Linux Lunacy!


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Norren

Lazy Artist
Staff member
Leader Council
Since Maiku_Ando and I almost killed "What are you doing?" with this topic, I thought it might be a good idea to make a new thread for it. XD

Windows 11 has me looking at Linux again, since while I like Windows 10 (at least since they let you turn the spyware off), I don't feel like running out to buy TPM 2.0 compatible hardware to satisfy some madman's quest for planned obsolescence during a silicon shortage.

Problem is, I have horribly bad luck with Linux for a number of Daily Driver things, and I know people find ways around it, but I just don't know how they do it. In particular, I've had terrible luck with vsync tearing on my displays. (nVidia cards, traditionally Intel CPU, but I made the shift to AMD with this new machine since I wanted a R7 5900X and had to settle for an R7 3700X because shortages.) Last time I tried Linux was probably 7 years back, I want to say? I tried Kubuntu, Lubuntu, and Mint. I settled on Mint and lasted enough months with it that I felt like I was starting to get comfortable with the OS, but all of them had the same horrible screen tearing problems and eventually it got to me.

I also am super curious about Wine/Proton for shoehorning in Windows stuff without going the VM route... although I think I'm going to have to emulate to some degree because of games that run that infernal nprotect rootkit. So, I'm all open to distro suggestions right now.
 
Since Maiku_Ando and I almost killed "What are you doing?" with this topic, I thought it might be a good idea to make a new thread for it. XD

Windows 11 has me looking at Linux again, since while I like Windows 10 (at least since they let you turn the spyware off), I don't feel like running out to buy TPM 2.0 compatible hardware to satisfy some madman's quest for planned obsolescence during a silicon shortage.

Problem is, I have horribly bad luck with Linux for a number of Daily Driver things, and I know people find ways around it, but I just don't know how they do it. In particular, I've had terrible luck with vsync tearing on my displays. (nVidia cards, traditionally Intel CPU, but I made the shift to AMD with this new machine since I wanted a R7 5900X and had to settle for an R7 3700X because shortages.) Last time I tried Linux was probably 7 years back, I want to say? I tried Kubuntu, Lubuntu, and Mint. I settled on Mint and lasted enough months with it that I felt like I was starting to get comfortable with the OS, but all of them had the same horrible screen tearing problems and eventually it got to me.

I also am super curious about Wine/Proton for shoehorning in Windows stuff without going the VM route... although I think I'm going to have to emulate to some degree because of games that run that infernal nprotect rootkit. So, I'm all open to distro suggestions right now.
lol New thread is great. As for Windows, I refuse to use 10, the spyware, the ads, the no choice on updates, the constant bugs, I don't want it. I do like 8.1 with update 1, you can turn off the spyware in that totally, I have a batch file in scheduled tasks that keeps all of that removed, and I can just let it have its updates. 10 always still has some tracking and spyware, even with the basic setting.

My current pc is a i9 10850K with a 1070TI running Debian 10, this PC is amazing and I love it, I did think about a Ryzen setup, but I didn't want to risk the hassle of the little bugs and glitches that people have been reporting, so went with Intel. I also got this 10850k at an amazing price, way less than a 5600X. Running htop and seeing 20 little cpu graphs never gets old lol. I did deliberately go for 10th gen over 11 as well. 11th gen would mean less cores, and in some situations is actually slower, and for way more money. My old PC is planned to be a Windows 8.1u1 desktop for things I can't do in Linux, but I still haven't got around to installing it, it still has my previous Debian install running and its been months, I just have not needed Windows so its just been sitting there.

Screen tearing is still an issue, but there are ways to minimize it, multi monitor setups mean you do need to choose which monitor is the one that is synced to, atleast with xorg. If you go with Wayland it is supposed to fix all that, BUT its still very new and don't know if everything works with it yet. I have steam installed and I have it set to use proton for all Windows games, works really well and I have been using this for a couple years, I don't miss Windows. Play on Linux is another thing you will likely want, and lutris too. I don't actually have them as all my games are in Steam and proton is very good. I do tend to install Wine as well. Some big things have happened with Linux gaming in the past 5 years, steam has done wonders with proton. Take a look at www.protondb.com it has great info on what games will run and any tweaks needed.

I think the most important thing here however, is don't give up. Don't do dual boot setup either, from experience, when you do that you just end up switching to Windows and give up. If you only have Linux, then you will be more likely to force yourself to find the solution. By all means go for a different drive for Linux and take your Windows one out for safe keeping, but that mental trick of taking away that easy reboot to switch back to windows really helps. Do note however, that current Linux installs with UEFI tend to break grub when another OS/drive is booted - its not a problem, just means sticking the usb stick in, booting the installer and 're-install boot loader', no data loss or anything. What I tend to do is when that happens the first time, I manually re-install grub with the --removable option, and then you don't have to fix it again.

Another option for you might be Arch Linux, that is supposedly bleeding edge current and therefore in theory can do more Windows games/apps. Debian is always a bit behind because the focus is on stability and testing it before release, so you wont get the most recent versions of things. For me, more stability wins, and I'm happy with it.
 
lol New thread is great. As for Windows, I refuse to use 10, the spyware, the ads, the no choice on updates, the constant bugs, I don't want it. I do like 8.1 with update 1, you can turn off the spyware in that totally, I have a batch file in scheduled tasks that keeps all of that removed, and I can just let it have its updates. 10 always still has some tracking and spyware, even with the basic setting.
I miss Windows 8 in ways. I'm one of the crazy people who actually was fine with it from the word go, I used it in preview channel from a month before they put Tiles in all the way until Win 10 preview. For me, the memory stability it offered was so much better than Windows 7 that I couldn't turn back to 7. (I also used Start 8 and later on, Classic Shell to "fix" the start menu as early as a few days after the retail release happened)

My current pc is a i9 10850K with a 1070TI running Debian 10, this PC is amazing and I love it, I did think about a Ryzen setup, but I didn't want to risk the hassle of the little bugs and glitches that people have been reporting, so went with Intel. I also got this 10850k at an amazing price, way less than a 5600X. Running htop and seeing 20 little cpu graphs never gets old lol. I did deliberately go for 10th gen over 11 as well. 11th gen would mean less cores, and in some situations is actually slower, and for way more money. My old PC is planned to be a Windows 8.1u1 desktop for things I can't do in Linux, but I still haven't got around to installing it, it still has my previous Debian install running and its been months, I just have not needed Windows so its just been sitting there.
Yeah, I joined the "all Intel" camp after AMD burned me a few too many times in the aughts, but a friend's an AMD addict and convinced me to try it out again with the 5000 series... and then I ended up falling back to the 3700x.

