you don't seem to know how what you are doing. The solution to your wifi card,in Debian, used to be to manually install the driver, because it wasn't in the kernel. That sounds like what you did. The solution now, in Debian, is to install the newest kernel from Debian's backports. I don't consider the latter to be a workaround. You talk a big game about using or wanting to use "elite distros" but it sounds like Lubuntu or Xubuntu is more your speed.

1 members found this post helpful.

I don't talk about a big game at all. And there is no such thing as Elite Distros. I have been trying out different Linux distros for the past two years. Before that, I ran NetBSD since the 2.0 release and I still run it on a 486 machine with 16mb of ram and 300mb harddrive as a gateway router for my home network. So I am not all that familiar with Linux. So I've tried Arch, Mint, Debian and Trisquel they are fine I just don't like sysctl command.

Article that I wrote back in the day: Here