Trying to switch from Windows to Linux, ongoing issues thread

[Aaron44126]

So after using GNOME for a week, there are a lot of things I like about it.  First off, it looks nice (animations, dark theme style, etc.) and it works well.  But I have issues with lack of customization in some areas – for example, Alt+Tab not showing all windows on the screen if you have a lot of them open (requiring a horizontal scroll to see the last ones), I haven't seen a way to fix that.  And then what bugs me even more is this sort of "our way is the only way" mentality that they have in some areas and taking options away.  The MB/MiB file sizes is a perfect example (1000 vs 1024-based size); changing that across the platform and not giving an option to revert to the old behavior (which basically everyone else uses) is crazy.  Displaying virtual desktops in a "grid" doesn't seem possible anymore (I know that I was doing that in GNOME 2 back in the day).  I do see that there are extensions to support this and I will admit that I haven't tried one yet.  ...Another one that I bumped into is just changing the option for how long it takes for the screen to "dim" when left idle.  Apparently this used to be configurable on its own, but they removed the (hidden) setting away and now it is just computed based on the "screen lock timeout" setting.  I also don't like some of the UI decisions in some of the bundled apps (which I fully realize that I do not have to use).  For example, the whole way the top menu is laid out in Gedit is just all around odd to me.  Lots of their other apps follow a similar design mentality, but no one else seems to be following along with what GNOME is doing in this area.

 

...So, I guess I'm looking for something more "traditional" and with a wider array of customization potential?

 

Anyway, the cool thing about Linux is that there are a lot of choices in this area.  So I think after my big file copy is done, I'm going to download the KDE packages and give KDE another go.  I did some reading up and it looks like it is easy enough to switch back and forth in Ubuntu.  Hopefully, the setup work that I have done + package updates + newer kernel will prevent whatever was getting me hung up at the login screen when I tried this before.  Though, I will back up my system partition first in case something goes awry.

 

I might end up finding all different issues with KDE and switching back to GNOME, but the only way to know is to try!

[Aaron44126]

Wow, so...

 

KDE first impressions:

Holy cow, this is awesome.  Why did I wait so long before trying to use this?

 

Well, it is more rough around the edges in GNOME in some ways, and I'm glad that I went with GNOME for the first several days, because the flakiness of some things might have put me off from committing to a switch to Linux if I had tried KDE first.  For example, it dropped me on my 4K desktop at 100% DPI scaling.  I went and bumped it up to 200%, but that did not change the size of the mouse cursor or bottom taskbar thing, so I had to figure out how to adjust those separately.  The mouse cursor then behaved strangely until I started a whole new KDE session.

 

I also had to fight with a few other things.  Like, Firefox really wanted to show a whole title bar (above the tabs) in KDE, even though it didn't do that in GNOME and I'm using the same Firefox profile.  Had to figure out how to tell it to collapse the title bar and tab bar together.  I also had to fight with changing the mouse "double-click interval", there is no GUI option for it and I had to set it in a text file.  I'm still trying to figure out how to unbind the "right super" key from opening the applications menu (without breaking the "left super" key from doing so), so that I can use it as the "compose key" instead.  (On Dell laptops, there is only one "Windows" key but Fn+Windows corresponds to the "right" Windows button, an easy keystroke and handy for remapping.)

 

BUT it has been super snappy and stable so far, and there is so much opportunity for customization without even delving into third-party extensions/addons.  Everything that I complained about with GNOME above was either addressed "by default" or easily addressed by poking around the Settings app.  Contrary to GNOME, there are possibly too many settings to mess with in KDE, it's a bit overwhelming.  But, I easily got Alt+Tab how I wanted it by setting it to the "thumbnail grid" style.  I changed the "switch workspace" keystrokes to be the same as GNOME (Ctrl+Alt+Arrows).

 

Anyway.  I went ahead and switched the packages around to use Ubuntu's KDE base desktop and remove GNOME Shell.  This is a Kubuntu install now.

