Trying to switch from Windows to Linux, ongoing issues thread

[Aaron44126]

2 hours ago, Etern4l said:

I don't know how you are feeling about it

 

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!

[Sandy Bridge]

15 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

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'm mostly just lurking in the thread, thinking about whether I should try to go Linux when I do my desktop rebuild, but this is the one area where I have some experience.  Several years ago at work my Outlook got completely borked, I think it wound up being hardware acceleration got turned on in an update and it didn't play well with my Intel GPU, but at any rate I couldn't sort it out, so I tried alternative e-mail programs.  What I wound up settling on was Evolution running on an Ubuntu VM.  It played perfectly fine with the corporate Exchange server.

 

This has been a number of years so I can't say how it will work with a 2023 Exchange Server (and I'm not familiar with Exchange ActiveSync), but IIRC I did try Thunderbird first, and couldn't get it configured easily, and Evolution played nice.  Although Thunderbird development has picked up again in recent years so it may play nice nowadays too.

 

That 1000-based file size counting would bug me, too.  1024 is where it's at.  I'm surprised this isn't easily configurable in file managers; it seems like a silly thing to have to switch file managers over.

 

----

 

Edit: Read through the most recent post.  Definitely interesting that the takeaway is that it's fun again, it wasn't entirely clear from the first page, although maybe that's the "black screen on boot after installing drivers, and having trouble finding a distro that just works" bringing back memories.  But it's good that that's the dominant takeaway.  We definitely have some overlaps in preferences and Linux/GNU usage; I always use the GNU Utils for Windows, even without WSL or Cygwin, and eventually ran back to XP from Vista, but only after concluding I wasn't going to get Ubuntu to play my must-have games back in 2007.

 

The performance issues you mention on Windows are curious.  I've long complained that 10 isn't as snappy as 8.1 or XP, but I can't see it painting the Open dialog in Notepad with Dark Mode, and TBH in my experience the Ryzen 5800 is pretty much powerful enough to make up the difference in snappiness between 8.1 and 10 (it only took 11 years of processor evolution to make that happen).  And while the Calculator doesn't start as quickly as it does in XP (thanks, sandboxing), the buttons are fully rendered when the window appears, which... well maybe it is the better part of a second, but at least the window as a whole is rendered once the sandbox gets going.  I would not expect those issues with the specs on your laptop.  Do you just keep way more applications open at once than I do?  I suppose with 128 GB of RAM you easily could.

 

Ironically the program in my life whose slow UI I am continually bemoaning is also a Microsoft program, but is Teams for Mac.  It's giving Electron apps everywhere a bad name.  Someone sends me a new message, I get the toaster notification, I go over to Teams to see the full message, and sometimes it takes 10 seconds to load their message while I can see the they sent an hour and a half ago.  That was instant with AIM!

 

Though I believe the problem, and GDI may well be culpable.  I once worked on a corporate-scale Visual Basic application, which had its own theming and everything, you wouldn't know it was a VB6 application from looking at it.  GDI limits were one of the major pain points of writing a highly complex VB6 application in the early 2010s.  I wouldn't say it was the reason that application was being gradually migrated to newer technologies, but it was a contributing factor.

[Aaron44126]

38 minutes ago, Sandy Bridge said:

What I wound up settling on was Evolution running on an Ubuntu VM.  It played perfectly fine with the corporate Exchange server.

 

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?

[Ionising_Radiation]

17 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Maybe at some point I will figure out how to sign those, but for now, Secure Boot off is OK

Check out sbctl.

 

Or if you want to do it all yourself, the Arch wiki has a detailed guide on self-signed boot images. If you do this, make sure you also read this section on dual-booting with Windows. If you don't include the Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA certificate, you will have a soft-brick when you change to NVIDIA-only in the firmware, because the GPU OpRom can't load, and you won't have any display output.

[Ionising_Radiation]

1 hour ago, Aaron44126 said:

unless there is some addon that provides it that I don't know about

ExQuilla is paid (€10/year), and supports Exchange, contacts sync, etc. I use it with my university's Exchange 365 server. 

[Etern4l]

3 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

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?

 

Kernel activity, module or not, shows up as "system" cpu utilisation (e.g. red bar in htop).

[Aaron44126]

10 hours ago, Sandy Bridge said:

Edit: Read through the most recent post.

 

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.

 

 

10 hours ago, Sandy Bridge said:

Definitely interesting that the takeaway is that it's fun again, it wasn't entirely clear from the first page, although maybe that's the "black screen on boot after installing drivers, and having trouble finding a distro that just works" bringing back memories.  But it's good that that's the dominant takeaway.

 

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.

