Unfortunately for me, my laptop’s dedicated graphics card has started having issues. The card randomly malfunctions and then is no longer detected by the OS.

In windows whenever this happens it instantly blue screens. Sometimes it boots up but the graphics is not shown in device manager and it blue screens later eventually. Only disabling the GPU has now prevented it from crashing.

In linux however the system never crashes. Sure my external monitor which directly connects to the GPU freezes but the system runs fine. Heck, unlike windows it doesn’t even happen all that often here.

I have been dual booting on different computers since about a decade ago. Only once have I ever seen a kernel panic. Windows on the other hand manages to blue screen at least once every year even though I seldom use it.

So. I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 8, and decided to try Linux. Windows was getting old, and I was caught by suprise when my location popped up on the lock screen. Also, I was having some issues with my Universities wifi after I changed my password through cmd.

I've had tried linux a couple times in the past, really trying to force myself to learn and use it, but each time I always had some kinda bugs that broke the entire experience. Non working wifi, some random dependency that a program I want to use needs, no games, etc etc. But, this computer is used mostly for school and art so I don't really need windows.

So, to Linux I go, right? I it's better and faster, yada yada yada. I ask around, ubuntu is trash, and fedora is owned by people who hate open source or something. So, I found an alternative endevouros which is basically just arch.

I go through the install, see an encrypt my drive thing, encrypt the drive, and install it. I boot it up and,, no compatible os found. Needed to turn off secure boot... okay.. I guess that is for windows. Boot it up, keyboard doesn't work for startup, so i plug in an external keyboard.. sigh.. this is going to be a pattern

So, I get in, and look around, touchscreen isn't working so I found the linux-surface driver thing. I install them as best i could with like a million commands. I am enjoying the OS itself, but, the keyboard still doesn't work in the encryption thing. Then, I actually try the pen

There is no palm rejection. Like, what's the point of having pen input if you can't use the pen as you normally can. I look at the system preferences and can't find anything related to it. I can't just lift my hand while doing art lol

Regardless, the thing I'm using, which is KDE from plasma, looks pretty smooth. All the animations are nice, the user interface is very pleasing and even the dock lifts up at the desktop so it's aesthetically pleasing. (You can still slam your cursor in the bottom left)

Firefox is significantly faster than on Windows. I don't know why but it just is. Maybe it's from all the extensions I was using? 120hz is actually 120hz, like on windows it just felt.. laggy.

But, the compromises were too much.

At this point, I've been trying stuff for a couple hours to try and make it work but honestly? I just can't. I'm not going to sacrifice something as simple as palm rejection just so i can not support microsoft. Hopefully in a couple years it will be fine to just install and use like you do with windows.

Just wanted to share my experience with yall. Not really looking for help, just as feedback to what a kinda average user would experience. I'll try again eventually, and yes, I understand that some of this is from direct sabotage from Microsoft. But, I have tried on a different computer too, and it also lacked palm rejection (though was 1 year ago).

Good luck yall, and thank you for contributing to make stuff better. Sorry I couldn't do the same, I'll be back eventually to try again.

In the context of personal computers.

As much as we'd love to see a world where everyone's PCs ship with Fedora or Mint or some other open-source, free operating system, let's be realistic here. Big hardware manufacturers want money. They WILL monetize an OS if at all possible -- Linux or not. They WILL happily preinstall an OS that pays them, if the option presents itself, and are not at all incentivized to maintain a free and open-source OS if money says otherwise.

In a world where Linux becomes the dominant OS, what would that mean for us, the consumer?

Would every hardware brand pull an Apple, and ship their own OS? Would an XPS run DellOS, a Galaxy Book run OneUI Linux, an HP Envy a HPOS, etc? As a hardware vendor, being able to preinstall your own locked-down operating system comes with many market pros, such as tighter hardware-software integration and easier implementation of tracking and monetization. Somewhat like the Apple style, where the Mac computer only ships with macOS.