[Etern4l]

Yeah, I thought KDE would suit you better :) My initial impressions after trying Plasma were very similar. Probably the main reason I'm not using it is that it's using more resources, although I also don't really have a hard requirement for any of the features, and the simplicity of the Gnome experience works. Ideally I would use Mate, as it's basically and even lighter, yet more configurable Gnome - not available for Linux Clear unfortunately.

 

One thing that's lacking is auto-placement of windows in their last positions after login. Need to look for an extension for that I guess.

[Ishayin]

Hi all,

 

I haven't been around here much of late, mainly due to my health, but also because a lot of the computer time I have been able to manage over the past 6 months has been dedicated to trying out and getting to better grips with Linux. I plan to post more on this here once I have a system I am happy with fully configured (at least on the software side), but a few quick points I can make now as a quick preview:

 

1. Be cautious of developing any pre-conceptions based on the conventional wisdom of the internet – you really need to test out a wide range of systems for yourself and come to your own conclusions. From my previous tests around a decade ago, and from reading and watching videos, I had certain ideas in mind about what I was likely to like or not like before I started. All these ideas turned out to be quite wrong in the end.

 

2. There is so much potential in the Linux ecosystem, that even those developing distributions seem to have little grasp of the full breadth of it. As a result, there is no perfect distribution which has managed to put together all of the pieces at once, and many of the most popular ones have major drawbacks that I find to be quite fundamental (even more so than the all too common quirks mentioned by Aaron above – since there are distributions that have clearly long solved these issues, I find it strange how slow everyone else is to copy over these fixes into their own systems). Anyway, after trying ~ 25 different distributions, I have finally found one that IMO is a clear step forwards from the rest of the pack in sense, and the first that I can really see using as my main system in the future. I will reveal all in time 😉

 

3. For choice of desktop environment I would highly recommend XFCE over the others. In my testing it clearly beats the other popular choices in terms of performance, robustness/stability, power/flexibility and ease of configuration and use. You can easily setup any kind layout with any configuration of elements you like, and can easily save and switch between completely different layout configurations. And beyond all the GUI options which are fairly sensibly laid out, and already include for example all the different transparency effects and options you could ever wish for, you can style it even further with your own custom CSS code. A few days ago, and without any prior experience with CSS, I was able to setup my own custom radii and gradients on my task bar buttons, with a nice highlight and 'click' effect on activation, and all using a colour scheme that stays in sync with the system theme 😎
I think many people get the mistaken impression that it is only chosen for performance reasons, or think it looks ugly and dated due to the very outdated screenshots in their documentation and elsewhere on the internet, or from some of the more popular distributions that have XFCE releases not showing it at its best (I found that nearly all non-flagship releases tend to be noticeably lacklustre and rough around the edges compared to the flagship release). Of the more popular options, the two that do the best job with it I think are MX Linux, followed by Manjaro XFCE. But the more you play with it, and configure it to your liking, the better it gets. Whereas I found with other DEs, the more I played with them, the uglier and more unstable they became 😕

 

I know a few different people here have recommended MATE, and I certainly agree that it is a solid choice if you can configure it to your liking. I also feel like there is more potential with it than is on display in any current release. But getting my own setup running on it just seemed to be pushing the limit of its abilities a little too much for comfort (e.g. with the panel failing to load with my configuration on boot).

[Aaron44126]

Well, while I was doing all of this data shuffling, one of my 8TB NVMe drives pooped out.  It started acting flaky for an hour or so (it would "disappear" from the OS and I had to cold boot the PC in order to get it back), but now it is not visible at all... either from Windows or Linux, attached directly or I also tried putting it in a USB-C enclosure.  It's just dead.

 

Time to find out if Sabrent's warranty process is any good!

[Etern4l]

14 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

Well, while I was doing all of this data shuffling, one of my 8TB NVMe drives pooped out.  It started acting flaky for an hour or so (it would "disappear" from the OS and I had to cold boot the PC in order to get it back), but now it is not visible at all... either from Windows or Linux, attached directly or I also tried putting it in a USB-C enclosure.  It's just dead.

 

Time to find out if Sabrent's warranty process is any good!

 

Oh dear, annoying. Hope it goes better than for this guy..