 

8 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

Or if you want to do it all yourself, the Arch wiki has a detailed guide on self-signed boot images.

 

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!

[Aaron44126]

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.

[serpro69]

On 4/17/2023 at 1:15 PM, Ionising_Radiation said:

Which distro? KDE Plasma is the desktop environment.

 

Ubuntu (thought that was clear from the sentence since I mentioned the timeline relative to Ubuntu 20.04 release :D )

I do like KDE overall, but that issue was more or less a blocker for me, hence wen't back to Gnome.

 

I haven't tried it with other distros though, or even with more recent Ubuntu versions, so things might have improved since then.

 

  

On 4/17/2023 at 1:28 PM, Aaron44126 said:

What does everyone use for email?

 

Thunderbird mostly (Lately have to use Outlook - via web - for work since our IT peeps blocked authentication for third-party apps)

It did support calendar and contacts last time I used it with O365 account (about a year ago)

[Aaron44126]

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.

 

[Etern4l]

What kernel version suffers from those scheduling issues for you? 

[Aaron44126]

5 hours ago, Etern4l said:

What kernel version suffers from those scheduling issues for you? 

 

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

[Etern4l]

Should be enough in theory, 6.0 is more for Raptor Lake. Sounds like something is not working right though.

[Aaron44126]

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.

[Aaron44126]

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.)

[Aaron44126]

7 hours ago, Etern4l said:

Sounds like something is not working right though.

 

My VMware Windows VM is working much better now that I also forced it to P cores only.  I think that the "vmware-vmx" process was also identified as a background task and stuffed to the E cores.  (That one makes more sense, since you don't engage with its process directly from the desktop ...?  It technically is a background process.)  I've seen other complaints about this; VMware doesn't seem to have done anything yet to work with Alder Lake / Raptor Lake hybrid architecture setups (on either Windows or Linux hosts), leaving it to users to basically figure it out on their own.

 

I plan to leave the Windows VM on all of the time, but I don't like the idea that a Windows background indexing job or something could gobble time on the P cores (and eat into the limited power budget of a CPU/GPU combo workload) while I'm doing something resource-intensive on the Linux side.  I'm going to set up a solution to have it automatically shuffle between P or E cores depending on whether I'm actively using it or not.  I have a few things to stitch together to make that work.

 

...The fingerprint reader driver died again, same symptoms as before, so I think that I'm going to give up on it.  I've gone and removed the driver and support packages.  I'll figure out "howdy" face recognition authentication soon.

[Aaron44126]

Howdy face login was very easy to set up.  However, it didn't end up working out well.

 

I apparently have two usable cameras, /dev/video0 which is the regular camera and /dev/video2 which is the IR camera.  The regular camera worked for a bit but after a while started just outputting all black images, so howdy could not see me.  The IR camera is supposedly better to use for this sort of thing, but that didn't work with howdy either, the capture was just too dark for howdy to get a good face ID (unless I put a really bright image on the screen... I live in dark mode!).  So, password for now I guess.

 

Now, what is going on with this???

 

I was on "Balanced" mode when I spotted this, but I set it to "Performance" mode when gaming yesterday.  This might explain why I had one weird moment of it being stuck at around 20 FPS for 30 seconds or so.  I found other people complaining about weird/random performance issues that seem to be related to this.

 

How do I disable this intelligent performance limiting behavior?  Disable thermald?  I'm happy just let the CPU throttle itself, thanks.

 

[Edit]

$ powerprofilesctl 
  performance:
    Driver:     intel_pstate
    Degraded:   yes (high-operating-temperature)

* balanced:
    Driver:     intel_pstate

  power-saver:
    Driver:     intel_pstate

Nothing is going on right now, temps are fine...

 

[Edit 2]

Nevermind, doing it to myself.  Disabling turbo boost with "/sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo" = 1 causes this message to appear.  There's a bug report about it over here.

Will continue to monitor performance issues...  Still learning more every day.

 

[Edit 3]

Well, no performance issues gaming this evening.  ..Other than that I forgot to run my "high performance" script before starting (enabled turbo boost, Dell BIOS high performance mode, etc.) and had a "what the heck is going on" moment.  I had that fully automated on Windows and still need to work out that tooling here on Linux.

 

Here's an annoying thing.  If I disconnect my game controller (Sony DualSense), the Steam client decides it wants to pop open in my face.  Not sure if anything can be done about that.

[Aaron44126]

The size formatting consistency is just great (1024 vs. 1000 unit sizes).  Same app!

 

 

 

(Marking up screen shots right in Linux for the first time.  Got to get used to a new image editor.  I do like how Alt+PrtSc takes a screenshot of the window with proper transparency around the edges and everything.  Can't do that in Windows without a third-party app.  The stock snip app can do a window screenshot, but it will grab elements of whatever is behind if there are rounded corners.)

