I’ll continue to call it forge joe. It’s more cute. It’s like “where do I put these files?” “Just give them to Joe, he’ll know where to store them”.

I remember reading somewhere that btrfs has good performance for gaming because of deduplication. I’m using btrfs, haven’t benchmarked it or anything, but it seems to work fine.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I had a lot more spare time to tinker with linux when I was a student than after, having a full time job. But I guess if you only have the one computer and need it to work, then tinker in a VM or something. Don’t wait with tinkering and learning about linux if it is interresting to you and something you want to spend time on. You might not have the time for it in a few years.

Half Life 3

I agree. Even though I use extensions for dock, desktop icons and appindicators, I respect the Gnome devs for keeping things opinionated. It allows them to focus on implementing core functionality well, rather than having to support every customization option, which would clutter the settings and slow down development.

Next goal then would be vulkan 1.3 such that DXVK would work.

I guess the closest to a decent FOSS piano plugin is MDA Piano, or perhaps search for piano samples. Perhaps someone has created a decent piano preset for the dexed FM synth (but will probably sound very 80s). I’m using pianoteq (unfortunately proprietary, but it has native linux support and sounds good).

Also pacman cache.

I’d recommend go back to arch. I use arch myself and have decided to stop distro hopping. I always end up regretting and come back to arch. The arch install script is quite good now, spares me hours of hunting down what packages to install for a working desktop and configuring of bootloader, etc, that I had to do before for installing arch.

Last time I tried something else was fedora. I liked the seamless experience, but I was annoyed by the very slow updates (why does it take soo long to refresh the repos?), and I missed the awesome wiki and package availability on arch.

I would just get a T530 which is basically identical but it doesn’t have the nvidia GPU. You can upgrade the screen to a W530 1080p one, they’re interchangable.

You will have problems with the nvidia GPU on a W530 on linux. Especially if you want to use the displayport, as that is connected only to the nvidia GPU. Basically the displayport won’t work without permanently enabling the nvidia GPU and disabling the intel iGPU, killing battery life.

Basically my general advice for a linux laptop is avoid nvidia at all cost.

Just a couple days late for me. Just got a new nvme SSD which needed a recent kernel to be successfully initialized on boot. So I had to make my own ISO (september iso had too old kernel).

Gnome. But I use 3 extensions (dash to dock, desktop icons and appindicators) and the adw-gtk3 theme so GTK3 apps looks the same as GTK4/libadwaita apps.

This. Can confirm that it will work as I’ve used vulkan on an old Radeon HD7770, also on a R9 390. Basically you need a kernel parameter in the bootloader config to enable AMDGPU driver.

I never had a game cube so it didn’t cross my mind. AMD’s GCN is short for “Graphics Core Next” though.

One thing that could be worth checking out is whether the power supply is bad/insufficient. That could explain the GPU working when just using the desktop normally (GPU idle/low power), but when launching a game the GPU might get insufficient voltage or something causing the output to be unreliable.

Or as others have mentioned as well, maybe it’s a bad display cable. To try to find the cause of the issue, perhaps try to swap the cables between the two monitors to see if the monitor having issues changes. If there is no change, try to swap the outputs used for the monitor to see if the GPU output is bad (if swapping the output causes the other monitor to have issues instead).

When the screen goes black, does the monitor complain about missing input, or is the image just black as if the GPU outputs a black image? If it is missing input, then maybe the cable/output is having issues. If the image is black then it may be the GPU having issues.

One thing to note for linux and GCN GPUs, is that older GCN based cards doesn’t use AMDGPU driver out of the box, so vulkan won’t work initially. You need a kernel parameter to enable amdgpu for older GCN (at least I’ve had to do that with arch linux). But when it is enabled it works great in my experience. You will get a warning in the console that the support for that GPU is experimental though.

Also vulkan support for Ivy Bridge is not complete and is experimental. It is unfortunately not possible to use DXVK on ivy bridge due to this.

I’ve been using arch for many years now. I’ve used various distros every once in a while, but I always come back to arch. When arch break it is probably a single package that is causing the issue, and there is likely a forum post explaining how to fix it already when you have an issue. However if I manage to break ubuntu for example, I always have a bad time getting the system back up without a reinstall. I haven’t tried using BTRFS for snapshots yet, but I usually format my drive to BTRFS for new systems/reinstalls now, so I have the opportunity at least. Don’t know if snapshots would have made a difference for the GRUB issue that happened though. Thankfully it didn’t affect me as I use systemd-boot instead.

I also use Gnome, vscode and firefox. Don’t know about matlab but there is a wiki page and an aur package, so I think it should work. For gnome if you use extensions, I recommend installing them from the aur, instead of from the web browser, as you won’t need to manually update them. For vscode, there is an aur package for the official version from microsoft, but there is also a FOSS version on the main repo (though some extensions may not work/be available out of the box on that one).

One issue arch users may get after a while is the hard drive filling with cached packages. Pacman doesn’t delete old packages from the cache automatically, so if you never clear the cache, you will get a copy of every version of every package you’ve ever installed in the cache. I’ve made it a habit now every once in a while I’ll clear the cache, after an update and I’ve confirmed the system works after the update. There’s a command “paccache” from the “pacman-contrib” package that’s convenient for clearing cached packages.

Fun fact tangent: Voss water is literally just tap water from Norway (but not from the town with the same name). There are people literally flushing their toilets with the same water.

TLDR: Long rant about modern smart phones.

I’ve concluded that it is impossible to get a new phone that has the features I want. Some phone manufacturer always seems to arbitrarily declare useful features/form factors obsolete, maybe replaces it with some new gimmick and gets the hype machine going so all the other manufacturers do the same in fear of becoming irrelevant.

I just wish that some day some company is going to create a smart phone with a reliable fingerprint reader on the back again where it is reachable by fingers on BOTH the left and right hand. Or that some manufacturer will create a phone with a smaller screen than 6 inches. Or god forbid a normal aspect ratio like 16:9 instead of the ridiculously long lightsabers they’re making now. Then maybe it would be possible to get it out of my pocket while sitting down. Missing headphone jack is just a drop in the ocean IMO. There are so many other annoyances that I didn’t use to have, but now is an issue with modern smart phones.

If I got the chance to dictate what the manufacturers should do. I would tell them to stop. The camera is good enough. Make it smaller and not protruding out the back of the phone so much. The SOC is fast enough. Make it more power efficient instead of chasing for the next GHz. The screen is large enough, just stop. If I wanted a larger screen I would use a tablet. Do some damn QA. Test the main functionality of a phone, which is communication, not game benchmarks, not who can take the prettiest picture of the moon. Is it possible to take the phone out of the pocket without accidentally hanging up on whoever is calling you? Is it possible to send and receive to/from SMS/MMS groups? Does the fingerprint reader actually work or does it just say “sorry too many tries” every time you take the phone out of the pocket before even touching the fingerprint reader?

Just had to get that out of my system :P

Using termux for SSH as well. Haven’t heard about croc before. Are there advantages over copying files with ssh (scp) for example?