This was about to be my response. Sometimes, when a 5.1 surround mix is forced into stereo output, it causes the ‘speech’ channel to sound quieter than it should.
Try sticking to non-surrounds sources OP if you don’t have surround setup
I’m using Kubuntu as my main OS and it has been very stable for me. You can remove snapd and install the deb Firefox repository. You should look up tutorials on how to do it, I did it and nothing broke
I for one hope to move from kubuntu to debian with KDE, I assume that won’t have snap shit or systemd shit, but I might be painfully mistaken right there, I haven’t checked it out yet.
Debian does use systemd, but what’s so bad about it? I’m just curious, I’m using Arch with KDE, and that also uses systemd. Never had any issues with it. Debian doesn’t use snap by default though.
I have been enjoying OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s a rolling distro unlike the Ubuntu and Debian derivatives, but the updates hardly ever cause problems and it’s very easy to roll them back if they do. It also gives you a choice between X11 and Wayland, and Wayland is working well for me on Intel graphics.
I jumped into Tumbleweed recently and have really been liking it. Last time I used Linux with a desktop environment I was using Gnome and KDE was a lot unglier. Things have definitely changed.
KDE Neon gets the latest package updates regarding KDE first but it is not official in any sense, as listed on their website. In fact, Neon is just a package archive built on top of Ubuntu that offers more up to date KDE stuff.
I have used the distro as a daily driver in the past. It uses it’s own pkgcon package management system.
Add screensavers or take X11 out of my cold, dead hands. I don’t use a CRT but still like screensaver since it prevents me from having to wait 5 years for my screen to turn on.
Wayland is great! Except for all list of not-a-bugs that I’d like to see fixed. Still, I’m not going back to X, so take that how you will.
What are the not-a-bugs? Things like covering up a Wayland window will block it’s rendering thread indefinitely with no way to detect it happens to handle it. This can lock up some games, or cause you to time out in a networked application. Some Wayland core folks don’t want applications to know if their window is visible or not because it’s mild information about a user’s attention that should be private. Every game dev on the other hand is asking “WTF!?” as it causes their games to break randomly.
Another mild example is that windows cannot be raised except by the user or by launching them. This is supposed to be a mild security precaution so a program can’t pop up a legitimate looking dialog over another application and trick the user. Realistically it means that applications can’t open and focus URL in your web or file browser. Instead they have to give you a notification telling you “Firefox is Ready” and make you do it manually.
A lot of this is slowly (painfully?) changing, and the adversarial nature is a bit frustrating. Wayland fixes so many little things that I find it well worth it though, and I say that as a game developer frustrated by many of the core design decisions.
Another mild example is that windows cannot be raised except by the user or by launching them. This is supposed to be a mild security precaution so a program can’t pop up a legitimate looking dialog over another application and trick the user. Realistically it means that applications can’t open and focus URL in your web or file browser. Instead they have to give you a notification telling you “Firefox is Ready” and make you do it manually.
I would like them to keep that behaviour. At least make it an option or allow whitelisting certain applications. Nothing I hate more in an OS than windows stealing focus without asking.
Focus stealing is one of the worst things in the world, I am so glad I haven’t had to deal with it since I switched to wayland. (Except for stupid firefox tabs stealing focus from other tabs, that still happens obviously and happened to me during a test for my university and almost invalidated my score)
Some Wayland core folks don’t want applications to know if their window is visible or not because it’s mild information about a user’s attention that should be private.
I do like that. I have encountered a number of bullshit things like HR mindless training videos (ok, the fourth time I’ve seen this guy contemplate accepting a bribe… I get it. Don’t accept bribes! Leave that shit to Clarence Thomas) or ad playbacks that refuse to proceed unless they are focused. It’s annoying as hell. The problem you point out also sounds really annoying.
What are the not-a-bugs? Things like covering up a Wayland window will block it’s rendering thread indefinitely with no way to detect it happens to handle it. This can lock up some games, or cause you to time out in a networked application. Some Wayland core folks don’t want applications to know if their window is visible or not because it’s mild information about a user’s attention that should be private. Every game dev on the other hand is asking “WTF!?” as it causes their games to break randomly
Please don’t make up what “Wayland core folks” think. You don’t know it, and your claims are waay off.
It’s not about security. It was intended to allow the compositor to throttle apps to improve efficiency… Which of course in practice doesn’t work like this at all, because OpenGL swap buffers and Vulkan FIFO presentation modes were never intended to be used this way.