 

[Edit]

Woot!  Ubuntu 23.04 with Linux kernel 6.2 supports my laptop's 120 Hz display on the Intel GPU with no fuss.

Now, I guess I will have to pull that kernel over...

[Etern4l]

Nice catch. Would just open a bug report.

[Aaron44126]

Copied the kernel packages from Ubuntu 23.04 and installed on 22.04.  Pretty straight-forward.  Now running Linux kernel 6.2.  120 Hz now works off of the Intel GPU, I just had to go toggle it over in GNOME settings.

 

Now running an "unsupported configuration" so it's manual kernel package updates, and hopefully there's no big trouble.  (6.2 kernel on 22.04 should become supported and show up in the standard repo in a few months.)

[Aaron44126]

Playing with using "Nemo" as the default file manager.  Not sure if this is my final solution; I tried it because it looked really easy to switch to and switch back.  Nemo is the default file manager for Linux Mint / Cinnamon.

 

Switching is just:

https://askubuntu.com/a/1446372/702934

(A lot of this answer is duplicative, explaining different ways to do the same thing.  You really just need to do the first four shell commands at the top and then restart the GNOME session.)

 

Nemo has way more options than the stock GNOME file manager, and it does have an option to use "binary" (1024-based) file sizes, in Preferences under Display.

 

Doing things like File->Open in a program to open a file browser still use the standard GNOME dialog (I'm not sure if there is an easy way to change that).

[Aaron44126]

On 4/20/2023 at 11:25 AM, Aaron44126 said:

Doing things like File->Open in a program to open a file browser still use the standard GNOME dialog (I'm not sure if there is an easy way to change that).

 

Spent some time looking at this.  That thing is not part of GNOME, directly; it is the "GTK File Chooser" and it does not have options to change how the size is presented (either from the user side via a config file or something, or from the application side via a parameter to the method that makes it pop up).  I see more or less where the code is and I might try patching it at some point.  They do have a parameter that can be passed to the "format the size" function that will cause it to show in IEC units (1024-based), so it would be an easy one-line change.  GTK is a pretty core library though so I'll have to read up on how to do it properly.

 

What I'd rather do is add support to change the behavior via a config file (...there are some other config file options available that are respected by the File Chooser, like hiding the "recent folders" panel, so I could just hook in with those), and then submit it to GTK as a feature improvement.  No idea if they would take it.  I think it would be easy enough to justify since the GTK File Chooser is widely used even if you are not using GNOME (it pops up in Firefox on KDE for example), just to give users an options to have their file sizes match between apps.

 

Anyway.  This is not especially high on my priority list.  But it is the one place where I can't change the file size display format and it actually bothers me.

 

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Things are much smoother with 120 Hz working.  I am spoiled and don't think I will ever go back to a system with a 60 Hz display.

 

Formatted one of my 8TB drives for use in Linux.  Got it all set up with MDRAID RAID-0 and LUKS encryption.  (No encryption on the system/boot volume yet.)  It's a one-drive RAID-0 array, but this way I just add more drives to the array as I free them up and grow my partition later.

 

Also, set up a job to sync my KeePass password database between Linux and the other places where I use it.

 

Things are moving along.

[Aaron44126]

Trying to move some data out of Windows to the newly set up Linux drive...

I do not think that VMware's "Shared folders" feature is very efficient.  😕

(But I don't care enough to try to find a faster way to do it.)

[Etern4l]

Haven't had a chance to play around with VMs yet, although KVM seems to come recommended these days on Linux over VMware and VirtualBox. 

[Aaron44126]

12 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

KVM seems to come recommended these days on Linux over VMware and VirtualBox. 

 

Yeah, I might try out KVM and/or Xen at some point.

Aside from this file transfer issue, generally I am happy with the performance, though I did also have to fix a problem with kcompactd0 locking everything up (some kind of memory management issue).  I could probably fix the file transfer speed problem by setting up smbd on the Linux host and moving files that way, but I'm not really ready to mess with that yet.

 

For now I'm going to stick with VMware.  First off, I've been using it for almost 20 years so I am very familiar with how to configure different things.  I appreciate its portability in that a VM that I set up on Linux will easily be bootable on a Windows box later on if I need it (or even a macOS box ... if it were Intel-based).  I actually have some existing VMs that I will be moving over, and I do not anticipate that I will spend more than two minutes getting one up and running.  We use it at work too (bigger stuff with ESXi, etc.), so being knowledgeable about it is all-around helpful.

 

I have tried VirtualBox in the past as well and it has always seemed sort of clunky by comparison, to me.