Aaron44126

This has been previously reported and is a "side-effect" of disabling the EC fan control in certain Dell systems. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I can do about it. Any other tools that use the same fan control mechanism (SpeedFan, HWiNFO64) will have the same issue.

My Precision 7770 replacement fans still make a noticeable startup noise (even if it is maybe not as bad as the original ones). If these really have a quiet start then I might look at trying to source one of these heatsinks and install it in the 7770. (My idle fan RPMs are lower now that I'm on Linux as primary and I'm back to dynamically adding CPU load to keep them from powering off. I actually sort of like that it is contributing to Folding@Home instead of just doing junk work like I had before, though, so maybe I will just keep this setup.) Questions: Can you get the heatsink part number? (You should be able to go to dell.com/support, put in your service tag, and pull the parts list.) What power level do you see the CPU running at when you do a Cinebench test? Feel free to start an "owner's thread" ... I haven't seen anyone else show up with one of these new systems, or even mention that they had ordered one.

In your scheduled task "Action", make sure that you set the "Start in" field. It should be the full path to the folder containing Dell Fan Management.

Well. I guess I am not sure if it was the fingerprint reader or USB bus power related or what, but I seem to have possibly solved the buzzing by adding the fingerprint reader to the USB "autosuspend" blacklist so the kernel never tries to shut it off. (Reference.)

Ubuntu 23.04 is releasing... tomorrow. I don't want to install a non-LTS version, but I'll at least boot a live media and check it out; I want to see if there are any improvements to the iGPU driver (hello, 120 Hz display?). It has kernel 6.2, which will be released in the official Ubuntu 22.04 repos probably in August. ————————————————————— Still getting the electrical buzzing sound from my laptop, so I don't think that it is iGPU power management (which I presently have disabled). Here's something crazy that I just noticed. The laptop isn't always buzzing. But if it is, I can do this in the terminal: > sudo echo hi This causes a prompt for my fingerprint to appear. When the prompt is up, the buzzing stops. As soon as I do a fingerprint scan and the prompt goes away, the buzzing comes back. It's consistently reproducible, I did it like five times in a row just now. I don't think it is related to the fingerprint reader necessarily (...the buzzing is actually coming from the opposite side of the laptop...), but something to do with power management. The fingerprint reader is internally attached via USB. I think that when the fingerprint reader is "awake" and listening for a scan, it also wakes up the USB bus and something in the PCH, and somehow that causes the buzzing to stop. Going to have to poke around and see if I can find other ways to reliably stop the buzzing, and if I can do something to prevent the laptop to going to whatever power state causes this. Again, never once experienced this on Windows, so Linux is doing something different.

I'm on 5.19. I thought that was high enough to have proper support for Intel Thread Director.

BIOS update 1.21.1. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=86R0Y - This release contains security updates as disclosed in the Dell Security Advisories DSA-2023-091, DSA-2023-095, and DSA-2023-099. For more information, see Dell Security Advisories and Notices. - Firmware updates to address security vulnerabilities including (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures - CVE) such as CVE-2022-30339. - Fixed the issue where the system cannot boot.

So, here's a fun thing regarding the fingerprint reader... The Linux driver uploads its own firmware to the thing, causing it to not work if I reboot into Windows (which I did today to grab my Firefox profile to move to my Windows VM). But then, in Windows, the Broadcom driver will flash the Windows version of the firmware onto the fingerprint reader, so now it won't work when you boot into Linux. Each time the fingerprint reader firmware is flashed, you have to reboot before it works properly, so if you bounce between operating systems you're going to have a little firmware war going on. I think I managed to disable the automatic flash on the Windows side so this won't be an issue next time. Playing games this evening... Much better. I used "taskset" to set the process affinity when starting the app rather than after it was running, no idea why the latter didn't seem to work, but this did the trick. The CPU load stayed on the P cores and the game had a nice stable 30 FPS. I'll be doing some more scripts to automatically set the performance stuff up when starting a game and tear it down afterwards. I already had something similar for Windows. (...In addition to process affinity, I like to keep turbo boost disabled but enable it for gaming, set the NVIDIA GPU to prefer a higher power level, change the Dell BIOS "thermal mode" to ramp up the fans more readily, and so on. All of that can be scripted out.) I did notice that... yuzu has options for "borderless windowed" and "exclusive fullscreen", similar to what you see with many Windows games. "Exclusive fullscreen" is definitely more smooth than "borderless windowed", which I found to be a bit jerky. Even though, "exclusive fullscreen" doesn't seem to be exclusive; when it is active, I can still Alt+Tab to different programs and have windows running on top of the game. Maybe it caused Freesync to engage? I know that Freesync is supported with this hardware/software stack but I don't know how to tell if it is active.