[Aaron44126]

4 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

Oh dear, annoying. Hope it goes better than for this guy..

 

Well.  The symtoms seem similar for sure.  But I didn't have any trouble putting the warranty claim in and I did get an email confirmation immediately (he mentions that he didn't get one in the article).  I had already registered my drives, to extend the warranty to five years.  Now, I'm basically waiting to see what happens...  I'm not really crunched for space, but this is only the second time I've ever had an SSD fail.

 

All three of my Sabrent drives are from the same batch (sequential serial numbers!) so now I'm a little bit worried about the others.  Backup script is next priority!  I'm going to start with just an rsync job to copy everything to my "home server" every night.  (I do have everything backed up more-or-less, but nothing has been updated in the past week since my backup scripts were also running under Windows!

[Aaron44126]

Set up jobs to copy of a bunch of data from my main laptop to my "home server" using rsync (home server is running Windows; thanks WSL for making this easy).  Scheduled to run nightly, so less worry about losing files if another drive goes out.  I still want to find a solution to "snapshot" certain files more frequently and be able to restore to a snapshot similar to Windows volume shadow copy or Apple Time Machine.  I'm looking at restic.

 

@Ionising_Radiation, I am wondering if you have any thoughts on this as a longer-term KDE user.  Here's a perfect example of KDE being "rough around the edges"; it is failing at what I would consider to be basic laptop state management.

 

Here's the situation:

When I shut the lid, I want KDE to turn off the display (and keep it off until the lid is opened again) but otherwise keep the laptop powered on and running.  I'd prefer it if the system also locked automatically, but its not a dealbreaker if it doesn't.

 

In KDE settings under Power Management -> Energy Saving, there is setting with a few options for what to do if the laptop lid is closed.

 

"Lock screen" seems to lock the screen, but not turn it off.

"Turn off screen" seems to turn off the screen, but not lock it.

 

Also, if I shut the laptop lid and have KDE turn off the screen with this option, and I wiggle the mouse around while the lid is still shut, the screen turns back on, even though the lid is still shut.  (I have a USB mouse connected so it is impossible to pick up the laptop and move it without triggering mouse motion.)  In addition to the heat coming from the system, the screen creates its own additional heat that is trapped in there when the lid is closed so I don't feel comfortable just leaving the display on in this case.  I actually noticed this problem to begin with because the lid seemed hotter than normal!

 

Googling around, I just see people resorting to scripts to get the behavior that they want.  You can tell KDE to execute a script on certain events, but I already have a script running an infinite loop to do my fan management so I'll probably just add screen management in to that.

 

cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state will tell me if the lid is open or shut.

xset q | grep Monitor will tell me if the display is on or off.

So I can repeatedly poll to see if the lid is shut but the display is on, and if so, I can turn the display off with xset dpms force off.

(I don't use external monitors with this system, but if I ever do I can adjust accordingly.)

At least it is easy to do this stuff with one-line shell commands in Linux, it would be much more awkward to do in Windows and I'd probably resort to writing a small program.

 

...Anyway, I'm still wondering if there is a better way just using KDE settings...?

 

[Edit]

Realized that the "automatically lock after X minutes idle" setting is not working either.  I had it set to 10 minutes, but just bumped it down to 1 minute, and it won't automatically lock.  (I see other KDE users complaining about this as well, it might be tied to having some other power saving option disabled.)

[Ionising_Radiation]

@Aaron44126, my lid-closed sensor has been broken since forever, so I never noticed this; even Windows keeps my laptop screen on when the lid is closed! 😄 Furthermore, I keep my laptop plugged into a monitor with the laptop screen disabled. 

[Aaron44126]

13 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

@Aaron44126, my lid-closed sensor has been broken since forever, so I never noticed this; even Windows keeps my laptop screen on when the lid is closed! 😄 Furthermore, I keep my laptop plugged into a monitor with the laptop screen disabled. 

Thanks, ah well...

 

Well, I successfully scripted out fixes for both the "screen stays on when lid is shut" problem and "automatic lock after 10 minutes doesn't function" problem, both are effectively solved, even if I think it was silly for me to have to do it myself.

