Bluetooth sucks on all platforms. It may be worse on Linux, but given how often my coworkers on Mac and Windows have audio issues it meetings, not by much.

Get a good set of RF wireless headphones and only use Bluetooth when you’re traveling.

I frequently switch between audio outputs (headset for calls and focused gaming, speakers for other use). I installed an audio switcher applet to make changing that easier and faster. But cosmic is perfect for me other than that.

Games like Baldur’s Gate assume you have at least some DnD experience. I remember playing Neverwinter Nights for the first time long ago and being really glad I played one session of DnD before it.

I have a cache drive in my NAS for reads, thinking about putting a second drive in there so I can have a read/write cache array. It makes a huge difference over just having spinning rust. I’d love an all-flash array, but 36TB of SSD would be very expensive right now.

Note to others reading this: If your main use case is gaming (or anything other than storing/processing buttloads of data), I’d suggest just getting a bigger pcie3 drive instead of a faster pcie4/5 drive. Going with a faster drive won’t be a noticeable difference, but having 2-3x the capacity (for the same price) will help.

The scheduler is limited but it can still schedule across all the threads and cores in a given system. It’s just doing it less efficiently. The headline is misleading.

Desktop or laptop? Do you need peripherals included? Honestly for under $500 I’d highly suggest looking at refurbished machines. You’ll be able to pick up an off-lease Dell or Lenovo or HP system for < $300.

Run this command to see what version of the vulkan API you’re on: vulkaninfo | head -n 5

Proton 8 requires vulkan 1.3 compatibility. I’m guessing the drivers you’re using (or maybe the drivers nvidia has published?) don’t have support for it.

50-60% of my initial attempts at connecting to something via bluetooth is my accidentally selecting the wrong device. I’d say maybe you’re one of my neighbors but I definitely wasn’t up at 5am.

I’d recommend avoiding Epic Games, they seem to love breaking Linux compatibility. Publishers that force you to use their launcher, even if you have steam, can be annoying sometimes.

I’d suggest an AMD graphics card if possible. It just makes things simpler. I think Nvidia is still having issues with Wayland.

There were apparently 2 different MX150 chips with very different power consumption (10w vs 25w), core clocks (937mhz vs 1468mhz), and memory bandwidth (40GB/s vs 48GB/s). I don’t think either of these are going to play GTA5 well, but the 10w part is probably much worse. Can you confirm which one you’ve got?

Apple makes such weird decisions with their hardware sometimes. Like running the trackpad and keyboard off the Bluetooth controller in some models. I think it’s intentional just to make other OSes less compatible sometimes.

In college I was an apple certified tech and I had to replace a hard drive in a MacBook one day. The wireless card was glued to the top of it. No clue why. What was a 6 screw procedure on every other laptop vendor at the time was 20+ screws and 15 minutes of gentle prying on that thing.

Yup, you can do this pretty easily. But I didn’t want the added latency of another hop wherever I’m on cell service.

I’m using nextDNS so I can have it outside of home too. If you want someone to use on your phones when you’re away from home wifi, I’d give that or AdGuard a try. But PiHole is easy to do for home in an SBC or container.

I’ve been using Linux for 2 decades and I still use Debian for containers and servers and Pop_os for my desktop and laptop. If I was going to run a straight gaming machine I’d probably use something Arch based.

What kind of experience are you looking for? Something that’s bleeding edge? Something that’s going to give you 99.999% uptime with minimal hassle? Something to give you a hobby?

I love how Cosmic just stays out of your way and let’s you work. Never looked back after switching to it, hopefully the new one is the same thing but faster.

Wireless printers didn’t exist when this game came out. Network printers weren’t really a thing in homes. I wonder if it’s trying to probe the printer for some details, like margins or paper size, and crashes due to latency.

Edit: Have you tried removing/renaming the wineps.drv file in this bottle?

I wonder if pop_os is going to stick with Ubuntu with snap being pushed so hard now. It’d be cool if they switched to Debian.

Edit: looking at the pop repos, the branches are named after the new Ubuntu release still. Hopefully they’re removing snap dependencies at least.

Yeah they burned me a few times in the past by acquiring games/studios and breaking their Linux compatibility immediately after getting them. I’ll hold this grudge for decades.

Apple doesn’t ship consumer systems with dedicated GPUs in them and they’re on their own custom silicon now. Developing cross platform games for them must be a major PITA.