I'm still amazed how few cores/threads most consumer PCs have.

Screen tearing is still an issue, but there are ways to minimize it, multi monitor setups mean you do need to choose which monitor is the one that is synced to, atleast with xorg. If you go with Wayland it is supposed to fix all that, BUT its still very new and don't know if everything works with it yet. I have steam installed and I have it set to use proton for all Windows games, works really well and I have been using this for a couple years, I don't miss Windows. Play on Linux is another thing you will likely want, and lutris too. I don't actually have them as all my games are in Steam and proton is very good. I do tend to install Wine as well. Some big things have happened with Linux gaming in the past 5 years, steam has done wonders with proton. Take a look at www.protondb.com it has great info on what games will run and any tweaks needed.
Looks like I'll need to try Weyland, then, the tearing drives me up the wall. (My old setup was three 60hz monitors, I wonder why it had so much trouble...) I've actually been curious about Weyland for a while- WSL2 is using it to run native Linux apps in Windows on insider previews. (They're just dragging it out forever in classic Microsoft fashion.)

I knew about Proton from friends talking about it recently, but my last attempt at switching to Linux used Play on Linux and Wine. Lutris is new to me, I'll definitely look close at that one. There's also something that caught my eye called WinApps for shimming apps in a VM into a native app looking box? It caught my eye since there's a handful of apps I know are just... never going to get there. (Photoshop CC, Office, etc.)

I think the most important thing here however, is don't give up. Don't do dual boot setup either, from experience, when you do that you just end up switching to Windows and give up. If you only have Linux, then you will be more likely to force yourself to find the solution. By all means go for a different drive for Linux and take your Windows one out for safe keeping, but that mental trick of taking away that easy reboot to switch back to windows really helps. Do note however, that current Linux installs with UEFI tend to break grub when another OS/drive is booted - its not a problem, just means sticking the usb stick in, booting the installer and 're-install boot loader', no data loss or anything. What I tend to do is when that happens the first time, I manually re-install grub with the --removable option, and then you don't have to fix it again.
Yeah, when I tackled it before I blitzed everything straight through to where I had all the core drivers working and then set up Windows 7 in a VM for anything I couldn't figure out yet, so I was able to slowly wean myself off without resorting to actual dual boot. I figured I'd do the same this time, but I also have a spare machine that can keep living in Windows land, just in case.

Another option for you might be Arch Linux, that is supposedly bleeding edge current and therefore in theory can do more Windows games/apps. Debian is always a bit behind because the focus is on stability and testing it before release, so you wont get the most recent versions of things. For me, more stability wins, and I'm happy with it.
I'll download both and make live USBs and see what I think. I usually tend to use some Debian descendant in Live USB form for my IT work, so I'm already somewhat comfortable with it, although it's been so long my command line is rusty. My longest adventure with Linux was under Mint. Will probably be a few days before I can give it a shot in either case. (I have some family coming over when I get up, and I expect Monday to be a "damnit phone, stop ringing" day.)
 
I miss Windows 8 in ways. I'm one of the crazy people who actually was fine with it from the word go, I used it in preview channel from a month before they put Tiles in all the way until Win 10 preview. For me, the memory stability it offered was so much better than Windows 7 that I couldn't turn back to 7. (I also used Start 8 and later on, Classic Shell to "fix" the start menu as early as a few days after the retail release happened)


Yeah, I joined the "all Intel" camp after AMD burned me a few too many times in the aughts, but a friend's an AMD addict and convinced me to try it out again with the 5000 series... and then I ended up falling back to the 3700x.