 

Also added a second 8TB drive to my RAID0 array for a total of 16TB capacity.  The array reshaping was pretty slow, just moving at a porky 200 MB/sec (I'm used to Storage Spaces going around 10× that fast for similar operations); it took over 12 hours.  It appeared to be CPU-constrained, using 100% time on a single E core.  It did complete with zero downtime, and without breaking either of my other drives, so no complaints really.  (Haven't heard back from the Sabrent people about my broken third drive...  I'll be calling them tomorrow probably.)

 

Oh, and I picked up an "AuthenTec Eikon Mini" USB fingerprint reader, which is supported natively by libfprint with no additional driver mucking required.  Seems to be working fine so far.  We'll see if it sticks.

 

Messing around with process priority ("nice"/"renice") to prioritize and de-prioritize some things and I had no idea about Linux "autogroups" and how they impact this.

[Aaron44126]

On 4/17/2023 at 11:25 PM, Aaron44126 said:

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).

On 4/18/2023 at 11:04 PM, Aaron44126 said:

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.

 

It all makes sense now...

If you do not pass the "-a" option to taskset then it does not apply the affinity that you ask for to all of a process's threads, just the main thread.  😕

[Aaron44126]

Well, it turns out that having fingerprint authentication enabled will block login to KDE (from SDDM, after a reboot), it just hangs after entering the password, like I experienced when I tried Kubuntu for the first time.  Another case of KDE being "rough around the edges".

 

I thought that maybe I wouldn't have to be as "careful" about process management on Linux, but...

Last night I was just trying to watch TV in Firefox while also downloading some Steam games in the background.  Turns out that Steam is happy to use 100% of 12 CPU cores while downloading and that was causing my video stream playback to stutter and hitch.  Solved once I pushed the Steam process to E cores only.  So, got to work out a solution to make things like that happen automatically.  Process Lasso was really helpful for making this happen on Windows but I am not aware of a similar piece of software for Linux.

[Aaron44126]

Finished up yet more scripting to make sure that certain apps/processes stay pinned only on the E cores and with low scheduling priority, and others like games stay pinned only on the P cores with high scheduling priority.  I also added scripting to automatically move the Windows VM to the P cores when I am actively using it and to the E cores (with low scheduling priority) when I am not.  I also decided to disable Linux's "autogroup" scheduling feature; I don't see any situation where fixes more problems than it creates, for me, since I guess I like to have a strong input in system-wide process scheduling.

 

Playing around with learning how to insert special characters.  On Windows, this is holding down the "Alt" key and then keying in a four-digit sequence on the numeric keypad.  I have a lot of them memorized that I use regularly, like "—" and "×", and characters that pop up in Spanish like "é" and "ñ" and "¿".  On Linux, you press the "compose key" and then key in a two (or more) character sequence to insert a special character.

 

...So, the Linux way will take some getting used to, but in the end it is definitely more intuitive and easy to "guess" what sequence you will need for more oddball characters that I can't remember the numeric sequence for, like "°" and "÷" and "→" and "©" and "…" and "€" and "≈" and "⅞".  I like it so much that I went and installed WinCompose to be able to use the same sequences on Windows.

 

I set the compose key to "right Windows" which is also Fn+Windows on Dell laptops.

 

—————————————————————

 

I got in touch with a Sabrent person and with no fuss at all I was provided a shipping label to send the broken drive back to them.  Only after receiving it will they ship out a replacement.  I don't have to pay shipping; it is going to Florida via 2-day FedEx.  I won't be able to ship it until tomorrow.  I don't actually have anything that I feel comfortable shipping it in.  I haven't kept any NVMe drive boxes.  I ordered the cheapest NVMe 2280 drive that I could find (128 GB for $12 USD), which should arrive this evening, I will use its packaging to ship out this drive to Sabrent.  And from now on, I will always keep at least one empty NVMe drive box around, I guess.

