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I suppose all things come to an end. And the thing that is coming to an end is my HP Victus, which is a laptop that I owned for nearly 3 years or so. It was always a shitty laptop, one that was built like shit, and it was a laptop that really didn’t want to run Linux. This laptop had audio issues and suspend issues and I just couldn’t figure out the actual cause of these problems. Battery life was also mediocre on the HP Victus, especially when running Linux. Despite these pitfalls, I really did like this laptop. There was something about this laptop that I liked, maybe it was that high refresh rate screen, or maybe it is the fact this laptop is significantly more powerful compared to the laptops I had in the past.

Things change, however, and I realized that I don’t really need a laptop of this size, or a laptop at all. At this time, I have no real need of a portable x86 computer (for now), and using this laptop around the house was more of a hassle than it was worth. Also, I needed money because of some things happening, so we end up with me selling this laptop.

Being honest here, this laptop always kinda sucked at running Linux. Suspend not working was always the major issue, like either the laptop never slept when you asked it to, or the laptop would end up stuck in this weird state where the laptop was trying to sleep, but ends up locked up in this endless loop of being locked up, and the only real way to get the laptop responding again is with a hard reset (aka, pressing the power button until something happened). I would have these cycles where the laptop would work just fine, where everything would seem to work with no issues, but then some sort of update would occur, or I would make some sort of change to the OS, which would cause the laptop to start misbehaving. The most recent issue I had on this laptop was Pipewire not working anymore after an update, and the only real way to get this working again is by restarting Pipewire. Journald pointed that there was something in the waking up from suspend process that wasn’t allowing Pipewire to start. The problem later progressed to the point where after waking up from suspend, audio will simply not work anymore, and even if I restarted the Pipewire system, nothing would happen. The only way to fix this was a full reboot.

Another issue with these gaming laptops is dealing with two GPUs. Linux sucks at this1, and updates often left the NVIDIA GPU unusable, and the OS often didn’t tell you the issue. As mentioned in a post a while ago, I had for the longest time this issue where the system would boot up just fine, and then when I tried to log in, the driver would fail to load any graphics at all. It is strange, and the only way I managed to fix this was by reinstalling the drivers for the NVIDIA GPU again.

I suppose if I ever get a new laptop in the future (if i am able to get one, especially with these fucking RAM prices), I should probably pick one with the most bog standard hardware that I can. Stuff like integrated Intel graphics, no fancy BIOS features, and from a manufacturer that slightly gives a shit about Linux. Thinkpads and Latitudes seem to be a great choice for Linux, and these can be found for somewhat cheap secondhand. I think I may also avoid dual graphics laptops like the plague, because the main issue I had on this laptop was specifically with the dedicated NVIDIA graphics.

In the meantime, I decided to keep using Linux on the main PC, which I barely use nowadays. Maybe it is just how tired I am for some reason, or the wrist pain, or the horrors, but I noticed that I barely even use the thing, aside from some occasional VC-ing with friends, or just playing games with friends or by myself or something. Who knows. Anyways, my main PC is a bog standard PC with no real special hardware (aside from some peripherals, but that will be touched on later), and aside from the NVIDIA GPU, everything should be able to run just fine on Linux. Hell, even that NVIDIA GPU worked last time when I was using Linux, with some issues on games, but I feel this time it may be different. Maybe performance is great and everything is just fine. Or maybe it is abysmally slow and it sucks or whatever. We’ll have to see.

the actual install process

Installing Linux as per usual on this PC was pretty painless. This time, I had no issues with the installer, and it was mostly smooth sailing, I was even able to get the boot drive encrypted with zero issues. Rebooting into the OS, I started installing apps, setting up shares, and the like.

I tried installing the NVIDIA drivers and I found that they would refuse to load. This smelled like a classic Secure Boot issue, but when I booted into the BIOS, I found the Secure Boot option disabled. I was pretty confused at this, and so the only other thing it could’ve been was probably the TPM chip somehow not allowing the NVIDIA drivers to load2. So I decided to disable it, and of course this tripped Bitlocker to lock me out from my Windows install. I was prepared for this, and I had the recovery code saved elsewhere, and after putting that in, it was all fine. After that, I was both able to boot into Windows no problem, and I was also able to get the NVIDIA drivers without any issues.