Or alternatively, would every brand pull a Windows? Would a single or handful of Linux distributions (say, Ubuntu) end up with enough cashflow to simply buy out the vast majority of PC vendors to include their OS preinstalled? And then get to maintain their market position due to consumer familiarity with their OS, as well as advertising/marketing revenue; meaning we'd end up in a world similar to how it is now, but with Ubuntu taking over what Windows' market role?

Change log: Release v0.5.4 · ilya-zlobintsev/LACT · GitHub

Explained: Linux AMDGPU Control Application Adds vBIOS Dumping, Fan Control Hysteresis - Phoronix

"LACT 0.5.4 is out as the open-source and independently developed "Linux AMDGPU Control Application" for this community AMD Linux graphics driver control panel option given the lack of any official Radeon GUI management solution from AMD.

LACT continues progressing as this Rust-based GUI control panel for Radeon graphics cards on the AMDGPU kernel driver. LACT allows for GPU overclocking, power and thermal monitoring, fan curve control, power state configurations, and other features that are available with the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver but not exposed by AMD in any official graphical user interface. With LACT 0.5.4, yet more features have been wired up".

With explicit sync being merged and added into both the new Nvidia drivers and all the newest updates to the different desktop environments, what is stopping Valve from releasing SteamOS3 for every device? Power management for Nvidia devices? some other feature that I have missed somewhere?

Is there a major blocker for Linux gaming to become even larger and a real contender with Windows 11 or 10? Apart from anti cheats I mean.

Installing antiX Linux on my PC with 2 GB RAM, a Intel Celeron E3300 (2 cores) CPU and Intel 82G33/G31 Express GPU was one of the best decisions I have done in my life. When I was using Windows 7, my PC was crappy, I was unable to install basic programs such as Stremio and I was only able to play Windows 7 classic games on my PC because of my old graphics driver. When I switched to antiX Linux, my PC became more usable and I finally managed to install these programs that were not installable on Windows. Even though the graphics on some programs are not that good, at least they still open.

Battery Input Manager is a DBus service managing charging input on your phone (PMOS, Droidian, Mobian)

https://gitlab.gnome.org/gnumdk/battery-input-manager

It is able to set a start and end input threshold. It will charge until a max input threshold if an alarm is detected.

GNOME Clocks >= 45 is supported (flatpak or not).

If your phone looks unsupported, please look at https://gitlab.gnome.org/gnumdk/battery-input-manager/-/blob/main/data/devices.json and send me a merge request to add support for it.

It’s been a bit more than a month since I got a laptop with an ARC GPU and I switched to Fedora Silverblue.

So far it’s been great, I had absolutely no issues that haven’t been incredibly easy to troubleshoot and I’m genuinely really liking ARC. If Intel doesn’t decide to kill it any time soon, I will be a long time user from now on.

Fedora Silverblue has been lovely, it’s very refreshing how out of my way it feels. I don’t really have to worry about some app breaking my system, and rpm-ostree has been really nice, giving me all the informations I might need to know to get some app working properly.

Working with Homebrew has also been quite nice, I like that basically all of the packages I tried to install, just work. On Ubuntu I had issues with brew, that I don’t seem to encounter on Fedora Silverblue.

If you’re in the market to get a new GPU or to try a new distro I genuinely recommend them.

What are you guys’ experiences with either ARC or Silverblue?

I have a business in which my employees have to use Linux in an actual desktop environment. Over the years, I had to make a number of adjustments and just wanted share my recommendations to people who are in the same boat. Please note, these are recommendations for advanced users who need to train new employees/users who haven't used Linux before; these are not recommendations for advanced users for themselves.

And yes, I am the same guy who wrote about making a non-tech company using Linux and also posted the update to that.

We use Kubuntu so some of these are KDE/Plasma specific.