 

Oh, and it turns out that I've been pronouncing "Sabrent" wrong since forever.  On the phone recording, I heard that it has a long "a" sound as in "gave" — "Sabe-rent" — whereas I have always been saying it with a short "a" sound as in "rat".  Not sure how long it will take me to stop saying it wrong, ha.

[Aaron44126]

Another question for @Ionising_Radiation, since you've messed with this stuff before (more than I have anyway).  I've been reading some stuff and have a few starting points to look at, but I am curious if you have any practical experience or tips to share.

 

Looking at Optimus / dGPU stuff.  Do you know anything about how to do things like ...

• Tell if the dGPU is powered on or not?
• Tell which app(s) are using the dGPU?
• Start an app on a particular GPU?
• Force the dGPU to power off (no apps allowed to use it), in a way such that it can be powered back on without a reboot?

So far I have been basically let things operate "by default" and I didn't have to do anything in particular to get games working on the dGPU.  But, I'd like to exercise more control over this, make sure that the dGPU is fully powered off when it should be, and let some simpler games like Baba Is You just run on the iGPU.

 

———

 

While I had tested some Linux Steam games right away, I did fire up some Windows Steam games (using Proton) for the first time yesterday to see what's what ... I know that there will be issues with some of them, but so far I am impressed with the "it just works" aspect of it all.

[Sandy Bridge]

On 4/17/2023 at 11:25 PM, Aaron44126 said:

 

Cool...  Do you recall if that also included support for calendar appointments & tasks?

It's been 8+ years, so I'm not sure anymore... but I don't remember it not supporting calendars.  I think I would have noticed if it didn't support calendar appointments, but that was a small team where we mostly communicated via HipChat, so maybe not.  I've never used Outlook tasks so no idea about that one.

 

On 4/18/2023 at 8:47 AM, Aaron44126 said:

Here.  I recorded a video from my Windows VM to demonstrate.

Interesting, that is very noticeable.  Attempting the same workflow on my old (2011) desktop, I think it does have one frame (at 60 FPS) where things aren't in the right place yet, but without Dark Mode it's not nearly as jarring so I've never really noticed it - and that's more than one frame in your video.

 

Microsoft could benefit from some focus on performance.  I agree that it seems like GDI should not be such a limiting factor now as it was in the '90s (and I guess you can bump the limit higher now, but still), and every time I use Teams I'm reminded of its poor performance (click the toggle to customize notifications on a channel, wait 10 seconds while watching a spinner for it to load the UI).  But that mediocrity is good for Linux.

[Ionising_Radiation]

15 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

• Tell if the dGPU is powered on or not?
• Tell which app(s) are using the dGPU?

`nvidia-smi` will answer both. 

 

15 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Start an app on a particular GPU?

Arch Linux has nvidia-prime which provides `prime-run`. It looks like Ubuntu has a similar package, which provides similar functionality with `prime-select` or the NVIDIA X Server Settings window (`nvidia-settings`). 

`prime-run` is essentially a one-liner shell script that sets environment variables for the script's session (and any child processes):

#!/bin/bash
__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA_only __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia "$@"

Then you run any program off the terminal with this, e.g. `prime-run vkcube`. I have never played games on Linux (and I fundamentally dislike gaming with a translation layer, even if it works more-or-less seamlessly), so I haven't tested this in great detail.

 

15 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Force the dGPU to power off (no apps allowed to use it), in a way such that it can be powered back on without a reboot?

Again, the programs and utilities in `nvidia-prime` ought to help. 

Overall, on Linux, the GPU-switching and power management mechanisms are provided in the OS by PRIME and PRIME Render Offload (pun: Optimus PRIME), and the NVIDIA driver's Runtime D3 power management implementation (RTD3), respectively.

 

With a modern NVIDIA GPU (Turing and later), there is generally very little configuration needed to fully power-down the dGPU. I can achieve > 12 hours of battery life with PRIME, which is better than Windows. 
 

