So 3 months ago, I decided to get a Linux distro installed on my terrible HP Victus laptop. Usually for Linux I tend to choose PopOS or Kubuntu, two pretty good distros, but the last time I tried Kubuntu I found that it's stuck on a very old version of KDE Plasma, meanwhile PopOS has been in a limbo state ever since System76 started working on their new desktop environment, COSMIC. Since I don't really like Ubuntu's reliance on snaps (the app packaging format), I decided I was gonna use Fedora instead. I really do like Fedora. It has the (IMO) best implementation of KDE Plasma on any distro, it also has some more modern stuff like Wayland and Pipewire by default and they work pretty well. In the past I used X11 and I honestly didn't have a good experience at all, especially on multi monitor setups. I would encounter annoying problems all the time , and honestly Wayland on NVIDIA is pretty good nowadays.

obligatory desktop screenshot, wallpaper is this one: here
also obligatory fastfetch screenshot, with a bunch of bullshit windows to act like you actually do work on linux instead of rebooting to windows like a normal person /j

Issues

So during this time, I encountered a number of issues, some small, others quite significant.

Sleep issues galore

Been struggling with so much sleep/suspend issues for the past three months, usually everything runs smoothly until something happens, it could be an update, which breaks sleep and I now have to figure out a way to fix and find the solution. First it started off as just needing to adjust some settings in GRUB, which would work but not really, sometimes my laptop would refuse to wake up after being put to sleep. Eventually that got fixed, but now I found a bigger problem: I can't suspend the laptop anymore. Basically I press the sleep button inside the OS, the screen goes black for a moment, and then a couple seconds later, I am encountered with the lock screen. The most frustrating thing is that sometimes, it does work and go to sleep! But other times, it'll just do the thing mentioned above. I seem to found a correlation to the issue: it seems to happen almost after connecting my laptop to charge, which somehow breaks suspend and it doesn't work until I do a full reboot.

Music players on Linux kinda suck

So for context, on Windows I use Musicbee for my music listening needs, it is great, it has cool features like plugins and themes and whatever, and also supports a large number of last.FM features like scrobbling, the "loved" system actually can sync with last.FM loved tracks thing, so if I mark a song as "loved", it would also appear on last.FM that way. Musicbee also handles song ratings, you can display custom fields when displaying a list of songs, among other features. The problem is that Musicbee does not support Linux and I don't think it will ever get a Linux version, since what I can tell, the program uses a number of features that are exclusive to Windows. This means that I would have to find a replacement if I want to use Linux full time, which is something I want to reach in the future. Here is Lug's review of some of the music players I tried out:

shitty meme i made a while ago when i was pissed off at this lmao.

Strawberry

For the most part, Strawberry is really decent all things considering: it has decent library features, it has support for last.fm scrobbling, among other things, but it lacks a lot of features I want like synced lyrics support. There is no extra last.fm features, no plugins and no skins. However it is pretty okay, it isn't like it is missing anything crucial.

Strawberry music player. It is probably the best music player on Linux right now.
another screenshot, real
Strawberry can't read LRC files, but apparently it can read embedded lyrics. Still can't show them synced however.

Harmonoid

So someone in a forum somewhere called this player "slick nothingness" and honestly I can't figure out any other way to describe it. It looks really good, it actually has synced lyrics support (holy shit!), and it also has some last.fm features. But sadly, it lacks so much: it doesn't have ratings, no custom fields on music lists, has really basic library features, and has no plugins or themes. Also the killer issue: it fucking eats of 20% of my CPU by just playing music. I don't know why it eats up so much CPU, but when I saw this happening, it was pretty much the last straw: I uninstalled the player and went back to Strawberry for most music playing tasks.

I like Harmonoid's look, but it lacks a lot of features to use it daily.
Synced lyrics!!!!

Fooyin

Looks really promising, however since it is in early development, it is still very undercooked. Also it updates really slowly: the last update for the player was back in October. Supposedly there are plans to get a plugin system working, but for now it seems that there hasn't been anything released yet. Ratings work as you expect it to be sometimes (other times, it fails to update however).