When it comes to installing programs again, this time I decided to avoInstalling Linux as per usual on this PC was pretty painless. This time, I had no issues with the installer, and it was mostly smooth sailing, I was even able to get the boot drive encrypted with zero issues. Rebooting into the OS, I started installing apps, setting up shares, and the like. id Flatpaks like the plague. The reason as to why is that I encountered too many issues with them in the past, with stuff like certain things not working at all, Also for the programs that didn’t offer a bulid in the default Fedora repos, I decided to add their COPR repos if they had them, so the OS can handle updates. Meanwhile, for those who don’t have any sort of repository, the move then was to use RSS feeds to notify me when a new update was out. This was useful for something like Veracrypt, which doesn’t offer any way to set up automatic updates.

I thought everything was fine, however there were two issues that cropped up and I had to figure out a way to solve them. The first one was with audio, where the audio playback had this random crackling, and it is more pronounced in video playback inside browsers and such. There wasn’t anything online regarding anyone having issues with the FiiO BTR5, so I started trying to see if there was like any Pipewire settings I can go and tweak, in order to stop the crackling. I think the funny thing is that, it managed to fix itself without any changes to the OS, so I guess there was some sort of update somewhere that fixed it.

While using Linux, I found two issues with graphics. NVIDIA is no stranger to strange fuck ass behavior on Linux, but honestly these days, the NVIDIA drivers for Linux are pretty solid, and work well enough under Wayland. But that is beside the point, the first incident was when both displays just kinda shut off at the same time, and when they came back to life, the secondary monitor was off, while the primary display turned on, but at a strange resolution, which was something like 640x480. The logs hinted at some sort of disconnection issue, where it seems like both monitors were disconnected and reconnected at the same time. The power LED also did the same too. My suspicions is that either the power regulator I have is going bad, it was a micro power outage that I’ve been seeing a lot recently, or it was some sort of driver issue. I really don’t know. I think the most likely issue was probably a power cut happening for a split second, which was something that I noticed happened when I was using Windows, and had a phone charging in front of me. As soon as the two monitors turned off, the phone also turned on as it stopped charging, which kinda told me what the real problem was.

The other incident was more serious in my opinion. So I was playing Minecraft, and while playing, I encountered an issue where the main display just shut off for a moment, and then it came back on. It also glitched a bit, and this has me thinking that either this is a issue with the drivers, or the SSD is going bad, or turning on Freesync on these monitors wasn’t a good idea. I honestly have no idea, lmao. I should mention that this has never happened on Windows, and playing Minecraft for like 30 minutes confirmed it. Turns out it is possible the GPU was overheating, since the fan curve for the GPU wasn’t really set properly. Just for good measure, I turned off Freesync on both monitors, just to save myself the pain.

Another issue that I had is with the SSD. I think this PNY SSD sucks. It is a DRAMless SSD which makes sense as to why it is this slow. Linux on that drive feels fast, but then if a thing that requires a shitload of writing happens, the system will stutter and slow down, and generally become unresponsive. This genuinely sucks. Because of this, I decided to ditch the original idea of using the PNY SSD and I would I instead use a Samsung SATA SSD which should be much better. It also has more storage too, 1TB vs 500 GB of the PNY drive.

the experience

Honestly the experience with Linux this time around has been pretty great. Linux seems pretty decent nowadays with Wayland and NVIDIA GPUs, and I didn’t find any major issues with graphics at all (aside from the ones mentioned above, which never happened again).

I decided to try gaming on Linux again, and it is smooth as to be expected. ULTRAKILL works just fine, meanwhile Minecraft also ran great, and it turns out simply copying the instances folder from the Windows install of ATLauncher and plopping them into the install folder in /home/user/.local/share/atlauncher/instances/ was enough to make it work. DOOM Eternal also seems to be working just fine, however I noticed a bunch of errors related to memory management, which from what I can tell, is a quirk with NVIDIA GPUs when they run out of memory.

KDE Plasma really has gotten really good these last couple of years. I remember when KDE Plasma was this DE that looked nice but had very poor stability, and stuff often crashed. But now, it is pretty solid. I guess it helps that I don’t customize stuff as much as I used to.

gaming

In one sentence: it is good.

Every time I try Linux, I am pretty amazed how far Proton has come along. I remember the only game it was able to run was Overwatch, but now it can pretty much run anything as long as there isn’t some bullshit anticheat on it. It is generally impressive to see how much it has improved in the last couple of years.