Some poking this morning... There was a kernel update from Ubuntu. After installing it, I had to rebuild and reinstall the VMware kernel modules. Looks like this is going to be a recurring thing. I'll make a script so it will be easy. This might be an issue because I'm running VMware Workstation 16 instead of the current version 17; I don't know if it officially supports Ubuntu 22.04 (it's just what I have a license for). NVIDIA kernel modules were automatically dealt with after the kernel update was installed, by dkms. [Edit] VMware documentation does say that VMware 16.2.x supports Ubuntu 22.04 as a host. My laptop display supports 120 Hz, but GNOME will only allow me to select 60 Hz. xrandr -q does not reveal any 120 Hz options detected. I disabled graphics switching in the BIOS to attach the NVIDIA GPU to the laptop built-in display. With that, there was no issue selecting the 120 Hz display option. So, the Intel GPU driver is what appears to be holding me up here. I pulled the values needed for an xrandr modeline but was unable to get 120 Hz working under Intel graphics by messing around with xrandr. I've been fighting with some weird electrical buzzing sound coming from the laptop that I never heard while running Windows. I thought that it might be related to Intel CPU C-states and did work to block everything higher than C1, but it still occurs. Based on when I hear it (when switching over to VMware, or a couple of times when starting a video), I think that it is related to the Intel GPU power management. I figured out how to add a kernel parameter to disable that for now; we'll see if that makes a difference. ArchWiki is being pretty helpful with regards to messing with the display stuff, even though I'm not using Arch. ...Need to stop messing with this and do some actual work.

I just realized that you added more content to that post. Yes, I definitely am pushing it when it comes to multi-tasking, and the GDI issues that I referred to get worse the more stuff that I have open. Also, I will go days or weeks between reboots if I can help it, and the issues also get worse the longer my session is running. With regards to the calculator issue, I was referring to the Win32 calculator app, not the UWP one. The Win32 app is used in Windows 8.1 (and earlier), Windows Server, and Windows 10 LTSC. Also, Windows wants to have no more than 10,000 GDI handles open. There's a registry setting to adjust this limitation and you can set it up to around 65,000. If you go over the handle limit, nothing "breaks" per se but performance gets even worse. (I'm not sure how this works exactly but I found it noted multiple times including in this link that I posted above.) ...I wrote a quick program to count up the number of GDI handles by process on my system and found myself using about 33,000 during a typical session that had been going for a couple of weeks. One application was responsible for about half of those: Quicken. So, am I "contributing" to the problem with the way that I use my PC? Yes, for sure. Though I'd argue that in 2023, with the PCs that we have now, I shouldn't have to worry about such limitations. Here. I recorded a video from my Windows VM to demonstrate. This is a brand new Windows install with nothing extra installed except for VMware Tools, MS Office, and what you see on the taskbar. I do have animations turned off (maybe Microsoft uses those to cover things up a bit) but I have seen these on my main system with animations turned on. For Notepad can see the white parts of the window before it gets painted when I open a file browser (visible on most of the attempts), and for the calculator, it was harder to reproduce but you can see it most on the second-to-last attempt, at around 0:32. Again, this is not the worst I've seen it; it starts getting slower if the session has been really busy for a long time. Sometimes I can see it rendering the calculator buttons individually. I'll say that the "fun" part didn't come until after the "actually get a distro sort of up and working" part. I was more frustrated when I kept running into walls just getting one to install. Even now I am treading lightly in some ways. I know that if I mess with the NVIDIA driver too much, for example, there's a chance that I'll end up in a "can't boot" situation and then it might take me a while to figure out how to use the available recovery tools to resolve that. I'd say, if you're rebuilding a system and interested in a possible Linux switch, and you have some time, then give it a go. Games are more-or-less solved thanks to Steam Proton and Lutris (check out some YouTube videos on those). You don't even have to trash your Windows install, just shrink your Windows partition to free up some space for a Linux install (or install just Linux on a separate drive) and you can dip your toes in. Worst case, you learned some stuff and can just throw it away and switch to Windows anyway. It seems to me like we have a lot of "overlaps" as you said so you might have a similar experience to me. Yeah, I don't think that its the boot image that I'm worried about; I am still able to boot with secure boot on, just the VMware kernel modules will not load (VMware will complain, and if I try to load them in the terminal, I get a vague error). I did find directions on how to sign them. I'll try it (eventually). ——————————————————————————————————— New observation regarding the fingerprint reader. The driver has crashed or something after a few hours. At one point it failed to read my fingerprint and just sort of hung, and eventually prompted for my password. Now, it just always goes straight to the password prompt, and when I put in my password it takes a few seconds for it to actually unlock. And it takes 10+ seconds for the sudo password prompt to appear in a terminal. I saw that there is a different Git branch of the driver for "jammy" (Ubuntu 22.04) so I'll try switching to that and see if it is better. Otherwise, I guess I'll have to forego using the fingerprint and I'll try switching to face login. [Edit] "jammy" fingerprint reader driver didn't work for me at all; no fingerprint for now, maybe I'll fight with it later. [Edit 2] Literally right after I posted that, it started working, so I'm going to see if maybe it doesn't "crash" or whatever this time!