I'm still amazed how few cores/threads most consumer PCs have.
I think I mentioned previously, but I'm planning on keeping an 8.1 install going past end of support for any vital Windows needs, and if that can't run a particular thing, then I wont use that thing lol.
My previous pc was a quad core so I've gone from 4/8 up to 10/20 in a single upgrade, I do tend to keep my PCs for long periods (excluding actual hardware death) therefore I try to get the best I can each time. My old PC was a real champ tho, I still love it, it's been my main PC for maybe 7+ years, only recently did it start to struggle in big sim games.
Looks like I'll need to try Weyland, then, the tearing drives me up the wall. (My old setup was three 60hz monitors, I wonder why it had so much trouble...) I've actually been curious about Weyland for a while- WSL2 is using it to run native Linux apps in Windows on insider previews. (They're just dragging it out forever in classic Microsoft fashion.)
Well in my setup I'm using old Xorg and I don't have tearing issues, I have 2 monitors and only one is used for gaming, that one is what the gpu syncs to. Sometimes it is not the fault of the x server, it can be the composter for the window manager and others. When I was fixing mine I think I had 4 or 5 places I had to make a small tweak, like 1 setting in each. Note that I am using old display tech here, a 1070ti and an old monitor, there is no g-sync or freesync on this thing lol. It is 1920x1080 at 60Hz and that is enough for me at the moment. I've not tried Wayland myself yet, it is meant to be in the latest Debian 11, but I have not tried that either yet, I'm still on Debian 10.
I knew about Proton from friends talking about it recently, but my last attempt at switching to Linux used Play on Linux and Wine. Lutris is new to me, I'll definitely look close at that one. There's also something that caught my eye called WinApps for shimming apps in a VM into a native app looking box? It caught my eye since there's a handful of apps I know are just... never going to get there. (Photoshop CC, Office, etc.)
I have not tried WinApps or the whole Windows VM route yet, its on the list of 'thats cool, I should try that' things but not got around to any of it. In terms of desktop apps, Adobe CC and Sony/Magix Movie Studio are the ones I have that are sill in Windows only land. I have started using Gimp to do graphics items, if I can get happy with that and drop Photoshop then it will just be InDesign on the Adobe front, but really I don't actually need them, Gimp has managed to do everything I have needed, and I since the death of J-Zine I only need InDesign for one project every couple years, and for that I can just use a second PC. Same with Movie Studio, I don't do much with video anymore but if I do need it, my old PC can handle it.
Yeah, when I tackled it before I blitzed everything straight through to where I had all the core drivers working and then set up Windows 7 in a VM for anything I couldn't figure out yet, so I was able to slowly wean myself off without resorting to actual dual boot. I figured I'd do the same this time, but I also have a spare machine that can keep living in Windows land, just in case.
Sounds like a good plan.
I'll download both and make live USBs and see what I think. I usually tend to use some Debian descendant in Live USB form for my IT work, so I'm already somewhat comfortable with it, although it's been so long my command line is rusty. My longest adventure with Linux was under Mint. Will probably be a few days before I can give it a shot in either case. (I have some family coming over when I get up, and I expect Monday to be a "damnit phone, stop ringing" day.)
Its totally up to you, but if you go the Debian 10/KDE/xorg/nvidia route on a PC, then I can probably help a bit more as that is what I'm running, and already had to fix lol. I do want to try Arch, it is on that list I mentioned earlier, but I don't have another new enough GPU to run a second system. My next best GPU is a 560TI, which is just 1 generation before Vulcan was a thing, and so all the Proton stuff doesn't work on it. Mint is nice and user friendly, and is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, but the Debian folks tend to refer to it as a 'Franken Debian', because they tend to like re-inventing the wheel for the sake of it and doing non-standard things. That and their original weird attitude to upgrades (just install fresh) put me off Mint.

It is also the point that I have been using Linux long enough that to be using the distro that is regarded as the 'easy' one, it feels like a cop out on my part, nothing wrong with Mint or Ubuntu, I just feel it would be the lazy move, in other words I should be able to get an original distro working, and if I can't then thats me failing, and I should learn more lol. I once built one of my new servers in OpenBSD, no prep or anything first, I just decided I wanted the challenge, and it was really good fun. Maybe I should move Fansub to OpenBSD lol.
 
I think I mentioned previously, but I'm planning on keeping an 8.1 install going past end of support for any vital Windows needs, and if that can't run a particular thing, then I wont use that thing lol.
My previous pc was a quad core so I've gone from 4/8 up to 10/20 in a single upgrade, I do tend to keep my PCs for long periods (excluding actual hardware death) therefore I try to get the best I can each time. My old PC was a real champ tho, I still love it, it's been my main PC for maybe 7+ years, only recently did it start to struggle in big sim games.
Yeah, the only reason I upgraded my old rig is it was a 3rd gen i7 and it was just starting to act like it'd taken heat damage. Turns out one of the HDs in the data array was starting to go bad, just failing silently... and I could have probably kept it going another 3+ years as a main desktop. It took moving all the data off of it as part of setting up the new machine and then copying some of it back in a "wait, I want to try this..." maneuver before either SMART diagnostics or the event log actually decided to go "Hey, uh, did you know a disk in your striped array has a failing head?"

Old rig sits off to the side, but it needs a new GPU. It's got a GTX 650 in it that I'd like to replace but can't bring myself to drop the funds on. My main desktop is the 3700x and a GTX 1650.

Well in my setup I'm using old Xorg and I don't have tearing issues, I have 2 monitors and only one is used for gaming, that one is what the gpu syncs to. Sometimes it is not the fault of the x server, it can be the composter for the window manager and others. When I was fixing mine I think I had 4 or 5 places I had to make a small tweak, like 1 setting in each. Note that I am using old display tech here, a 1070ti and an old monitor, there is no g-sync or freesync on this thing lol. It is 1920x1080 at 60Hz and that is enough for me at the moment. I've not tried Wayland myself yet, it is meant to be in the latest Debian 11, but I have not tried that either yet, I'm still on Debian 10.
At the time I had 3 monitors, two 1080p monitors and another one that was 1920x1200. My usual configuration is to set them up in an H shape- the two on the side set to portrait mode. They were all 60hz, but... yeah. At this point the main desktop has a 4k monitor in portrait mode, a 1440p digital tablet in landscape mode and the 1920x1200 screen off to the side in portrait mode, so I'm fearing it will be more pronounced.

I have not tried WinApps or the whole Windows VM route yet, its on the list of 'thats cool, I should try that' things but not got around to any of it. In terms of desktop apps, Adobe CC and Sony/Magix Movie Studio are the ones I have that are sill in Windows only land. I have started using Gimp to do graphics items, if I can get happy with that and drop Photoshop then it will just be InDesign on the Adobe front, but really I don't actually need them, Gimp has managed to do everything I have needed, and I since the death of J-Zine I only need InDesign for one project every couple years, and for that I can just use a second PC. Same with Movie Studio, I don't do much with video anymore but if I do need it, my old PC can handle it.
I'm in an awkward spot where I don't actually use Photoshop CC for all that much, but every rare now and then I need it for specific things that Clip Studio Paint can't do. From research, it looks like the online activation version of Clip Studio Paint has a weird hiccup where it doesn't seem to be able to activate under Wine, although why exactly that is I probably won't find out until I'm installing it. If I can't get Clip to work, that's... a definite pain in the arse... but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Artwise, I have no idea what sort of dev tools I'll run into that don't like Linux. My plan is to develop HTML5/ElectronJS so I have little to adjust to there, VS code has native Linux, Blender I trust is native Linux, OpenMPT is wine friendly, Audacity forks are all Linux native... All the core stuff just looks good... It'll probably be the simple stuff I'm not even thinking to consider that'll give me the most trouble.

