I recently bought an LG GRAM 16 and I really enjoy that (I’ll blog about that in the near future, hopefully). I had no problems installing Linux, nor with Manjaro Gnome (Phavo) neither with Kubuntu.

However, in Manjaro Gnome I soon started to note some lags, especially with the touchpad and some repainting issues. I had no problems with Kubuntu (it was 21.04). The main difference was that Manjaro was using Linux kernel 5.13, while Kubuntu 21.04 was using Linux kernel 5.11. As soon as I updated to Kubuntu 21.10, which comes with Linux kernel 5.13, I started to have the same problems also in Kubuntu.

Long story short: switching to Linux kernel 5.14 on both systems solved all the problems 🙂

In Manjaro you can use its kernel management system. Alternatively, from the command line, you can run

On (K)ubuntu things are slightly more complicated because the current version 21.10 does not provide a package for kernel 5.14.

However, you can manually download the DEB files of the kernel (and kernel headers) from the mainline repository https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/. Then, you run dpkg -i on all such downloaded files. However, I prefer to use a nice GUI for such mainline kernels, mainline, https://github.com/bkw777/mainline. It’s just a matter of adding the corresponding PPA repository and installing it:

The GUI application is called “Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer”. You select the kernel you want (in this case I’m choosing the latest version of the stable 5.14 version) and choose Install. Reboot and you’re good to go 🙂