Cool... Do you recall if that also included support for calendar appointments & tasks? My past experience with this (with Thunderbird) was that you basically had to use IMAP which meant mail only. Thunderbird doesn't have any native Exchange support (unless there is some addon that provides it that I don't know about), but it looks like they have shoved a calendar function in there now. Exchange ActiveSync is like a "lite" version of the Exchange protocol that is used by, say, smartphones to talk to Exchange. It's adequate for mail/contacts/calendar/tasks sync and it doesn't necessarily have to be used with a phone. You can actually use desktop Outlook and attach it to a Hotmail/Outlook.com account via Exchange ActiveSync instead of regular Exchange (have to do some trickery to get it to use that protocol) and you can barely tell the difference. Anyway, I'll be messing with this sometime in the next few days. ———————————————————————————————— Still fighting with some performance inconsistencies when gaming. Today, I noticed that one of my "E cores" are under heavy load, even though I used "taskset" to set yuzu to run on the P cores only (0-15). It seemed to take because I can query the process affinity and it returns the same thing that I set (0-15 instead of 0-23). Here, I have a screenshot. yuzu is the only process using any significant CPU. It's affinity is for CPUs 1-16 (P cores only). "top" reports yuzu using 2.7 cores, and in Activity Monitor we can see that most of that load was given to the E cores (17-24 by its count), and the P cores (1-16) are hardly doing anything, despite the CPU affinity that I gave to yuzu. Confused ...? The game is struggling at 10 FPS (target is 30 FPS). It's an emulator, so it is CPU heavy. I'd really like to move that load up to the P cores which should be way faster. On that note, how is kernel module (driver) activity tracked? In Windows, it all went to the "System" process on the process list. I don't see anything analogous in Linux?

Minimal Python snip to read the fan speed in Linux! Pass "1" or "2" as a command line parameter to pick which fan to read. Needs "smbios-utils" present. (Maybe? libsmbios might be included in the Linux kernel.) #!/usr/bin/python3 import sys from libsmbios_c import smi if len(sys.argv) == 2: if sys.argv[1] == "1": res = smi.simple_ci_smi( 0, 0, 62976 ) print(res[smi.cbRES2], end = "") if sys.argv[1] == "2": res = smi.simple_ci_smi( 0, 0, 62992 ) print(res[smi.cbRES2], end = "")