Mint is nice and user friendly, and is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, but the Debian folks tend to refer to it as a 'Franken Debian', because they tend to like re-inventing the wheel for the sake of it and doing non-standard things. That and their original weird attitude to upgrades (just install fresh) put me off Mint.
I still don't understand what the Mint team's philosophy was. Even after giving up on Mint as my desktop OS, I used Mint live USBs for backing up client machines and diagnostic work, and eventually the Mint live USBs got to where they wouldn't boot in the older desktops my senior citizen clients tended to have.... I don't know what was going on there, but yeah, Mint seemed to be very badly maintained.

Ubuntu frustrated me for different reasons, but was equally incomprehensible. I had it on a Laptop for several years and then suddenly "Here, this update, it makes everything look and act like MacOS and sends your local HD searches to Amazon."

It is also the point that I have been using Linux long enough that to be using the distro that is regarded as the 'easy' one, it feels like a cop out on my part, nothing wrong with Mint or Ubuntu, I just feel it would be the lazy move, in other words I should be able to get an original distro working, and if I can't then thats me failing, and I should learn more lol. I once built one of my new servers in OpenBSD, no prep or anything first, I just decided I wanted the challenge, and it was really good fun. Maybe I should move Fansub to OpenBSD lol.
Challenge can be fun, but I'm getting more than my fill of that for the moment, lol.

Midway through writing this, in a moment of sleep deprivation I decided to toss Debian 11 on my old rig just to test the water somewhat. Installation just finished up, so I'll start poking around and testing things. I'll probably edit in/post some musings on it later.

Edit:
Stupid things done for laughs so far.
  • Installed Edge for Linux Beta
  • Reskinned Plasma to look like Win 10 Aero
  • Found a Windows 10 start menu for KDE Plasma w/ Tiles.
 
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So, the old machine... is actually doing pretty well right now. Aside from some dain bramage from misreading the nvidia instructions, everything I've done has been pretty simple/easy. Most of what I've installed has been via either apt or .deb files. Steam went in painless enough, so far I've fired up FF3 PR and Octopath Traveler without issues under Proton experimental.

So far my biggest gripe is that I'm not sure where to adjust font sizes on the bottom panel. I moved it to the left side of my monitor and the date part of the time widget just likes to randomly increase in size by around 1.88 em and wrap around to the next line.

It also doesn't like some realtek device on my old machine, but... that seems to be a symptomless problem. The network is behaving perfectly fine. Putting Debian on the old hypervisor didn't seem to go as smoothly, but I'm not entirely sure what happened there.

Also, one odd question... are there any issues from installing Snap? I've been looking at Anbox for a while now, but for some reason they don't release deb or have an option for apt... but from what I've seen a lot of linux users seem to really hate Snap.
 
So, the old machine... is actually doing pretty well right now. Aside from some dain bramage from misreading the nvidia instructions, everything I've done has been pretty simple/easy. Most of what I've installed has been via either apt or .deb files. Steam went in painless enough, so far I've fired up FF3 PR and Octopath Traveler without issues under Proton experimental.

So far my biggest gripe is that I'm not sure where to adjust font sizes on the bottom panel. I moved it to the left side of my monitor and the date part of the time widget just likes to randomly increase in size by around 1.88 em and wrap around to the next line.

It also doesn't like some realtek device on my old machine, but... that seems to be a symptomless problem. The network is behaving perfectly fine. Putting Debian on the old hypervisor didn't seem to go as smoothly, but I'm not entirely sure what happened there.

Also, one odd question... are there any issues from installing Snap? I've been looking at Anbox for a while now, but for some reason they don't release deb or have an option for apt... but from what I've seen a lot of linux users seem to really hate Snap.
An important thing with Debian, make sure to do things the Debian way - ie follow the Debian Wiki, they usually have notes for everything, including Nvidia drivers and Steam. Randomly installing a .deb file can go very badly wrong, especially if its from Ubuntu or Mint.

I was thinking your old machine would actually be a very similar setup to mine, as its Intel 3rd gen and Nvidia graphics, it should work fine. Do you have wifi in that machine? That is usually what missing firmware messages on boot are about. You can install it with the firmware package, but that might be in non-free or contrib, see below. I run Debian on Hyper-V with no issues at all, so should be fine, but I run it as a server not a desktop.

So font sizes on bottom panel, are you using KDE Plasma? Did you install any additional things to mod the start menu?
I'm running at 1080 and not having any font size issues. Maybe post a screen shot?

As for snap, as in snapcraft.io the store thingy? That's an Ubuntu abomination... And yes many of us hate it, because it is what the 3rd(?) time I think that Ubuntu has tried to make its own packaging system and then expects world+dog to suddenly use it because they said so. It is yet another attempt to lock things to Ubuntu, its more packages to maintain, it breaks things in distros because it doesn't follow the rules in those distros, and it is just another little gimmick/fad by canonical. See, dam I had a mini rant there and I never even used it before LOL.

So Anbox seems to be yet another Canonical (Ubuntu) thing, -wags finger at you disapprovingly-, just re-read the mini-rant about snap above lol.