I tried a couple of games while writing this post: these games being ULTRAKILL, Slime Rancher 2, Beastieball, Deep Rock Galactic, Minecraft, and even Doom Eternal. Generally, most games ran just fine, especially with Slime Rancher 2 and Beastieball, these games run without any issues, and with performance similar to that found on Windows. ULTRAKILL had some worse performance, but it was still playable, and Doom Eternal also just ran fine. Minecraft, to no one’s surprise, ran as good, or occasionally better than Windows, and with the new Vulkan stuff in Minecraft, the performance is genuinely fucking insane, like it was crazy to see my FPS jump from 140~ish FPS to around 900 FPS. Also, Deep Rock Galactic when running on DX12 also runs just fine, and its performance is so close to Windows that I think I may just commit to running this game on Linux from now on.

I sadly still use Discord for friends and other stuff, therefore I need to keep Discord around (even if I fucking hate it), and a thing I sometimes do on Discord is to stream shit on a voice chat with friends. Streaming in Discord seems to work just fine (with Vesktop, not sure with the official client), however this isn’t without its issues, like for example, if you have an audio source that can be disconnected (like a DAC like the FiiO BTR5), if you disconnect it while streaming with audio, it can cause the whole system to hang up for a couple seconds while Vesktop figures everything out, and you may need to leave and rejoin the voice chat when that happens. It is pretty annoying, and I don’t really know a definitive solution for this problem, other then using the onboard audio that cannot be disconnected. Another thing is that, there are some strange issues with how Wayland streaming works nowadays. There really isn’t a way to just select only the audio from a specific app, so the only real way to stream stuff with audio is by selecting to use the whole system audio as the audio source, which can cause issues if I want to listen to music while streaming, and I don’t want my friends to hear that music. I know there are tools to manipulate how Pipewire works, so I may experiment with that soon.3

drawing in krita

I’ve been putting off drawing for quite a while now. I am not sure why, but I decided to try to use my time on Linux as an opportunity to try drawing shit on Linux.

However, the last time I used Linux, I had some issues with how the system handles the drawing tablet I have. There is nothing wrong with the drawing tablet itself, everything, even the pressure sensitivity works, but some issues arise with how the pointer interacts with the system. When drawing, i realize I tend to leave the canvas area (especially if I am trying to , which leads to the pointer going to the taskbar and then it will be stuck there, opening dialogue boxes and whatever until you grab the mouse and refocus Krita. Trying to search this problem is strangely difficult, since DuckDuckGo will confuse your search results with other, similar sounding, but ultimately wasn’t the same issue. I think the most simplest solution to this is to set Krita to full screen mode, in other words, basically avoiding the issue, altogether.

Sure enough, putting Krita in full screen does solve these issues, however there are some other things to keep in mind, since this does block a whole screen. I think it doesn’t really affect me because of like, drawing for me is a whole display kinda activity.

Another thing to mention is that, when a drawing tablet is connected, the OS thinks that there is a full touch screen somewhere, so what Plasma does is to show a virtual keyboard on both the lockscreen (kinda like how Windows 10 used to do it when it had the Huion drivers installed) and when clicking on text fields. There is an option in the settings for this, called Virtual Keyboard, and it is surprisingly easy to disable the keyboard this way. I should also mention that I haven’t installed any drivers at all, so none of that weird telemetry bullshit that is found on the tablet’s drivers on Windows.

handbrake weirdness

Something interesting that I found out is that, the version of Handbrake for Linux isn’t particularly great. The first thing that I noticed is that there was a lot of missing stuff, like a comparison of the size between handbraked files and the source file, or how the frameworks for both apps are different, one using native Windows UI, and the Linux version using some awful GTK shittiness. Or how I can’t configure Handbrake to automatically sort files out for me like in Windows. Apparently there are a shitload of features (per this thread on Github here) that are missing on Linux, and there isn’t much development happening due to the lack of interest or volunteers willing to put in the work to reach feature parity.