Ha ha ha, operating systems feelings time! I've always liked the idea of Linux but it sort of takes pain from Microsoft to get me to switch. I've been comfortable with Linux for some time; I used it a lot in college and grad school, had a job at one point which included development on Linux plus managing some servers, and I have for many years regularly used GNU command line tools on Windows when it makes sense (most recently in WSL, but in Cygwin before that). I actually did switch to Linux and ran it for several months in 2008-2009, the later Vista years. It was Ubuntu 8.10/9.04, using GNOME 2.x. But I went back to Windows as soon as Windows 7 was released. Partly because Windows 7 did a lot to improve on the messed up stuff in Vista, and partly because I was just tired of fighting with various things in Linux. One thing that I remember from those days, for example, was that Flash content was pretty prevalent on the web. Adobe didn't have a 64-bit version of Flash Player, so if you had a 64-bit Linux distro with a 64-bit browser, you had to use some brittle thunk wrapper thing to run Flash content (using the 32-bit Flash plugin) that regularly broke. And never mind the fact that the gaming situation on Linux was pretty bleak back then. Anyway, I sort of feel like the same thing has happened again, I'm just becoming increasingly disgruntled with Windows. The #3 thing that has me dissatisfied is the general direction they are going (I was worked up enough about Windows 11 to complain about it to the Internet). The #2 thing is how easy it is for apps to mess with each other — for example, one app or driver being too busy with some resource causing another app to drop frames on a full-screen video, or things like that (more common with heavy multitasking). I've spent too much time tracking down issues like this. The #1 thing that has me dissatisfied is actually general poor performance of things that shouldn't be slow. A perfect example is performance of Win32 GDI applications. I mean, I have one of the highest spec laptops that you could get in 2022, and I can watch it taking time to paint individual elements of a standard File->Open window (i.e. in Notepad) — really obvious if you have "dark mode" enabled, as the unpainted elements are white — or, see it take the better part of a second to render the Win32 calculator app buttons after the window first pops open. What the heck. This is 2023, not the early 90's! I'm not the only one complaining; GDI performance in Windows is pitiful (especially if you do heavy multi-tasking with many apps open) and it doesn't look like they are really inclined to fix it; they'd just prefer people move to a newer GUI framework, but there are many apps (including several of Microsoft's) that will never make the switch to something more modern. So I got pushed beyond the tipping point in the past few weeks, and this time I'm not really thinking that Microsoft will be able to redeem themselves with a future OS release. (Not because it is not possible, but more because their priorities are not in line with what I would like to see.) So in evaluating what it would take to switch to something different, the only choices are obviously macOS or Linux, and I gave both high consideration. Now, I'm quite comfortable with macOS as well; I had a job for many years which involved running a school full of Macs. A switch to Mac would be easier in some ways because many of my apps that are available for Windows but not Linux actually have a Mac version. I have an iPhone / Apple Watch / Apple TV, and find Apple to be the most trustworthy / consumer friendly company out of all of the "big tech" companies — not that they are without fault, but I applaud their strong pushes for end user privacy and things like that. But I can't get behind the Mac, because of the closed nature of the hardware (no removable storage???), other things that bug me like the bad keyboard layout on their laptops, and the fact that there just isn't a great way to run Windows software/games on an M1 Mac if I need to. The idea of a switch to macOS is intriguing, but in the end, a non-starter. So... Linux. I'll say that this "experiment" has been a pleasant surprise. I sort of figured that I'd try it for a day or two, get disgruntled because I couldn't get something that I need to work properly, and finding that I had no real good options I would end up back on Windows. What I found instead was that this whole bit of experimentation and tinkering has made computing "fun again" and I'm actually enjoying the process quite a bit. Part of the reason is, I think, for the past ten years or so I have "forgotten" what it is like to get excited about a new OS since nothing in Windows has been really that exciting. This transition sort of reminds me of like switching from Windows 98 to Windows XP "early" — with the switch from the Windows 9x to the NT kernel, lots of stuff broke and there was stuff that I had to figure out again, but it was "worth" the "pain" of the switch because the new system was so much obviously better than the old one. Switching to Linux has felt a lot like that to me. I know there's a whole other layer to it with the transition from a closed to open ecosystem and so forth, and I do see and appreciate the value in that... but mostly I just want my stuff to work well. I don't mind some tinkering to get there. Even after a couple of days, I can tell Linux is simply working better for me than Windows did. Everything is so snappy, it's easier to get in and mess with stuff (I was playing with CPU C-states this afternoon), and even though I haven't figured everything out yet, it seems like there is at least some kind of path forward for everything that I need (even if some of that involves running Windows 10 VM on the side for the foreseeable future). Since I have made that determination, I don't see myself going back, on my home system anyway. Not fully ditching Microsoft. I'll probably continue to use .NET for side projects. I installed Visual Studio Code today. Anyway, I will continue to push ahead and figure out more things!