The thing is, you need to embrace your distro a bit more lol, and or Linux in general, it seems right off the bat you are trying to find ways to shoehorn as many different ways to get more software in there. For Debian, I'd suggest adding "contrib" and "non-free" onto the official repos in your /etc/apt/sources.list and trying to get as much software you need via those using apt before rushing to Ubuntu'ing your Debian. Alternatively, just use Ubuntu if that is what you really want.

I generally find it best to do as much as possible 'native' to that distro first, fix any issues, again the distro's way, and then only go to outside things at the end. The main reason is, all these outside things can break internal/distro things without you knowing, and it might cause you to drop said distro due to problems that were not even their fault. Remember, a lot of things that say "Ubuntu/Mint/Debian" are actually Ubuntu things, and some of the Ubuntu instructions don't work on Debian because Ubuntu do their own thing a lot.
 
Good to know on the .deb file thing. I should've figured the format would be a little more complicated than just being ".msi for linux". So far I've been lucky, I guess.

I found the Debian wiki when setting up nvidia drivers, and it had me add Contrib and Non-free to sources for setting up nvidia drivers, so that's already in. I'll have to start checking it for more things in general. I've been just googling "Debian how to ..." for doing things and luck has had me landing on Debian related blogs or the wiki, but now I know to be a little more intentional about it.

On the Clock/start panel thing, I've fixed it (below), but in the interest of knowing more for troubleshooting... I could be the KDE theme I picked, but it was basically like that from the word go- Setup finished, got to desktop, the KDE configuration screen put up a dialog asking if I wanted to pick a theme, I found a windows 10 theme at the top of the list, after that I moved the panel to the lefthand side of the screen and then went back to a discord chat on my main desktop. About 15~20 minutes later I looked back and the date had gone weird and wrapped around to the next line. Could've been the theme, could just be something weird with vertical panels? (Screenshot was taken later on that night, after putting other software in, but the date widget was acting weird from basically the beginning. It looks perfectly fine if you put the panel back on the bottom.)

1632946220045.png


I did fix that after posting last night by swapping from the regular clock widget to something called Event Calendar from the KDE Plasma widgets list, and it seems to be perfectly fine at keeping everything on one row. /boggle. I still can't manually adjust panel font size, tho. I can pick font, bold, italics, etc. but not specify a size in points or pixels.

And yeah, I don't actually want Snap on there, lol. The only reason for asking about Snap was wanting access to Anbox for running Android games. I've watched a few angry, impassioned rants from Linux youtubers in the last year about how bad Snap is and how relatives of theirs have messed up debian/arch/etc with it, so I figured I wanted to know more before installing an installer to install one app that might not even work. (The last half of that sentence literally hurt to write. Damnit Ubuntu!)

On Anbox itself... I kind of just took the Anbox page saying "We only support snap" at face value. I should've just googled before asking, looks like you can get it through apt without fiddling with snap. /boggle.

So far, tho, I am thrilled with the experience. Everything's going pretty smoothly despite me bumbling in the dark. I ordered a spare SSD to swap my boot drive out with, so I'll probably try setting this up on my main desktop either later tonight or some time tomorrow. When I get to the multiple monitor madness? That's when all hell breaks loose. :D

As for the hypervisor... I'll go over that in detail later after I get back in from errands and take some time to explore it a little more. After a default options Debian install it just came up to a console login prompt, didn't even try to boot into the GUI.
 
Good to know on the .deb file thing. I should've figured the format would be a little more complicated than just being ".msi for linux". So far I've been lucky, I guess.

I found the Debian wiki when setting up nvidia drivers, and it had me add Contrib and Non-free to sources for setting up nvidia drivers, so that's already in. I'll have to start checking it for more things in general. I've been just googling "Debian how to ..." for doing things and luck has had me landing on Debian related blogs or the wiki, but now I know to be a little more intentional about it.

On the Clock/start panel thing, I've fixed it (below), but in the interest of knowing more for troubleshooting... I could be the KDE theme I picked, but it was basically like that from the word go- Setup finished, got to desktop, the KDE configuration screen put up a dialog asking if I wanted to pick a theme, I found a windows 10 theme at the top of the list, after that I moved the panel to the lefthand side of the screen and then went back to a discord chat on my main desktop. About 15~20 minutes later I looked back and the date had gone weird and wrapped around to the next line. Could've been the theme, could just be something weird with vertical panels? (Screenshot was taken later on that night, after putting other software in, but the date widget was acting weird from basically the beginning. It looks perfectly fine if you put the panel back on the bottom.)

View attachment 15141

I did fix that after posting last night by swapping from the regular clock widget to something called Event Calendar from the KDE Plasma widgets list, and it seems to be perfectly fine at keeping everything on one row. /boggle. I still can't manually adjust panel font size, tho. I can pick font, bold, italics, etc. but not specify a size in points or pixels.
It is probably somewhere in the theme / appearance, or under system settings -> fonts, there is a lot of stuff in Appearance section but sometimes its deeper in the tabs than would be obvious. I have my panel horizontal at the bottom so mines easy lol.