[Aaron44126]

Having issues with KDE locking up.  When it happens, KDE starts to act weird (mouse movement works, some apps are responsive but others are frozen, keyboard input generally doesn't work)... but the system is othersise still up and running – I can log in via SSH, I can still use my Windows VM (via RDP from another system), and I can switch to a console TTY once (if I switch back to the desktop TTY then the keyboard is fully unresponsive and I can't switch anymore).  Symptoms seem similar to what these other people are reporting, there are many from March/April indicating that this problem just started "in the last few weeks" so I wonder if some sort-of recent package update has messed things up, or if it just doesn't like kernels newer than Ubuntu 22.04's base 5.15 (they would have dropped 5.19 out for the first time in late February).  I haven't found a reported solution.  I am really liking KDE in general, but I can't deal with unknown instability so I might be having to switch to something else or back to GNOME.  😕

 

[Edit]

Maybe this is the solution?  If so, it's not just Kubuntu, looks like a KDE/Mesa conflict that would be affecting multiple distros.  I installed the Mesa update from the PPA referenced; we'll see if this continues to occur.  I don't really like being on the bleeding edge like this so if it does fix the problem, maybe I'll try to instead use the Mesa packages from Ubuntu 23.04 (looks like they are new enough to bypass this bug).  I already drug the kernel packages over from there.

[Aaron44126]

Some more messing around over the weekend.

 

I installed "Crossover Linux" and under that I installed Office 365.  I was mostly just sort of curious to se if it would work.  I didn't want to try to figure out wintricks/etc. to get it working on my own.  Crossover did make the install really easy.  I'm most interested in being able to run OneNote, but that doesn't seem to be an option for now, it is pretty brittle and easy to crash (never mind the fact that you can't access cloud notebooks).  Excel, on the other hand, seems surprisingly robust under Crossover.  I used it for a while and had no issues at all.

 

Quicken under Crossover didn't go well.  I got stuck at the Intuit account login screen.  It wouldn't take any keyboard input or copy/paste.  I'd also like to be able to run Adobe applications but I didn't even try that; just from reading, it looks like its a no-go unless you use pretty old versions.

 

On 4/28/2023 at 9:01 AM, Sandy Bridge said:

Interesting, that is very noticeable.  Attempting the same workflow on my old (2011) desktop, I think it does have one frame (at 60 FPS) where things aren't in the right place yet, but without Dark Mode it's not nearly as jarring so I've never really noticed it - and that's more than one frame in your video.

 

It is working way better for me now than what I showed in the video, since I have worked out some performance issues with the VM, but that demonstration is definitely along the lines of what I would experience on a "native" Windows system that had been up for a long time with a whole lot of apps open.

 

On 4/29/2023 at 12:04 AM, Ionising_Radiation said:

`nvidia-smi` will answer both.

 

Thanks for the pointers here.  I haven't messed with any of it yet, but I plan to in the near future.

 

I will note that when I first started messing with this a couple of weeks ago, I observed that nvidia-smi was always reporting that the dGPU is powered on.  I read comments online and saw mention that issuing a command to nvidia-smi will force the dGPU to temporarily power on, even if it is to just check the status?

 

I also saw someone state that you can also use this to tell if the dGPU is powered on:

cat /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/power/runtime_status

(Substituting appropriate PCI device ID)

 

I checked that and it returns "active", so really agreeing with nvidia-smi.  Closer inspection of nvidia-smi output reveals that the "Xorg" process seems to be using the dGPU.  I will have to see if I can figure out what is going on there.

 

On 4/29/2023 at 12:04 AM, Ionising_Radiation said:

I have never played games on Linux (and I fundamentally dislike gaming with a translation layer, even if it works more-or-less seamlessly), so I haven't tested this in great detail.

 

Ha, you may have noticed that I am something of an "all or nothing" person with regards to this project.  I'm not going to be switching back and forth between booting Windows and Linux.  I don't think I've booted into my Windows install for over a week now (obviously not counting the VM I have going).  Anyway, I already spent about half of my Windows gaming time in emulators so this is not something that I am averse to.  Also, it looks like about one third of my Steam games have a native Linux port which is a higher ratio than I was expecting.

[Aaron44126]

Figured out "manually" turning the NVIDIA GPU on and off.  Sort of.  Took some finessing and I have a bit of work to do yet to make some quick scripts for this.  (Maybe other distributions have a better default configuration and don't make this so awkward?)