As for why that hasn’t been fixed yet, it’s not as big of a problem anymore:
Mesa (at least for Vulkan) and Xwayland gurantee one frame per second as a minimum refresh rate
toolkits and libraries use mailbox presentation internally and check frame callbacks themselves for when to render
xdg shell now contains a flag for apps to know to inhibit rendering because they’re hidden. That doesn’t guarantee that presentation won’t otherwise block though
a (set of) protocol(s) is being worked on to replace frame callbacks with a mechanism actually suited for OpenGL and Vulkan
Another mild example is that windows cannot be raised except by the user or by launching them. This is supposed to be a mild security precaution so a program can’t pop up a legitimate looking dialog over another application and trick the user. Realistically it means that applications can’t open and focus URL in your web or file browser. Instead they have to give you a notification telling you “Firefox is Ready” and make you do it manually.
That’s not even close to how activation works on Wayland, and no, it’s not just a security thing, it’s a usability thing. Apps can only raise themselves if the currently focused app gives them focus, so that random apps can’t cover up what you’re working on just cause they need to show you an ad or an “important” pop up question or whatever. If it doesn’t work for a specific app, make a bug report about it to the app.
A bit of a zombie thread, but I’m not making anything up here. The blocking issue gets discussed a lot in gamedev circles, and there are issue threads that have been locked by folks with the power to do so because they just said “no”. One of them (Maybe Sebastian Wick? I don’t remember… doesn’t really matter) gave verbatim that use case where a video service they use would stop playing videos when the browser was in the background, and that is why they won’t report . Maybe they weren’t a “core” developer, but they had the ability to say “no” and end the discussion thread.
As for it being not a problem anymore, it still occurs even on Fedora 39. The 1 second present timeout still only works for XWayland, and that’s… not a great solution. Also, realistically unless SDL2, GLFW or whatever engine a gamedev is using handles it for them they just don’t have the time to worry about what GTK, Qt, or XDG shell does. We are already supporting multiple rendering APIs, and combining that with multiple UI libraries just to get a window to draw a triangle into is a combinatorial explosion. Last I remember reading from the SDL folks, they were waiting for the functionality to appear in Wayland before they could implement it, and they weren’t expecting anything to change soon either. Speaking personally, my current game project is single player so I can just pave over the timing issues when they come up:
Long frame detected: 6463.731931 ms. Skipping ahead!
The most frustrating part to me is much more meta. You get discussions with other game devs that have heard about this stuff and they continue to think that supporting Linux is just way too much work. Sometimes they are right, but rarely for the right reasons it seems. I believe in the glorious Wayland future… I just wish it would get here a bit faster. ;) On the other hand, if we rushed it and botched it then it would never arrive at all I suppose. (sigh)
As for how window activation works, you got me there. I just heard other people discussing that one, but it did explain why on Wayland I would just get “Firefox is ready” notifications when opening links instead of just showing me the page like X did. Though I’m quite happy that it’s gone now in Fedora 39. Progress is good!
The 1 second present timeout still only works for XWayland
Oof, I thought the corresponding MR for Wayland was merged… But it was from Sebastian and after he got into a heated discussion again and started cursing, the MR got closed by someone else :|
realistically unless SDL2, GLFW or whatever engine a gamedev is using handles it for them they just don’t have the time to worry about what GTK, Qt, or XDG shell does
SDL does handle it, but only for OpenGL; it can’t do anything about Vulkan. GLFW doesn’t do anything about it either, so that is pretty annoying.
I believe in the glorious Wayland future… I just wish it would get here a bit faster
Don’t we all. Let’s hope the current upstream approach to fix this issue gets somewhere sooner than later…
While I find that I agree with his takes like, 55% of the time, I do agree that Debian and Arch are basically the S-tier distros. So many of the other ones are basically just opinionated Debian or Arch, and while those can be useful when you’re getting started, I’ve found that for the long haul you’re better off just figuring out how to configure the base distribution with the elements of the opinionated ones that you like rather than use those distros themselves. Also, RIP CentOS. I would have put that in a high tier before the RHELmageddon (not top tier mind you, but it had a well defined use case and was great for that purpose).
I’ve been using Arch for years and can’t pull myself away because everything just works. Whats the difference between arch and whatever the derivatives are? I don’t even know what distros to arch are the Ubuntu / mint to debian
EndeavourOS is easy-mode Arch. You get a liveboot with XFCE and a graphical installer with quite some choices, from a wide selection of desktop environments and window managers to the init system and filesystem. You get pacman and yay, with the AUR preconfigured.
