The Breeze app style has gotten the visual overhaul you’ve all dreamed of: no more frames within frames!
Yeah, it regularly appears in my nightmares /s. Sorry Carl, but I’m gonna have to patch this out. I hope this will get a config option like the change to the Dolphin details view that made the click area to open a file span the whole row (doesn’t look like it’s configurable as of now). I kept patches to undo that for a while as well…
Spectacle has gained support for rectangular region screen recording!
Oooh, I’ve been waiting for that. Very cool! Now I hopefully don’t have to fiddle around with OBS anymore to record a section of the screen.
wow. I gotta check out nixos. That is incredible. Do you happen to know if fedora silverbue or any of the other immutable distros do this, or is this something specific to nixos?
I did some research yesterday and it looks like silver blue has some rebase command that does something similar. Universal Blue is using that to make it easy to switch between DEs, netting a very similar result!
Well, you can roll back with a switch too; no reboot required.
The VM protects you from accidental state modification however (i.e. programs enabled by some DE by default writing their config files everwhere) and its ephemeral nature makes a few things easier.
I have extensions that do small QOL things. I can still use GNOME just fine without a single one of them enabled.
How do you cope with the lack of a dock and system tray?
I don’t cope with that. I don’t really see a huge benefit to having a system tray. Before GNOME 44 added the background apps view to the quick settings menu I just put anything that was ‘background’ into a workspace. Even after 44 I still have this habit and rarely actually need the background view.
As for the dock argument I’m not sure what an always visible dock would provide that the current dash does not. I think I might even prefer the current dash over an always visible dock. Whenever I want to switch windows I just go to the overview and pick out whatever window I want. It’s a lot easier to hit a huge window than to have to target a small icon at the bottom of the display.
I understand that some people might disagree but I actually love what GNOME does (most of the time).
Make sure that device doesn’t require proprietary drivers (commonly WiFi or GPU). If the hardware in question needs those and you need the component to work, I wouldn’t take it for free because you’d be stuck with shitty support on an ancient kernel.
Most commonly, thio affects broadcom WiFi and Nvidia GPUs.
I second that about Nvidia GPUs. While Linux hardware support is really good, there is plenty of common, mainstream hardware that never was and never will be supported by Linux, usually due to uncooperative manufacturers. For Nvidia, their non-free driver is terrible and the nouveau driver in Linux is hit-or-miss. (Note, many people use either of those successfully, but the likelihood of success drops rapidly with any of: multiple displays, the need to dynamically change outputs, multi-GPU Optimus hardware or even laptops in general, and fully functional hardware acceleration.)
While one should, ideally, use AMD over Nvidia with Linux. It sounds like OP is shooting for older hardware, so I’m going to assume GPU performance isn’t a significant consideration. Nouveau should be fine for regular desktop usage on older Nvidia cards.
But trouble with assumptions. If you do want the most out of your GPU, AMD is the way to go.
As a genera rule avoid Nvidia. Also google the fingerprint sensor and wifi model before buying. General advice like “Thinkpads are fully linux compatible” is rubbish. Take your time to Google all idiosyncrasies of your desired model.
Im just most concerned about it being linux user friendly and fairly durable, as I tend to mess things up and wipe my drive sorts often lol hey, i’m learning! don’t game so don’t need Nvidia, check. don’t need a fingerprint sensor, check. so what is it that actually makes linux more compatible with some computers but not others? does it boil down to the cpu???
Focus on what you’re going to use the laptop for and choose your hardware accordinly. Linux will work great as long as your hardware is not unsupported. So don’t worry about that at all.
I’ve been running an A770 Limited Edition on Arch for a year now and I am happy with it now. It was a rough start, with issues ranging from glitches and crashes to HDMI and DisplayPort audio/VRR issues, but these days it is pretty solid. VRR works fine on my DisplayPort 144Hz 4K monitor. Most games perform pretty well but temper your expectations, the A770 is a midrange card.
I can play Overwatch 2 at 4K 144Hz low settings just fine and I don’t see many frame dips. It’s not noticeable if it does dip because VRR. CS2 performance isn’t amazing, but at low settings 4K I get between 100 and 160 frames depending on complexity. I have FSR turned on. On Cyberpunk I have FSR turned on and it seems to dip down to 20fps when out in the desert and the city is in view, but usually 40 to 60.
Thanks for this. I’m on 1440p so hopefully the performance will be a bit better. The A770 seems like it has great price to performance though, making it one of the top spots on my list.
I wasn’t able to enable VRR on my monitor (with freesync). I’m using KDE Wayland on Debian Testing, just wondering if you knew a workaround or something?
What kernel are you using? Debian tends to lag behind with kernel updates which makes it a bad choice when running new hardware. I switched from Debian to Arch when I got my A770 because at the time Debian’s latest kernel even in sid didn’t support Arc at all while it worked fine in Arch.
Just to make sure, you’re using DisplayPort right? I don’t think the Arc cards support VRR over HDMI. The HDMI port on the Arc is actually a built in DisplayPort to HDMI converter, and I don’t think any converter chips support VRR modes.
Okay so for whatever reason, turning Freesync on and off a bunch of times from the OSD and then replugging works until the next reboot, so I’ve dumped the working EDID and I’m trying to figure out how to load it at boot (but I’m not having much luck).
For reference, the monitor is a Samsung LC24RG50.
Edit: Got the EDID loaded, KDE says it’s supported, but VRRTest doesn’t really seem to do anything.
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