 

I discovered bbswitch which is a kernel module that can check the status of the NVIDIA GPU and also turn it on and off using ACPI commands.  It agreed with nvidia-smi and the runtime_status thing above, stating that the NVIDIA GPU is on even though there are no apps using it.

 

I could not use bbswitch to turn off the NVIDIA GPU because the driver was still loaded, and I could not unload the driver because it was "in use".

 

I used Ubuntu's prime-select script to switch the system to "intel" mode rather than "on-demand" and rebooted.  The system booted up on the Intel GPU, with the NVIDIA driver not loaded according to lsmod.

 

bbswitch was still showing the NVIDIA GPU on, but now I was able to turn it off without issue.

 

Then I went through these steps:

• Use bbswitch to turn the NVIDIA GPU on.  (No problem.)
• Load the NVIDIA driver with modprobe.  (Oops, prime-select actually blacklisted it, I had to go and clean that up.)
• ...That's really it, the NVIDIA driver is now usable (I can run a game on it).  Also, nvidia-smi now does not show an Xorg process trying to use it.

Now, I still need to figure out how to turn it off after I have loaded the NVIDIA driver once.  If I try to unload it with modprobe, it shows an error that it is in use, even though no applications are using it according to nvidia-smi.  Unloading the driver is a prerequisite for bbswitch being able to shut the card down.

 

[Edit]

Managed to do a power on / power off cycle; if I take care to not allow the "nvidia-drm" module to load then I have no problem unloading the rest of the NVIDIA kernel modules.

[Aaron44126]

Figured out the whole priority/pin system in the apt package manager, so I can add the Ubuntu 23.04 repos but only have it pull down select package updates from those repos (Linux kernel and MESA packages, because I need newer versions of those than are currently offered on 22.04).  ...This opens up some interesting mix & match possibilities for pulling different package sets from different ditros/distro version and not having to worry about keeping track of updates.  I don't have any other specific use cases right now but I think maybe if I wanted a certain application to stay more up-to-date than it does in the regular Ubuntu repos, I could set it up to be updated through the Debian testing repo or something.

 

I know they have Snap and Flatpak to help with keeping applications up-to-date, but my trials of those have ended in frustration with how sandboxed everything is.  I do understand the purpose of the sandboxing, and that's great, but here's an example of the frustration.  Yesterday, I tried to install Pinta through Flatpak and ended up with an "ow, my eyes" experience when it opened up a big bright screen and everything else on my system is in a "dark mode" theme.  Apparently, at least when running KDE, Flatpak apps can't "see" the system theme and you have to jump through hoops to make that sort-of work.  I tried downloading it from Github and compiled it myself and when I ran that one, Pinta just used the system-wide dark GTK theme that I have set and looks great.

 

The whole Snap/Flatpak thing is all new to me because it wasn't a thing yet last time I tried Linux as a desktop OS and isn't something I had any need for during my normal use of Linux in a VM, mostly from the terminal.  And, I am looking at Pinta because it is obviously inspired by paint.net, which is my preferred image editor on Windows.  It uses a lot of the same GUI ideas and keyboard shortcuts, so less re-learning may be needed on my part.

 

For system backup, I ran across Timeshift which seems to do what I want and was very easy to set up.  (I did have to use the terminal to get it to set the snapshot location to my RAID/LUKS drive, which didn't pop up as an option in the GUI.)  It backs up all of the system files to another drive, and you can just browse the snapshots in any file manager.  Multiple "snapshots" will use hard links for unchanged files to save space.  It excludes user files (everything in the home directory) so that you can roll back to a snapshot without having to worry about those being modified.  (I already have a separate backup solution in place for that.)  It can do fancier stuff if you use btrfs, but my volumes are all ext4 right now.

 

Today, I finally set up Thunderbird for email.  Working fine for mail, and I've used it before so it's familiar.  Still haven't tried to figure out calendar & tasks but it looks like there are options to make that work.