Speaking of weird-ish things, if you like the Windows style of file copying dialogue, as in the dialogue stays open while the file is still in motion and dosn't disappear into thin air and randomly puts a 2 second 'done' message, you can change that. I mention it becuase that is probably one of the single most stupid things I have ever seen in a UI and I hate it, so I found out how to make it actually display progress until it is finished. Let me know if you want that, I can link to a page on it or give you the rules files.
And yeah, I don't actually want Snap on there, lol. The only reason for asking about Snap was wanting access to Anbox for running Android games. I've watched a few angry, impassioned rants from Linux youtubers in the last year about how bad Snap is and how relatives of theirs have messed up debian/arch/etc with it, so I figured I wanted to know more before installing an installer to install one app that might not even work. (The last half of that sentence literally hurt to write. Damnit Ubuntu!)
Glad the Linux community is coming together on that lol.
On Anbox itself... I kind of just took the Anbox page saying "We only support snap" at face value. I should've just googled before asking, looks like you can get it through apt without fiddling with snap. /boggle.
That would be the Canonical marketing, try to force everyone to use Snap because no one likes it, even at detriment to a different project. This is the problem with them, they will deliberately do things like this (i.e. hide the fact you can use a .deb) just to push their own agenda. Oh and speaking of sneaky stuff, Ubuntu has a little program called Whoopsie, that by default sends memory dumps back to them, silently in the background if something crashes. It is like Microsoft putting all their new game releases with a Windows 10 minimum requirement, even back when Windows 7 was still in support.
So far, tho, I am thrilled with the experience. Everything's going pretty smoothly despite me bumbling in the dark. I ordered a spare SSD to swap my boot drive out with, so I'll probably try setting this up on my main desktop either later tonight or some time tomorrow. When I get to the multiple monitor madness? That's when all hell breaks loose. :D
Cool, glad it is working out so far. The multi monitor prompt when you first get to the desktop is a bit weird and counter intuitive, you can change it later, but I'd strongly recommend you try to get it right first time. I had some issues where it would randomly switch which monitor was 'primary' and then insist on loading up games in totally the wrong monitor. It doesn't seem to do that if you get it right first time. Note I'm on Debian 10, that might be fixed in 11.
As for the hypervisor... I'll go over that in detail later after I get back in from errands and take some time to explore it a little more. After a default options Debian install it just came up to a console login prompt, didn't even try to boot into the GUI.
It might be doing a 'server' install, did you actually tell it to install the desktop environment? It might be detecting Hyper-V and trying to be helpful and unselecting the GUI default.
 
It is probably somewhere in the theme / appearance, or under system settings -> fonts, there is a lot of stuff in Appearance section but sometimes its deeper in the tabs than would be obvious. I have my panel horizontal at the bottom so mines easy lol.
Hmm. Everything there's pt 10. Weird. At least switching widgets fixed it. ^^;

Speaking of weird-ish things, if you like the Windows style of file copying dialogue, as in the dialogue stays open while the file is still in motion and dosn't disappear into thin air and randomly puts a 2 second 'done' message, you can change that. I mention it becuase that is probably one of the single most stupid things I have ever seen in a UI and I hate it, so I found out how to make it actually display progress until it is finished. Let me know if you want that, I can link to a page on it or give you the rules files.
Oh, weird. I'll check and watch for that- I've never seen it happen on any Linux distro I've used. (Gentoo, Knoppix, mint, *buntu, etc)

Cool, glad it is working out so far. The multi monitor prompt when you first get to the desktop is a bit weird and counter intuitive, you can change it later, but I'd strongly recommend you try to get it right first time. I had some issues where it would randomly switch which monitor was 'primary' and then insist on loading up games in totally the wrong monitor. It doesn't seem to do that if you get it right first time. Note I'm on Debian 10, that might be fixed in 11.
Noted. Having to manually go set that up after it plug and prays wrong in Windows is a pet peeve of mine, so being prompted once at first time setup is something to look forward to.

It might be doing a 'server' install, did you actually tell it to install the desktop environment? It might be detecting Hyper-V and trying to be helpful and unselecting the GUI default.
That could be. I wasn't expecting it to differ from the desktop where defaults were fine, and I was a little out of it, so I may have just powered through something not registering that a dialog came up different. It is a Dell Poweredge w/ a Xeon processor, so it's reasonably likely that it offered to install in server mode. If it did, then I really just need to put KVM on and get it setup to work headless. I'm feeling pretty wiped at the moment, tho', so I think I'll pick the Linux adventures back up tomorrow after D&D. I'm not sure if I want to get the Server going or just dive straight in on the desktop after. I'll just find out tomorrow.
 
Hmm. Everything there's pt 10. Weird. At least switching widgets fixed it. ^^;


Oh, weird. I'll check and watch for that- I've never seen it happen on any Linux distro I've used. (Gentoo, Knoppix, mint, *buntu, etc)
Just do a really long file copy, like a dvd iso or something and the copying message goes and it carries on in the background, I really hate it because there is no way to tell how far it has got or if it has finished, especially if you miss the little 'copy finished' popup notification which only stays on screen for maybe 5 seconds. I changed mine so it shows all the time.
Noted. Having to manually go set that up after it plug and prays wrong in Windows is a pet peeve of mine, so being prompted once at first time setup is something to look forward to.


That could be. I wasn't expecting it to differ from the desktop where defaults were fine, and I was a little out of it, so I may have just powered through something not registering that a dialog came up different. It is a Dell Poweredge w/ a Xeon processor, so it's reasonably likely that it offered to install in server mode. If it did, then I really just need to put KVM on and get it setup to work headless. I'm feeling pretty wiped at the moment, tho', so I think I'll pick the Linux adventures back up tomorrow after D&D. I'm not sure if I want to get the Server going or just dive straight in on the desktop after. I'll just find out tomorrow.
Sorry, for some reason I was thinking you were installing a VM on Hyper-V. If it is on a bare metal server it should do as normal, maybe it just doesn't like the onboard graphics and can't start X.
 
And yeah, I don't actually want Snap on there, lol. The only reason for asking about Snap was wanting access to Anbox for running Android games. I've watched a few angry, impassioned rants from Linux youtubers in the last year about how bad Snap is and how relatives of theirs have messed up debian/arch/etc with it, so I figured I wanted to know more before installing an installer to install one app that might not even work. (The last half of that sentence literally hurt to write. Damnit Ubuntu!)
Not sure if it's still a concern for you but if you want a replacement for Anbox you should try Waydroid. It's a fork of Anbox which run exclusively wayland than much more maintained. Even if you dislike wayland I think it's still worth it for just running android games. Another option is to run a kvm VM with android x86 + arm translation layer and virgl.