There is also the “just use the command line” route, because after all, what is Handbrake but a front end for ffmpeg, but I for sure do not feel confident enough to deal with the command line, or figure out a batch system that works or whatever. I feel it is just too much work, being honest here.

finally, a file browser that doesn’t suck ass

I hate the new tabbed Windows explorer. Its like it’s made specifically to piss people off, and it certainly has done that to me, since Explorer has frozen on me so many times, and every time it freezes, it takes the whole fucking UI shell with it. Any transfers that were going on are gone, and it also affects all other Explorer windows, making them close against their will. It is also notoriously slow, it sees 10000 files in a folder and it shits itself. Or at best, slow down to a crawl. Or refuse to load any sort of thumbnails, because fuck you. In other words, the Windows explorer is a mediocre experience.

Dolphin on the other hand feels good to use. It is more responsive, it responds to shortcuts faster, it has tabs, it has split view, it is customizable, and while it doesn’t allow you to group and sort by different sorting options, it is still pretty good.

Aside from that, Filen finally doesn’t lock up the whole file browser out of nowhere. I also decided to switch how I mounted SMB shares, since a lot of programs don’t support the “modern way” of doing things with XDG portals. I now mount them in my home directory, and this time, directly via fstab. Now it works 90% of the time, and for the times it doesn’t work, I can always run a sudo mount -a to get things working again. Not a perfect solution, but it is decent enough for now.

small yet annoying issues i would like to resolve

I would like to get the fingerprint reader USB dongle that I bought years ago, to work on Linux without any issues. Fingerprint readers in Linux almost never work, unless it is some ancient thing from 1998 or whatever. This being a modern little dongle thing, doesn’t work on Linux (i mean it “““works”““, and it will read your fingerprint, but it never is able to unlock your PC with that fingerprint at all.) The fingerprint reader is 100% a convenience feature, I don’t need it, but it is nice to have and to just sit down, put the finger on the reader, and have your PC unlock itself and be ready to go.

GPU fan control always felt pretty jank on Linux, however I found out that LACT, when installed as a system package (none of that Flatpak junk) actually seems to work flawlessly, and it seems that it may even allow me some semblance of fan control, which is something that it is hard to do on Linux for whatever reason. Modded games are another thing I want to try while running Linux, maybe I can try modding ULTRAKILL, PEAK, maybe even going back to Lethal Company with dozens of mods installed. Cities Skylines is also another game that I would like to try running on Linux, but this time with a curated set of mods that are confirmed to work on Linux, I also want to fix the issue where the system would end up locking up every time the RAM limit got to 100%.

Switch games are another thing I want to figure out. Yuzu is the main emulator I use on Windows, and I know there is a Linux version out there and it had a Flatpak build for it, but I don’t know if it is still there, and I would like for it to not be a Flatpak, because Flatpaks fucking suck (and no, I will not use Appimages since they are equally as awful). Maybe I can find a “still supported” fork of Yuzu, but since Yuzu and Ryujinx died, most of these forks are hosted in very shady places, and I don’t feel like getting a virus today, lmao.

Another thing that I want to explore more, is qpwgraph. It is a program that is intended to be used with Pipewire, and it allows users to pipe audio to anywhere. In theory, I can use this program to pipe audio from VLC or some other soundboard program into my microphone input on Discord, which would be fun to try out.

I think the final thing to talk about is RGB control. Linux sucks at RGB control, because most RGB bullshit on mice and peripherals are almost always based on proprietary protocols that always suck, and the manufacturers for these things almost always release the software only for Windows, or at best, macOS. OpenRGB is a solution, but it only can detect the Logitech G203 and the RGB on the motherboard (which I already turned off from the BIOS). It doesn’t know what to do with the keyboard I use (the RK61) and the other mouse I have with RGB (which is the EVGA X17). With RGB, I always turn that shit off, because I don’t really like it4. I guess if I can’t control the RGB, I guess I can always go inside the device and snip some cables off (to physically turn off the RGB, lmao). This also could be an excuse to figure out how to control RGB on a keyboard, with software, which may help me get back into programming, maybe perhaps.

updates

  1. even popOS, which is the distro that has the best handling for dual GPU systems i think, doesn’t do this that well.↩︎

  2. it is likely TPM wasn’t the issue, maybe it needed a restart to work.↩︎

  3. vesktop has an option to show more input options, which i managed to find after fucking around for a couple minutes in the client, so maybe this would work, but i’ll have to test it more.↩︎

  4. except on the keyboard, I like to keep the keyboard set to a single color, currently the keys are set to a warm-ish yellow, which I kinda like. Thank god this keyboard saves the configs on board, unlike the stupid EVGA mouse I have…↩︎