I do like Fooyin, and how you can sort everything around. Sadly, there are too many missing features to use it right now (at least for me)

Elisa

Elisa is the default music player on KDE plasma. At a first glance it looks pretty good, it has support for lyrics files, ratings (not sure what it saves it as, or if it keeps ratings saved on a local database), and has a design that is easy to follow and understand. However it lacks last.fm support, and of course doesn't have any support for plugins or skins. Also I am not sure if this is a me problem, or is Elisa always this unstable? I tried loading up my usual music library, and while it works, it is very slow and sometimes likes to crash. Also, it doesn't like custom icon packs, which makes the icons look missing and other stuff.

Elisa looks good, but use any other icon pack that isn't default Breeze and you will see the horrors...
behold! synced lyrics!!! Note some characters are screwed up, not sure why.

"Fuck it, just run Musicbee on WINE"

I tried running Musicbee in WINE a couple of times, only to end up encountering errors and other fun stuff. Characters are missing, so you end up in cases for some songs that have Japanese writing would be missing their fonts. The player would also crash and burn out of nowhere, sometimes it is because I tried playing music normally, other times it is because I scrolled down too fast. One thing is for sure, WINE is very very hit or miss and will work or not depending on the time of day.

more notes on linux music players:

Was looking through some notes and found this lmao. this is my opinion btw, please don't kill me.

Battery? What battery?

I wasn't expecting spectacular battery life, but holy hell is the battery life very poor. The once three hours of battery I used to get on Windows on this very laptop, was now cut down to one and a half to two hours on Linux. What's more is that the only way I can manage to bring this number up was by essentially setting my battery settings to "battery saver", an option that makes some apps slow down to a crawl. Maybe there are ways to make this better, or maybe this is how it is on Linux.

Taskbar freezing when coming back from suspend

So when suspend actually decides to work, once I wake up the system from sleep, and log in, I find myself with a frozen taskbar that stays frozen for a couple of seconds. Sometimes, it is only for a couple of seconds, other times however the taskbar will stay frozen until I go to the system monitor and force close the plasmashell process. Not sure of what it could be, but every time this happens, the audio device popup stays stuck on screen.

Filen causes Dolphin to freeze for some reason

So a couple months ago, I decided to switch my cloud storage to Filen, since I got sick and tired of MEGA's stupid limits like "oh you exceeded your 2GB transfer cap? Pay up!". So Filen seemed pretty decent at the time. However, if you try to mount Filen as web storage, it will make Dolphin freeze for 30 or more seconds until something in the background finishes whatever it was doing and it goes back to normal. The solution was pretty easy: just don't mount Filen as a web share. I don't use it enough anyways.

Conclusion or whatever

Not sure how to finish this exactly. Been happy with my Linux experience so far, and I do want to try out Fedora on my main computer more. I haven't done that because of it is my computer and when I usually want to play games I tend to just want to play games and not have to worry if the game will decide to launch or not. I should be clear that Linux gaming has been very good, but there are cases where the game crashes or something weird happens and I don't know what caused it. While on the laptop, I still need to figure out the random sleep issues. Sometimes it shows up, and sleep doesn't work, other times it does work and other times if I close the lid on this laptop, suddenly sleep works! Other times if I do the same thing, it remains on. Something is up, and I have no idea why. Journalctl doesn't show me anything obvious sadly. If nothing shows up, I will continue to use Linux on this laptop for now and for the foreseeable future. I don't think Windows would get better anytime soon, lmao.

Tangent 1: foobar2000 and Linux

So apparently foobar2000 runs great on WINE and it works perfectly on Linux, however, I tried foobar on Windows and my god the learning curve is more like a learning cliff: I couldn't wrap my head around how foobar works, so I ended up giving up. Maybe in the future, I would probably figure something up perhaps.

Tangent 3: PEAK (the game), and damn that FOMO hitting different now

Welp it seems that everyone I know is playing Peak (is it PEAK, name in all caps? idfk) now, the sad thing is that: I don't have any money to buy the damn game (what not having a job does to a mf). And worse: that FOMO is starting to hit hard now, apparently the game is actually fun and most of the people I know are playing together and shit and I am just there like:
And I bet the second I finally buy the game the next friendslop game will drop and the stupid cycle will start again. ISTG I am being very tempted to simply pirate the damn game at this point, apparently multiplayer works somehow.