Also I just discovered that Linux Torvald is using a linux distro created by a vtuber. This and the existence of baby WOGUE makes me think this is really the best timeline to live in.
 
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Not sure if it's still a concern for you but if you want a replacement for Anbox you should try Waydroid. It's a fork of Anbox which run exclusively wayland than much more maintained. Even if you dislike wayland I think it's still worth it for just running android games. Another option is to run a kvm VM with android x86 + arm translation layer and virgl.
@Norren ^^
(no idea if that actually does anything, i think it is meant to lol)
I'm interested in that too as there are some mobile games I might be interested in. Although lately I've been into Yuzu for emulating Nintendo switch, my new found reason for life is to make Maho happy by crushing all our opponents in Girls und Panzer Dream Tank Match, shes so cute when happy and you can feel the disappointment when we loose lol. Even just driving around in a tank with her shooting random things is fun.
I'm also now looking at trying an Alpha emulator, as I want to get a virtual OpenVMS system running. I've used VMS in the past at work and the idea of getting FTV to run on VMS is just so insane I want to try lol. (I got MATV to run on FreeNAS in the past).

...so I figured I wanted to know more before installing an installer to install one app that might not even work. (The last half of that sentence literally hurt to write. Damnit Ubuntu!)
I forgot to reply to this bit previously, but seeing dhrz quoting it reminded me lol. That is literally how Ubuntu makes me feel in general lol.

Also I just discovered that Linux Torvald is using a linux distro created by a vtuber. This and the existence of baby WOGUE makes me think this is really the best timeline to live in.
lol
I'm kinda torn to 2012-14, Fate stay night, Girls und Panzer, this forum was still rocking lol. Although I am excited at OpenVMS coming to x86, and of course this timeline has Rin-sama and Maho-sama so...I'm sold lol.

Back on the Linux front I had to make an emergency DDL server build as the old faithful Mahoro was having some weird library issues where lighttpd was crashing libc. So a new DDL vm on the hyper-v server as well as a new vpn vm as it turns out the main ftv/matv server is too new to be able to talk to Mahoro's vpn. Getting that up and running will allow the ddl server and the legacy site/services to talk to the live/main site db again. At present it is running as two separate sites and I'm having to manually export partial tables from one db to the other every time the ddl system adds a file, which in itself is a manual process because the old torrenter no longer works for some reason and I can't find either the source code or where the heck I got it from. So yeah, a lot of work to do and right now it is a case of "which bits can I get working easiest to reduce the manual work".

And then I still have the whole "DA" site project, you know that domain is now a year old and I still haven't even put a site on it, yikes lol. Oh and er.. I should probably attend more MAA meetings (Maho Addicts Anonymous) (- wait that's a good name for a site lol) , as I caved in and bought not one but two domains in her honour... and no I don't even know what I'm going to do with them lol. I get all these ideas and projects I think of but then I sit down and watch a video of Maho dancing and 10 hours later shes still dancing and I got nothing done, although it does help with the fan fiction lol.
 
Hey! Thanks for the info toss! (We neglected this thread after swapping to IRC, which I've been getting lazy about launching since work. lol.)
Not sure if it's still a concern for you but if you want a replacement for Anbox you should try Waydroid. It's a fork of Anbox which run exclusively wayland than much more maintained. Even if you dislike wayland I think it's still worth it for just running android games. Another option is to run a kvm VM with android x86 + arm translation layer and virgl.
I found Waydroid, but I have yet to actually get it to work on anything. My attempts are kind of stalled out by the fact that Wayland and my nVidia 1650 get along so very swimmingly. And by swimmingly I mean "crash like Windows ME on 64 bit hardware". I do like Wayland when I can get it to work, although it breaks my Synergy/Barrier setup.

As Maiku_Ando will nod and express disapproval of, my misadventures with Linux have seen me back on Windows 10 while I wait for mid-level AMD graphics cards to return to something vaguely resembling MSRP from 4 years ago. I have Fedora running on my Surface, but on that system Waydroid keeps giving me this super generic error about usermonitor and clipboards not being started. (Last I checked it didn't have any working fixes on their github issues page, I should check again.)

Although I guess I could swap SSDs again and see if the new generic driver fixes anything.

Also I just discovered that Linux Torvald is using a linux distro created by a vtuber. This and the existence of baby WOGUE makes me think this is really the best timeline to live in.
This is so ridiculous and yet so amazing at the same time. For all the madness of this timeline, we really do get some pure gems.

@Norren ^^
(no idea if that actually does anything, i think it is meant to lol)
I don't think this worked, but the forum sent me an E-mail to let me know what I missed this week, so... maybe it worked after all? lol
 
I found Waydroid, but I have yet to actually get it to work on anything. My attempts are kind of stalled out by the fact that Wayland and my nVidia 1650 get along so very swimmingly. And by swimmingly I mean "crash like Windows ME on 64 bit hardware". I do like Wayland when I can get it to work, although it breaks my Synergy/Barrier setup.
Oh lol I didn't know that you were an nvidia user. If that's the case then I guess everything wayland is out of the question.
It's so sad that linux is being worse at emulating android than some chinese spyware on windows.
 
And by swimmingly I mean "crash like Windows ME on 64 bit hardware".
Owch, dude that is one harsh burn right there lol.
(And because I can't help it, the trick with Windows ME is to keep the RAM under 2GB, then it won't crash as much).

As Maiku_Ando will nod and express disapproval of, my misadventures with Linux have seen me back on Windows 10 while I wait for mid-level AMD graphics cards to return to something vaguely resembling MSRP from 4 years ago. I have Fedora running on my Surface, but on that system Waydroid keeps giving me this super generic error about usermonitor and clipboards not being started. (Last I checked it didn't have any working fixes on their github issues page, I should check again.)