Thanks for the nudge in the right direction. I found this Reddit post which helped me get it sorted (but I did have to modify his directions a little bit). It looks like it was set up (by Canonical/Dell/Broadcom/whoever) for Ubuntu 20.04 and needs some tweaking for Ubuntu 22.04. I'll post a step-by-step here later. Also helpful was a comment further down in the Reddit thread about the fingerprint read timing out. I had to enroll a second finger in order for it to start working for authentication. What's pretty nifty is that I can use my fingerprint to bypass sudo password prompts, too... I wasn't really expecting that. One slight disappointment is that I can't unlock the system by just touching the fingerprint sensor while it is locked with the screen powered off. I have to do something to "wake it up" and then do a fingerprint scan. (Windows would be "listening" for a scan even with the screen off.) Oh, this means ChatGPT is a liar!! (again)

My Linux experiment seems to have stuck. I haven't booted my Windows install in about 48 hours and I don't think that I will need to except to maybe go grab some files from my user profile. (I do have a Windows VM running in Linux that has access to my Windows data drive.) I have made a separate thread about this transition but I wanted to note some things specific to this model laptop over here. Linux seems to handle idle power management differently. I don't know if it is "better" but I know that there is a much lower level of background activity on Linux. I have heard some odd electrical buzzing from my laptop when there is nothing really going on that I never heard while running Windows. It doesn't seem to be coming from the fans because I can hear it when the fans are off (which also happens more often with Linux running); I can hear it coming from beneath the keyboard, so the CPU or something on the motherboard. I tried disabling Intel Speed Shift and C-states in BIOS (following online advise from others noting this problem), and neither of those helped. So, for now I have addressed this by running the Folding@Home client at the "light" power level to give the system something to do. With turbo boost disabled, this does not cause the fans to rev up and CPU temperatures are in the mid 50's. For other Dell/Linux users, you might find this useful. Here are commands to change the "thermal mode" on the fly. smbios-thermal-ctl --set-thermal-mode=balanced smbios-thermal-ctl --set-thermal-mode=cool-botom smbios-thermal-ctl --set-thermal-mode=quiet smbios-thermal-ctl --set-thermal-mode=performance These must be run as root and you have to have the Dell SMBIOS support tools installed. On Ubuntu, the package name is "smbios-utils". There's no tools or commands that I have found to read the fan speed, but I should be able to come up with one. [Edit] Found a better way to kill the buzzing; I don't know if the Linux wasn't respecting the "no C states" rule from the BIOS, or if the BIOS implementation is just bad, but it seems like the system was still entering higher C states even with C states disabled in the BIOS setup. I found a Linux solution to dynamically disable C states and I used that to block everything higher than C1. We'll see if that kills the buzzing. I still plan to come up with a solution that cycles Folding@Home on and off to prevent the fans from powering off. (Better than a random junk background CPU job.) [Edit 2] C states is not the issue; I still hear it with C states disabled and with FAH running. I think it might be something relating to Intel GPU power management? Going to figure out how to disable that. [Edit 3] Solved buzzing. It was either caused by the fingerprint reader or something to do with USB power management. I added the fingerprint reader to the USB "autosuspend" blacklist so that the kernel will never try to power it off, and the buzzing stopped.

What does everyone use for email? I haven’t decided if I’m going to try Thunderbird or Evolution first. (Coming from Outlook on Windows.) Any chance for proper Exchange or Exchange ActiveSync support …? I am familiar with Thunderbird, I used it for a few years (a long long time ago). Evolution looks more... Outlook-like, at a glance. [Edit] I take it back with Secure Boot being OK. It was OK, but I realized that I had left it disabled while mucking around, so I enabled it again this morning. Everything booted up fine, but VMware Workstation would not start any VMs, and it took me a bit to figure out what was going on — I had built some of the kernel modules myself (noted in a post above), and those weren't signed, so they would not load while Secure Boot was turned on. Maybe at some point I will figure out how to sign those, but for now, Secure Boot off is OK.