Manjaro is the easiest way to break Arch. It has its own repos which are just Arch but 2 weeks behind. This causes problems when (not saying if) you add the AUR, which is not 2 weeks behind but in sync with Arch main repos. Thus causing breakages due to migrations not happening at the same time.
Garuda is not as widely used as Endeavour and Manjaro, but from those who’ve used it, I’ve only heard good things.
I am using EndeavourOS Sway Community Edition. Was nice to have a starting point for my first pure WM and my first Arch install. The Sway Community Edition is looking for maintainers but I am a bit disappointed by some things in upstream Sway and am not sure I want to stick with it long-term yet. Might try Hyprland at some point.
Ah ok i gues si can understand it makes sense that if you really wanna learn linux you gotta be ready to get your hands dirty aka figuring out how to configure the distribution. Maybe its just very overwhelming because a beginner doesnt even know what you can / can’t configure. But probably everything
Yeah basically all a “distribution” is is a selection of software and configurations, and they distribute (hence the name) that software and configurations as a bundle. It definitely can be daunting to learn all of this at once as a newcomer, but on the other side of that coin I’ve seen many people begin their Linux journey on a “beginner friendly” distribution who come to see that distro’s configs as default and need to unlearn/relearn many habits as they progress through their journey. I think, too, that often people who are immersed in the Linux world don’t have a great perspective on what is/isn’t confusing for a new user and often end up obfuscating things with other things that are just as complicated, if not more.
I don’t think so. I can’t find any good information about those new ‘open-source’ kernel modules in any of the Linux wikis. Just news articles from 2022. Something isn’t right there. It’s either a marketing stunt and nothing changed or something else. I would dig deeper if I were you.
Concerning NVidia’s history: Don’t rely on them making user-friendly decisions. Especially when it comes to Linux. The usual drivers work. They have some hiccups and you’re going to have some annoying issues with things like Wayland, if something major changes in the kernel you have to wait for NVidia but they’ll eventually fix it. It’s not open source and you have to live with what they give to you. It mostly works though and performance is great. I’d say this is the same with the newer ‘open-source’ drivers that just shift things into (proprietary) userspace and firmware.
The true open-source alternative is the ‘Nouveau’ drivers. For newer graphics cards, expect them to get only a fraction of the performance out of your GPU and having half the features not yet implemented, including power management. So your game will have 10fps and fans on max while it empties your battery in 20 minutes.
On my laptop Nouveau started to be an alternative after several years when development kept up and it got comparable performance and battery life to the proprietary drivers. But you might replace the laptop at that point. Waiting for NVidia or the open source drivers to keep up hasn’t been worth it for me in the past. I did that two times and everytime I had to live with the proprietary drivers instead.
So my advice is: Be comfortable using the proprietary drivers if you want to buy NVidia.
Intel Arc got really bad performance reviews. It’s not worth spending lots of money on them. But fortunately they’re cheap because the gamers don’t buy them (for that reason). I live with the iGPU that’s part of my CPU. It’s alright since I don’t play modern games anyways.
But you missed AMD. There are some laptops available with the Ryzen 7040 series and it seems to be a fast CPU. They also made the integrated graphics way faster than before, albeit probably still not on the level for proper gaming. But I bet there are desktop replacements out there that combine it with an AMD GPU.
I didn’t miss AMD. The dedicated GPUs just aren’t available new in my wide area, unless they’re put into mediocre plastic shells of a budget laptop, and the integrated GPUs don’t work for my use case.
I just sold an AMD laptop (with RX 6800s) because I wanted a bigger screen. I don’t need top-tier performance, most of the games I play are fine on mainstream gaming hardware. The software experience was perfect but I didn’t use the laptop very often because it was 14" and uncomfortable to use in the couch because of the screen hinge design.
I already have a perfectly fine 2021ThinkPad X1 Nano that does everything I want from a portable computer and I noticed I just never had a reason to use the gaming laptop unless I was gaming. I just want something with a bigger screen and better GPU that will only be moved on our living room table and the storage rack, and the occasional car trip. If the 18" Alienware with RX 7900M was for sale here (for a reasonable price) I would buy that, but that is not going to happen.
I disagree. Someone who isn’t willing to try Linux on their own, or otherwise investigate, just because they’re curious is not ready for the baggage that comes with a new OS. Agreeing with another comment: don’t make this change at the same time as other major changes to your career. That is a recipe for disaster.