I think Maho can sum up my level of disapproval with this:

(click for full size).

I don't think this worked, but the forum sent me an E-mail to let me know what I missed this week, so... maybe it worked after all? lol
lol that means it didn't work, the "what you have missed" email is a different and automatic thing when you havn't been on in a while. Hint. lol.

Oh lol I didn't know that you were an nvidia user. If that's the case then I guess everything wayland is out of the question.
It's so sad that linux is being worse at emulating android than some chinese spyware on windows.
Same here on the Nvidia front, mainly because it always used to be that Nvidia was the best for Linux long ago and I always knew the model naming convention, now it seems AMD is more Linux friendly at least with regard Wayland, although I'm always a little skeptical of AMD, some of it is just a bit buggy for me.
 
Yeah nvidia on linux is a pain in the ass really, especially if you are using their older cards.

Speaking about nvidia, my laptop nvidia chip is old so I have to use the legacy 390xx version of the nvidia proprietary driver, which doesn't have native optimus support because it wasn't introduced in the proprietary driver until 440.31. For that, I have to use Bumblebee but the people who worked on Bumblebee support for Fedora dropped from Fedora 36 onward in favor of the new native support.
It's really annoying. I thought I'm settled on Fedora but I guess I still have to distro hop once again.
 
Victory! Got Waydroid working on my Surface Pro 3 Fedora install.

Now I just need to work out how to get that fancy sandboxing stuff so I can put Play store on here and have it properly jailed and privacy safe.
 
Yeah nvidia on linux is a pain in the ass really, especially if you are using their older cards.

Speaking about nvidia, my laptop nvidia chip is old so I have to use the legacy 390xx version of the nvidia proprietary driver, which doesn't have native optimus support because it wasn't introduced in the proprietary driver until 440.31. For that, I have to use Bumblebee but the people who worked on Bumblebee support for Fedora dropped from Fedora 36 onward in favor of the new native support.
It's really annoying. I thought I'm settled on Fedora but I guess I still have to distro hop once again.
Laptops have always been difficult, I recall the whole GPU switching issues years back, and that half the 'components' in laptops seem to be mostly windows drivers. That said my old Vaio SZ7 has debian on it and runs quite nicely. It is dual GPU, Nvidia and Intel, but the Nvidia one is some what broken, I suspect is the usual poorly made GPU chip issue.

Back on my desktop I had some issues with Debian 11, various things not working, KDE being different and the previous fixes for things no longer working. Also KRDC constantly disconnecting was annoying, so I actually switched back to Debian 10. Maybe it is just me but Linux is starting to feel more finicky than it used to. I feel in the old days stuff either just worked or it didn't at all, now it seems to be more shades of not quite working this week.
Victory! Got Waydroid working on my Surface Pro 3 Fedora install.

Now I just need to work out how to get that fancy sandboxing stuff so I can put Play store on here and have it properly jailed and privacy safe.
Cool, how many things are still holding you on Windows now?

I decided to get back into BSD again and installed OpenBSD as a vm on my Hyper-v server, I was debating about using it for some of the FTV/MATV servers but their httpd daemon dosn't take Apache style rewrites so it would be yet another thing I'd have to convert and I honestly couldn't be bothered. So for now its just for playing around on, currently it has a copy of the forum on it, so it certainly works, I guess that would be a 'BHMP' stack? (Bsd, Httpd, Maria db, Php) lol.

I'm currently experimenting with expanding my 10 gigabit network, I have a nice 16 port SFP+ switch and 20 10-gigabit single mode fibre SFP+ modules and a small pile of cards and fibre cables including 100m of military tactical Kevlar armoured multi-core cable that is currently being used to go from the back of my desk to the front of it because I ran out of patch cables lol. I'm learning Mikrotik switches and routers and I'm thinking of running mtrj 12 core fibre to each room with a breakout box. Given those cables are certified to 100 gigabit, that is likely overkill for a datacentre as I don't ever see the need for 600-gigabit to each room lol. Some of this is the fault of my Maho the tech fan fiction, as I got thinking of what would be the ultimate geek network in the house.
 
Cool, how many things are still holding you on Windows now?
Since native Android vers get all the Microsoft subscription apps out of the way, that gets the software list down to Clip Studio Paint as the main anchor... Wine is being forked to include the APIs Clip needs- it's not there yet but someone has it "not crashing", and there's also the interesting possibility of Clip's Android version that I haven't been able to test yet. I keep meaning to try to learn Krita more, but it's UI is so much worse than Clip's it's hard to use... I need to see if it can be customized more to fix/work around that, but still.

Hardware wise... I still need to pick up an ATI card. My Steam Deck has impressed me in regards to game compatibility and performance, so I'm really looking forward to getting my next video upgrade.

On a more random note, has anyone figured out how to fix the GTK3 file chooser crap so it properly puts buttons on bottom instead of in the title bar? I keep striking out when I search for it, it seems this is just how Gnome's engineers have decided to wage war on user experience.

I'm currently experimenting with expanding my 10 gigabit network, I have a nice 16 port SFP+ switch and 20 10-gigabit single mode fibre SFP+ modules and a small pile of cards and fibre cables including 100m of military tactical Kevlar armoured multi-core cable that is currently being used to go from the back of my desk to the front of it because I ran out of patch cables lol. I'm learning Mikrotik switches and routers and I'm thinking of running mtrj 12 core fibre to each room with a breakout box. Given those cables are certified to 100 gigabit, that is likely overkill for a datacentre as I don't ever see the need for 600-gigabit to each room lol. Some of this is the fault of my Maho the tech fan fiction, as I got thinking of what would be the ultimate geek network in the house.
I said this on IRC, but holy crap. The overkill. To think I'll be doing good to hardwire with regular ethernet next year, lol.
 
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