Now that I'm starting to get busy, I'm mildly annoyed that Alt+Tab in GNOME just shows one row of apps instead of expanding to multiple rows like Windows does (...so not all open windows fit on the screen). Guess I've got to get used to using the "activities view" if I want to do something other than flip to one of the most recent apps. Solved poor responsiveness in VMware by disabling hardware graphics acceleration... Huh. (Lots of people complaining about this, so not just me.)

Took a little bit of trial-and-error but I figured it out. It was not enough to just add a new launcher via MenuLibre; I had to set its "Startup WM Class" (hidden down under the "Advanced" tab) in order for it to be properly identified and pinned in the dock. (Without the WM class set, I was able to pin Beeper to the dock but when I clicked it, it just added a second unpinned Beeper icon to the dock that was the actual running application.)

I was actually just playing with MenuLibre before I saw your post, ha.

Yeah, that's the "iPhone-like" interface I was referring to (...though I didn't know the keyboard shortcut, thanks). It's not terrible, but I don't like how the icons have to be laid out left-to-right and you can't just place them anywhere on the grid. (Same complaint about an actual iPhone... and with the Windows 11 Start Menu.) I might have a spot that I like to keep an app for muscle memory access, but its position could get jumbled up if I mess with anything "before" it. Also need to figure out some more about how apps work in general. For example, I use "Beeper" for communication and the Linux version is distributed as an .AppImage file that you can just run directly. Because it is not "installed", it doesn't show on the app grid nor can I pin it to the dock.

Likewise, mostly what I want from the desktop environment is for it to just stay out of the way. I'm getting along well enough with GNOME as it is set up. I rather doubt that I will be keeping its file manager and I will check out PacManFM, or maybe look at something like Krusader. (I use(d) an alternate file manager and Start menu on Windows as well.) I think I'm good with just the three (Dash to Panel, ArcMenu, Tray Icons Reloaded). The one thing I'm wanting now is a better app launcher. I like having one keypress to bring everything up on one screen and then one click to open what I want ... Windows 8/10 tiles were good for this. GNOME "sort of" has this with their iPhone-like app menu, but at the very least I'd need to find a way to be able to freely place items rather than have them arranged in forced left-to-right rows. (Maybe there's another extension for that.) Thanks for the tips. I don't suppose you've seen anything more recently on the Precision 7000 fingerprint reader? I have seen that I could use "howdy" to set up facial-recognition login, and I do have an IR camera. I'd rather do fingerprint login, but I will take face login over typing my password. Secure Boot seems to work fine with Ubuntu (though I find that I have to disable it to boot a USB drive that I made with Rufus -- but not if I burn it to an actual DVD...). I'm not too worried about Windows messing with Grub, I think worst case I would have to go to BIOS and re-point it at the Ubuntu boot manager instead of the Windows one. Normally the Windows boot loader doesn't get refreshed unless you install a "feature update" and I might never do that again. ...I actually had Ubuntu install the boot loader on the Windows EFI partition and it indeed automatically added the Windows boot loader as an option to Grub. I can also choose whether to boot the Windows boot loader or Grub from the F12 boot menu. Yesterday, I was booting Windows pretty often to go pull files that I wanted to move over to Linux or my new Windows VM. Last night I got my Windows data drives attached directly to the VM, so I don't think that I'll need to reboot into Windows as often. I know that KDE has experimental Wayland support, but kubuntu doesn't enable Wayland by default yet. In fact, when I installed regular Ubuntu+GNOME, it didn't even have Wayland enabled by default, though I thought that I had read that it would be for 22.04. I enabled it myself (and then disabled it again after issues). I will be looking at LUKS at some point, I am interested in having an encrypted disk with "seamless boot" similar to BitLocker. I have bookmarked a tutorial on switching over an already-existing Linux install. Ubuntu seems to automatically invoke DKMS and build new stuff when a kernel update shows up, I'm not too worried about having to figure that out. I will look at BTRFS for my data drive. I've freed up one of my 8TB drives to use as a "bulk storage" drive for Linux but I haven't formatted it yet. I'm going to set up up as a single-drive RAID0 array with mdadm, so that I can add my other 8TB drives as I free them up and just have one giant partition, without having to shuffle everything around again. (I've also found directions for everything that I will need regarding this.) ———————————————— I spent some time just now figuring out how to do keyboard button remapping with xmodmap. I now have the same keybindings that I had set in Windows (i.e. right Alt/Ctrl mapped to PgUp/PgDn, messing around with the positions of F11/F12/Home/End; all of this because of "deficiencies" in Dell's laptop keyboard layout). That had been driving me crazy for the past day or so. The next thing that I need is a proper backup solution. I had yuzu throw out my XC3 save files yesterday after a crash — luckily, I had a copy of those sitting around so I only lost about five minutes of progress. I'm looking at an automated solution that runs every so often and makes folders of hard links (sort of like Apple Time Machine). I forget what it is called. Overall, this "experiment" has gone more smoothly than I thought and I find myself increasingly committed to keeping Linux as the daily driver. I'm pretty happy with how it is shaping up, though there is still lots to do and figure out. I'm not sure what would happen at this point to block me from proceeding. I do have the Windows VM which will host some Windows-only software that I need and it will probably stay running at all times. At some point I'll look into seeing if any of that stuff can be moved over to Wine. (That said, there is no way that I could switch to Linux on my work PC, that will continue to be Windows for the foreseeable future. My workflow is very Windows-dependent.)