 

Sabrent says they have inspected my broken drive and are sending me a new one.  No tracking details yet, though...

[Aaron44126]

For those into gaming, here's a cool thing that I just found out about and plan to mess with soon...

Gamescope.

 

I always wanted something like this for Windows.  It basically creates a whole separate Wayland session to run a game in and then routes it to a window on your desktop (which can be running either X or Wayland).  Looking at the Github readme, it appears that they've done a lot of work and thinking on making sure that compositing process is as smooth and efficient as possible.  (I've seen a few cases of benchmarks where running a game in Gamescope even makes it slightly faster than running it native.)

 

Aside from making it "impossible" for apps running in your main desktop to mess with your game and vice/versa, it allows you to do things like blow up games running at a lower resolution to full screen without actually changing your desktop resolution, run games that really want to run in 16:9 on a non-16:9 screen without changing your desktop resolution, force a framerate limit without changing your monitor refresh rate, and force full screen games to run in a window if you so choose.  There are even options you can set for how scaling should work (i.e. you can use AMD FSR as the upscaler for old games).  There are also keyboard shortcuts to change between windowed/full-screen and turn integer scaling on and off on the fly.

 

Does it actually work well on a laptop with Optimus in play?  It does say it supports Intel GPUs which should be all that matters, I would think.  A quick test looks promising, I didn't have to do anything specific to get a game running inside of Gamescope rendering on the NVIDIA GPU.

[Etern4l]

That's a deep dive for sure. Glad you surely must have enjoyed it, or else you would have quit by now.

[Aaron44126]

On 5/6/2023 at 7:15 AM, Etern4l said:

That's a deep dive for sure. Glad you surely must have enjoyed it, or else you would have quit by now.

 

It's become increasingly clear that going back to Windows would be just an exercise in never-ending frustration, so...

Linux may have its own frustrations, but I'm working through things bit by bit, and the only way to go is forward.

 

I'll ask this, maybe this is something you guys have experience with.  Is there a good way to get it to disconnect from Wi-Fi if there is an Ethernet connection?  (Windows does this automatically.)  Network performance between my Windows VM and my network scanner (talking about like a document/photo scanner) is poop if Wi-Fi is connected.  The VM only sees one network adapter, and traffic doesn't seem to always prioritize the Ethernet connection.  I can script a solution to this as well, just wondering if there was an easy way to do it.

[Aaron44126]

I just noticed that Ethernet priority is -100 and Wi-Fi priority is 0.  Maybe flipping those around would fix it?  I thought maybe it was a Linux "lower priority is better" thing but it looks like that is not the case.  (That's just the autoconnect priority so it might not even matter for traffic.)

[Etern4l]

13 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

It's become increasingly clear that going back to Windows would be just an exercise in never-ending frustration, so...

Linux may have its own frustrations, but I'm working through things bit by bit, and the only way to go is forward.

 

That's really cool!

 

I'll ask this, maybe this is something you guys have experience with.  Is there a good way to get it to disconnect from Wi-Fi if there is an Ethernet connection?  (Windows does this automatically.)  Network performance between my Windows VM and my network scanner (talking about like a document/photo scanner) is poop if Wi-Fi is connected.  It doesn't seem to know to prioritize the Ethernet connection.  I can script a solution to this as well, just wondering if there was an easy way to do it.

 

I've set negative interface priority on the wifi interface, although not sure if that does the trick. The following seems to contain some good suggestions, in particular the TLP package (advanced power management for linux) looks like it could be a direct hit. Don't have it installed so can't confirm.

 

https://askubuntu.com/questions/112968/automatically-disable-wifi-wireless-when-wired

 

  

2 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

I just noticed that Ethernet priority is -100 and Wi-Fi priority is 0.  Maybe flipping those around would fix it?  I thought maybe it was a Linux "lower priority is better" thing but it looks like that is not the case.  (That's just the autoconnect priority so it might not even matter for traffic.)

 

Yeah, just noticed this myself. -999 for the Ethernet, makes no sense, unless it has something to do with bonding I have set up. The slave bonding interfaces have zero priority for eth, and -1 for Wifi.