Ah I see now way you wanted the first extension. Natively you have to scroll on the right part of the panel around the volume icon to change the volume. Not in the middle of the panel
yeah okay so that’s the same on GNOME on every distro. The icon is too small so it takes too long to get the mouse just right just to change the volume a bit.
I actually think 2024 has a very good chance of being the year of wayland, scene graph api just got finished wlroots side, wine is rapidly approaching ready for wayland, sway-side all that’s missing is global shortcuts and single window capture (and disabling vsync for games is about to be merged, if you care about that).
It’s all rapidly shaping up, they even fixed nightlight nvidia side. I think it all depends on nvidia fixing shit.
With GNOME and KDE going Wayland only, it is all but over for X. Qt, GTK, and Electron already work on Wayland so most apps are ready. Cinnamon, XFCE, Enlightenment, and MATE all have Wayland plans now. There are a few compositor libraries that other window managers and desktop environments can leverage.
NVIDIA is slowly getting their act together. Many of the legitimate complainants are being addressed. There are desirable features starting to appear that are Wayland only. Even non-Linux systems are adding Wayland support.
It is hard to believe after so many years but I think that, by Christmas 2024, most Linux users will have stopped using X and maybe even stopped talking about it.
GNOME Shell 45 moved to ESM (ECMAScript modules). That means you MUST use the standard import declaration instead of relying on the previous imports.* approach.
<span style="color:#323232;">import Clutter from 'gi://Clutter';
</span><span style="color:#323232;">import Gio from 'gi://Gio';
</span><span style="color:#323232;">import * as Main from 'resource:///org/gnome/shell/ui/main.js'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">import * as Volume from 'resource:///org/gnome/shell/ui/status/volume.js';
</span>
well that’s what I tried, but how would I know where Volume is located in the path 'gi:// … '. Is there any way of browsing / exploring the jave files to that I can actually know what the path is?
I edited my comment with an example for your code and my best advice for figuring out the path of gnome shell imports is by browsing /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/, the docs are not very helpful.
It is very likely the wrong path, I just extrapolated the path from the gnome-shell git repo. I don’t use Gnome myself, I’m on the enemy team using LXDE on Devuan ;)
Just to clarify. The gi:// resources are GObject Introspection modules which are used for multilanguage bindings to native libraries. On my system, GI modules are found in /usr/share/gir-1.0/ . They’re just imported by name and sometimes version using gi:// (there are examples in the link in my first comment).
As I don’t have Gnome installed I can’t be sure of the path to gnome shell modules imported using resource://, but it’s probably the path I wrote, but without js/.
Any chance there’s a Debian repo for bcachefs? I’d want to see how it does on an extra drive in my server. Or will I have to compile it the old fashioned way?
For bcache, it is available in apt, I think. You just need to set the ppa. For bcachefs, I think you need to wait for 6.7 to land on Debian or compile it yourself.
I can’t quite figure out what would be the use cases where bcache would excel, except for hdds without cache or systems with very limited ram. Can you help me out with that?
The “cache” on HDDs is extremely tiny. Maybe a few seconds worth of sequential access at max. It does not exist to cache significant amounts of data for much longer than that.
At the sizes at which bcache is used, you could permanently hold almost all of your performance-critical data on flash storage while having enough space for tonnes of performance-uncritical data; all in the same storage “package”.
In my case, it basically helps me improve random read significantly. My NVMe is fast, like 3GB/s in sequential and 500MB/s in random, but it’s only 120GB. By using it as a cache in a bcache system, once a random read is performed, the data will be copied from HDD to SSD and if the data is requested again the random read will happen from SSD instead of HDD.
Thus, using it to play modern gaming is actually do able. Game that requires fast random read, like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield.
As a lot of people in my og post mentioned, random is more important that sequential. Bcache by default disable sequential cache so you wont fill you cache to fast if a big data is being read, like watching movie, copying video, etc. That’s where Raid0 comes to the rescue. Having Raid0 with 2 drives basically double my sequential read and having 3 triples it.
Basically the idea is that if you have a lot of data, HDDs have much bigger capacities for the price, whereas large SSDs can be expensive. SSDs have gotten cheap, but you can get used enterprise drives on eBay with huge capacities for incredibly cheap. There’s 12TB HDDs for like $100. 12TB of SSDs would run you several hundreds.