• Teach people about middle click pasting I have found that middle clicking is more beneficial than a burden for most users. All jobs require a fair amount of copy/pasting and having the option to middle click to paste is great. Similarly, most new users don't know about KDE's Clipboard applet which is useful when they need to copy and paste different items to different part of the form.
• Go over "focus follows mouse" By default, most WMs disable focus following the mouse; probably because Windows and macOS doesn't do that. However, if you simply go over it, you will find that most people would actually prefer it. Giving the new user the option is worth it.
• Go over shutting down the computer I know it sounds silly, but these days too many people think you are supposed to turn off a computer like they do a phone or tablet: by holding the power button for several seconds. You have to tell them not to do that and show the "proper" way to shut the computer off.
• For older users, scale the desktop Older employees/users don't have great eyesight, and often don't wear reading glasses when they probably should; or, their reading glasses aren't as strong as they should be. Even if you get a larger monitor, that monitor will likely have a higher resolution in which the text will be once again small. Therefore, I recommend sitting down with the user and scale the screen to as high as needed. Do not just change the default font size. The nice side effect of scaling the desktop is that the buttons are also larger; that way it's easier for older users to click on the right one. You may find that you will need to scale at a fraction (like 1.25x or 2.50x); in which case you may have to use Wayland; but that's a whole other discussion. Also, make sure the keyboard they are using isn't back-lit; sometimes having a back-lit keyboard makes it harder for them to see the letters.
• Some people like macOS and want the same UI/UX The nice thing about KDE/Plasma is that it can be customized by the end users. I'll leave it up to you, but some people would rather have that UI/UX than the default "Windows like" UX that most desktops have.
• If Num Lock isn't on by default in your distro, turn it on Most end users expect Num Lock to be working without having to hit that key. I don't know why most distros turn it off by default; but I would recommend have it turn on upon login (you can set that default in KDE's system settings under "Keyboard").

Obviously, there are going to be differing opinions on the best default settings, but this is what I have found when I hire new employees who never used Linux before.

Source (changelog) : Bump version to 46.1 (!3712) · Merge requests · GNOME / mutter · GitLab

46.1

* Implement linux-drm-syncobj-v1 [Austin; !3300]
* Fix input lag on X11 nvidia [Daniel; !3685]
* Fix scanout on secondary GPUs [Michel; !3674]
* Don't apply max-render-time to secondary GPUs [Michel; !3689]
* Fix reusing single-pixel buffers [Jonas Å.; !3702]
* Improve scanout candidate check [Robert; !3699]
* Always use logical pixels for bounds [Sophie; !3698]
* Fix modifiers getting stuck during grabs [Carlos; !3704]
* Fix night-light on displays without EDID [Sebastian W.; !3673]
* Fix secondary GPU acceleration with nvidia driver [Jonas Å., Daniel; !3304]
* Fix some XWayland clients being partially click-through [Sebastian K.; !3697]
* Fix initial suspended state [Jonas Å.; !3475]
* Fixed crashes [Bilal, Jonas Å., Sebastian W., Daniel;
!3683, !3666, !3691, !3708, !3678]
* Misc. bug fixes and cleanups [Ray, Carlos, Bilal, Ivan, Barnabás, Jonas Å.,
Jonas D., Michel; !3672, !3681, !3686, !3687, !3671, !3679, !3690, !3703,
!3695, !2946, !3696, !3710, !3644, !3707]

I keep seeing these posts about "adoption by the average user being hampered by X or Y".

Why do you want "the average user" to move over to Linux so bad ? Do you want "the average user" to ruin Linux like they ruin the internet ? Because when "the average user" comes over, that's when unrestrained corpo greed comes over too. And we've seen what that does innumerable times. I've been using Unix/Linux for 20 years. Linux is an IDE not an OS. It's not meant for "the average user". And that's a good thing.

Distro/Kernel maintainers should keep those "As easy as it should be, but not an ounce easier". There is no reason to want "widespread Linux adoption" unless your agenda involves greed and lots of money for yourself at the expense of Devs free work.

TLDR: stop posting about "Linux adoption is too hard for the average Joe". We know and we don't care.