I’m a Mac / Linux guy who dislikes Windows. I wouldn’t even suggest getting a Mac at the same time as making huge career changes. And Linux is harder. Not impossible, but no training-wheels. You want something new, but you aren’t really interested in Linux itself.
As much as I have issues with the snap implementation, I really want to live in a world where my base os is solid and everything else is easily updatable. LTS, with the latest apps.
Snap and flatpak achieve this, and I want more of that. Just less… frustrating. And less not-invented-here like.
Flatpak cannot do what’s discussed in the article. Snap can and it was started prior to Flatpak. If Flatpak was able to do what Snap can, you’d have half a point.
Flatpak cannot do what’s discussed in the article.
Nobody claimed 100% feature overlap. For regular GUI applications both work relatively similar, to the point that Snap now happily uses technologies developed for Flatpak, such as Portals.
it was started prior to Flatpak.
That’s irrelevant. One could just as well argue that Flatpak evolved from developments (OSTree, etc.) that are even older but that beside the point. Fact is that OSTree and Flatpak are vendor neutral and Snap isn’t. Attempts at vendor lock-in caused Valve leave Ubuntu and later choose Flatpak on SteamOS.
Snap has the ability to do the base system in a much more modular way and could be really cool for an immutable system. Forcing them on desktop users with their transitional deb packages and making it heavily integrated with only one repository really screwed it up.
Also I’m not sure about slow startup times. Are those still an issue? If so, then I would be sure to considet Ubuntu dead and not only not recommend it but actively recommend switching away from it.
Yes, they are still an issue. It is irritating enough that I have currently zero snaps and would rather build from source if snap is the only binary option.
That’s basically THE dealbreaker for snaps. Loop devices on lsblk? Most people don’t care and wouldn’t see it. Proprietary backend? Again, most regular people (Ubuntu’s target audience) do not care. So the slow startup time is THE dealbreaker.
I switched to Linux from Windows 3.11 because Microsoft software didn’t do what it was supposed to.
My method is that I don’t even know what’s available for Windows, so I don’t miss it at all. The opposite isn’t true though, and time spent in a Microsoft environment can quickly become painful.
My only regular contact with Windows is the Steam partition which hasn’t been used for quite some time. I have a laptop that has a small win11 partition that I boot every now and then to see what they’re up to these days.
However, in the end, the only real answer is that if you really need a piece of software, you just run whatever system that supports it. It’s not a religion, you use whatever is convenient for you at a given time.
Ooh, Win 3.11? Which version of Linux did you switch to at the time?
I don’t recall the kernel version, but my first was Red Hat 5.2 in the late 90s. I didn’t switch to Linux permanently though, had it on dual-boot. But eventually it was SuSE that won me over, with their YaST tool and polished KDE implementation - seemed lightyears ahead of Win 9x and ME at the time.
At the time, I installed slackware with a lot of floppies.
Now, after trying quite a few, I settled on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. It has one of the best KDE desktops, and basically just works, whatever you do with it. It’s comfortable and boring which I see as great qualities.
i know i’ve wanted something like this for a while. i really didn’t want to have to figure out how to get the existing keyman keyboard layout to work on linux, because fcitx works fine for all my other input needs, and i already knew how fcitx worked as i made an addon to get on-screen keyboards to work with it a while back…
as i know not many people would dare venture in the world of fcitx addons, due to the quite horrendous state the documentation is in… so if i wasn’t gonna do it, likely no-one else was, so i did it! and shared it with everyone, because the worse that could happen is that someone helps me make it better!
This almost seems like a good idea… if unicode weren’t already shaky enough.
UTF-8 is, honestly, pretty amazing. It lets you do things like compose latin-character text, and then interpose words like 𰻞.
That’s ‘biáng’, which is, to my understanding, a kind of Chinese noodle dish. It’s apparently the most complex Chinese character, comprising more than 50 strokes. (www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+30EDE).
In hex it’s encoded as: 0xF0 0xB0 0xBB 0x9E
So, yeah, only 8 bytes to describe a character that looks like white noise to me unless I zoom WAY in on it! (My vision’s getting pretty bad, tbh. I need it to be about the size it shows up on compart.com to make out the individual radical characters.)
If you were to count strokes on ‘biáng’, you end up with 5 bytes to encode 11 pen strokes or 2.2 strokes per byte. At 8 bytes to 57 pen strokes, the information density goes up to 7.125 strokes per byte.
So in Latin characters provided by UTF-8, you end up with very similar storage requirements. To encode the much more complex character, you get more than 3 times the information density.
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