You can slap bcache on a 512GB NVMe backed by a 8TB HDD, and you get 8TB worth of storage, 512GB of which will be cached on the NVMe and thus really fast. But from the user’s perspective, it’s just one big 8TB drive. You don’t have to think about what is where, you just use it. You don’t have to be like, I’m going to use this VM so I’ll move it to the SSD and back to the HDD when done. The first time might be super slow but subsequent use will be very fast. It also caches writes too, so you can write up to 512GB really fast in this example and it’ll slowly get flushed to the HDD in the background. But from your perspective, as soon as it’s written to the SSD, the data is effectively commited to disk. If the application calls fsync to ensure data is written to disk, it’ll complete once it’s fully written to the SSD. You get NVMe read/write speeds and the space of an HDD.
So one big disk for your Steam library and whatever you play might be slow on the first load but then as you play the game files gets promoted to the NVMe cache and perform mostly at NVMe speeds, and your loading screens are much shorter.
I don’t know, it’s going to depend a lot on usage pattern and cache hit ratio. It will probably do a lot more writes than normal to the cache drive as it evicts older stuff and replaces it. Everything has tradeoffs in the end.
Another big tradeoff depending on the cache mode (ie. writeback mode) if the SSD dies, you can lose a fair bit of data. Not as catastrophic as a RAID0 would but pretty bad. And you probably want writeback for the fast writes.
Thus I had 2 SSDs and 2 HDDs in RAID1, with the SSDs caching the HDDs. But it turns out my SSDs are kinda crap (they’re about as fast as the HDDs for sequential read/writes) and I didn’t see as much benefit as I hoped so now they’re independent ZFS pools.
So one big disk for your Steam library and whatever you play might be slow on the first load but then as you play the game files gets promoted to the NVMe cache and perform mostly at NVMe speeds, and your loading screens are much shorter.
I really love/hate how you can immediately understand the practical application of new technologies through the use of games.
I believe a USB WiFi dongle will be a better idea than modifying live images of various distros, and others are already pointing you in the correct way for that, but I feel the need to correct one thing:
Okay, so maybe I can add some driver files to the LiveUSB or something? . . . nope. Not a good idea, because the other part of the whole fix is installing firmware, which has to be in place before the drivers will work – but this chip is also still being used by the onboard Mac OS.
The WiFi module doesn’t have any persistent memory for firmware, which is why the system needs to bring its own firmware - it is uploaded to the chip on every boot as part of driver initialization. So there is no risk of interfering with macOS here.
The installation in the guide refers to putting the firmware in a place where the driver will be able to find it. In other words, you would be installing the firmware on the Linux system, not onto the WiFi module.
I believe a USB WiFi dongle will be a better idea than modifying live images of various distros
Yeah, you and me both. But I’d be willing to do it for one or two, just to be able to prove that THIS laptop can and will run Linux with its current hardware, should he choose install it.
Also, the only thing lost by modifying LiveUSB trials is my time. If I corrupt the image, or it doesn’t work, or I make it crap out somehow – all of which is likely, lol – I still have done no harm at all. It’s just a USB stick. And I will also have learned a few things along the way, like how Linux distros install and use drivers.
you would be installing the firmware on the Linux system, not onto the WiFi module.
Then technically (not that I personally have the chops to do it) this “firmware” could also be something plugged into the distro on the LiveUSB stick along with the wl driver. That distro is getting its current drivers from somewhere on that USB already, so I’m not reinventing the wheel, just adding to what is already there.
I guess I just have to read up more. Thanks for letting me know the difference.
What price bracket are you looking at? The two laptops that I normally use in that situation is a used Thinkpad X1 Carbon I got on eBay, and a HP Dev One that works pretty well for that.
The Thinkpad link that was shared below looks pretty nice, they tend to be fairly cheap and easy to get replacement batteries and parts. There’s a lot available in that $150 to $200 bracket on eBay. Edit: I just saw it’s 14", so a bit bigger than what you wanted. You can filter by screen size and price on eBay to give you an idea of what you can get. You may need a new battery depending on the age, so keep that in mind.
I prefer the T480 series (imo Thinkpad went downhill from there onwards). The non-s is a great off-road laptop, but for what OP is asking, the T480s seems like a more sensible choice.
What about something like the Thinkpad X201? It’s not ultralight but it is quite small.
Other than that I’d probably say a Chromebook with a Linux install. Second hand they are quite cheap and can likely do what you are after. A lot of them have passive cooling which is nice for a couch device. I was able to install libreboot on my C201P quite easily and now it just runs a traditional Linux install
I’m writing this on my x201 on my couch. I love it, but it’s not a great couch laptop. It’s kind of heavy, runs hot, and has poor battery life vs more-recent comparables.
I used to have X230 as a daily driver for laptop (I got separate desktop) and it’s a really nice machine for it’s size. Only the display is a bit lacking by todays standards as it’s only 1368x768, but for 150€ (give or take) it’s not too bad.
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