Ah yeah, thanks for the tip, this is much better. Don't need two bars... one is fine. The autohide also works really well. (I found that the extension that hides the top bar that I linked above isn't exactly perfect... for example, the top bar always reappears upon unlocking the system and you have to mouse over it to get it to go away.) And it seems to have many options for customization. I already shrunk the spacing between icons. I'm definitely interested in any "tips and tricks" along these lines. Anyone know if there's a way to get something more like the Windows 7 Start Menu in GNOME? (CInnamon and KDE have something along these lines built-in by default.) I know I can use the "activities" view and search for something, but sometimes I like seeing applications in a list. When I used GNOME 2.x back in the day, it had an application menu available from the top bar where you could have the apps grouped into categories, but that appears to be gone. [Edit] - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3628/arcmenu/ Also anyone know if there is a way to group "tray icons" into a container so that they aren't just hanging out on the right side of the bar? I have a couple of icons there already and I have a feeling that this space is going to get crowded with stuff again that I don't feel adds real value to keep on the screen all of the time. (I do see that Dash to Panel has the option to hide them entirely from the bar, but also looking for some way to quickly get at them on demand I guess?) [Edit] - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloaded/ (Also, disable the stock "Ubuntu AppIndicators" extension.) (I'm sure I could look into this stuff myself, and I will, just looking for any jumpstart from more experienced folks here. :-P)

Looks like I can't use Wayland if I want to use VMware Workstation, for now... Wayland intercepts keyboard shortcuts like "Alt+Tab" and they are interpreted by the host OS, not the guest OS. Doesn't look like anyone has figured out a way around this other than to switch back to Xorg. Probably need VMware to address it themselves. [Edit] Switching to Xorg also seemed to fix my GPU performance issue in yuzu... I guess it's just a bit too early to be trying to use Wayland? [Edit 2] Figuring out GNOME extensions, found this one that autohides the top bar. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/545/hide-top-bar/

Man, ChatGPT is a bit creepy. I will check this out. I'm not sure if it really knows what it's talking about for at least a couple of these but has still put something together that "sounds" reasonable.

I've never seen Windows setup get stuck like this. Is this in Windows Update in Settings, before the upgrade even really starts? You can force the update to kick off in a couple of different ways. Check the link here: https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11 Run the Windows 11 installation assistant. ...or, use the "create installation media tool" to build a Windows 11 USB drive (you'll need an 8GB+ flash drive that you don't mind erasing), and then run setup.exe off of the drive.