Linux OS stuff Thread

Deathwing said:

Do you use Arch Linux for gaming? Been considering dropping windows for my next rebuild.

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Absolutely not. Linux and Nvidia seem to be mortal enemies. Dunno if its improved in recent years but i already game on a budget cause i refuse to pay 2k for a gpu.

But if you're only playing 10 year old games you're probably good. One thing you'll appreciate is customizing your desktop over windows. However windows just wins on compatability which helps when you use third party tools and addons. Especially peripherals that might have little to no driver support on Linux

I've also heard windows does dynamic memory management better but I'm skeptical. That was also like 20 years ago i heard that.

That replacement file manager Krusader has been saving me lately, but it couldn't stand up to the challenge of my txt2images directory in my AI stuff. Looks like it has a hard limit on how many files it can see.

The pro overwatch season has started and you can really notice when frames are dropped. I'm using firefox and I pulled up the stats and was dropping about 10% of the frames.

Tried killing the compositor for laughs and it works, no frame drops. Shift-alt-F12. I use it a lot for when I'm running stable diffusion. Frees up a lot of gpu memory.

Well I got bored / tired of kubuntu and wanted to try something new. Arch users have always had this smug sense of superiority about them, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

The install script crashed and none of the partitioning stuff would "stick". You'd change it and it would revert back to the way it was. I got out of the broken script and started installing manually, following the wiki, and even my own raw fdisk commands were failing with a very generic error. Eventually I just booted to a live image of lubuntu and used kde's partition editor and got a swap part, a 30ish gig os part, 300 or so for home, and the rest my windows partition. I had to move the windows partition over, which of course broke it.

It was a multi day adventure getting it going, but I learned alot about how the guts of it all works. The wiki is really good. I had it up on a second computer or I'd never have gotten anywhere.

I've had a few really odd problems like a phantom steelseries mouse was detected alongside my real mouse (a mionix castor). Now and then randomly every 5-20 minutes it would make the steelseries the "primary" mouse and turn accelleration back up and crazy fast pointer speed. I had to hand edit alot of xinput stuff to fix it, and screwed it up the first time and completely disabled all input devices (even other ones I plugged in later) so had to boot to usb to fix it.

Then my 144hz monitor would randomly switch to 60hz now and then. Never figured out why but that eventually went away when I got the official nvidia drivers going.

Love the package build system they have, the AUR AUR (en) - Home. If you can't find a package you want (like I wanted the real visual studio code), you can just grab a tarball and run makepkg -s -r and it will grab everything you need to build it via pacman, build the thing into a package, then remove all those extra dependencies after building.



I've got a todo list of around a dozen things to make it really usable, like middle mouse on a taskbar item creating a new instance of it. I was quite shocked when the default was to kill the app

Getting windows going again after arch was a major nightmare. I installed arch MBR and I think my windows was MBR but I just couldn't get it to boot. I ran across this great post: How to Repair EFI/GPT Bootloader on Windows 10 or 11 | Windows OS Hub

That made me think about just using EFI. I managed to convert my partition table without destroying anything, but I wrecked my arch boot of course. Many attempts at fixing it were erroring out. What I didn't understand properly is that when you boot from USB to fix whatever boot problem you are having, you have to boot the USB in efi mode. If you don't, you don't have access to the variables stored in the bios non volatile memory.

Once I figured that out I could see the nvram variables and it showed a path to the windows boot loader. I checked and it was missing so I just searched the whole drive for it, found it off in windows somewhere, and copied it by hand into the EFI partition. I really didn't expect that to work but it did

On the arch side, EFI stuff is very very confusing. The wiki seems to indicate that mounting the EFI partition to /boot is the way to go. I have it like this right now but when I did a kernel update, all the kernel stuff failed to handle the path changes.

Like normally if you have a normal /boot, the kernel stuff is right in there. The initramfs and all that. But if you have the EFI partition mounted the kernel stuff goes in like EFI/arch/, so the kernel updates fail.

Also mounting there covers up stuff like /boot/grub so you can't update grub without umounting the efi stuff. This all seems like stuff I'm going to forget in about a week.

Another odd thing is, when grub starts, the efi stuff isn't mounted in /boot, but somehow it finds and uses the kernel stuff in there. But the grub.cfg is in the usual spot. If you put it in with the efi stuff it doesn't use it.

So yea, very confused. I think I might just try one of the other recommended stuff in the wiki, like mounting to /efi and rigging up some kind of trigger to copy the kernel stuff where it needs to go.

Speakin of grub check out the anime butts grub theme I made!

So I've almost got through all my big TODO list. There are a few things I couldn't fix like doing a windows-like middle mouse to spawn another instance thing. I really didn't want to install all the bloated QT stuff to work on it. That and a small file manager change I wanted to make were both hard-coded, so I thought maybe I could use the makepkg AUR stuff to fix it, but neither package actually builds.

I'm hitting that alot now. Often someone will upload something on the AUR site and then abandon it. So quite a few don't work anymore. (like conda)

One thing that turned into a big asspain was ssh-agent. When people ask about this on a place like stacko, everyone has their own opinion and there will be like 20 answers, 19 of which are crap. I ended up having to make a systemd service for it.

Time differences between Windows is always a problem if you boot back and forth. This time I set Windows to use UTC for the system clock, and set up this crazy complicated / pedantic Chrony stuff that is super over-obsessive about time. It corrects the clock coming back from windows within a minute or so.

For daily work, I'd say it has all been worth it. I watched several hours of 1440p youtube the other day while I was compiling and installing stuff. I checked and I'd dropped 2 frames out of 200kish. Kind of amazing. Nothing ever seems to get unresponsive. The zen kernel I'm using could be part of that I guess.

The compositor only does vsync on my main monitor, but that's fine. I don't use my secondary for much important, it is only a 1080p 60hz. The other one is running 144, so what do you even do if a window overlaps both?

Best of all I haven't seen a single glitch. KDE used to quite often have windows go solid black, go upside down, or have chunks of the screen flicker and flash.

Kharzette said:

So I've almost got through all my big TODO list. There are a few things I couldn't fix like doing a windows-like middle mouse to spawn another instance thing. I really didn't want to install all the bloated QT stuff to work on it. That and a small file manager change I wanted to make were both hard-coded, so I thought maybe I could use the makepkg AUR stuff to fix it, but neither package actually builds.

I'm hitting that alot now. Often someone will upload something on the AUR site and then abandon it. So quite a few don't work anymore. (like conda)

One thing that turned into a big asspain was ssh-agent. When people ask about this on a place like stacko, everyone has their own opinion and there will be like 20 answers, 19 of which are crap. I ended up having to make a systemd service for it.

Time differences between Windows is always a problem if you boot back and forth. This time I set Windows to use UTC for the system clock, and set up this crazy complicated / pedantic Chrony stuff that is super over-obsessive about time. It corrects the clock coming back from windows within a minute or so.

For daily work, I'd say it has all been worth it. I watched several hours of 1440p youtube the other day while I was compiling and installing stuff. I checked and I'd dropped 2 frames out of 200kish. Kind of amazing. Nothing ever seems to get unresponsive. The zen kernel I'm using could be part of that I guess.

The compositor only does vsync on my main monitor, but that's fine. I don't use my secondary for much important, it is only a 1080p 60hz. The other one is running 144, so what do you even do if a window overlaps both?

Best of all I haven't seen a single glitch. KDE used to quite often have windows go solid black, go upside down, or have chunks of the screen flicker and flash.

Click to expand...

Linux users like playing with their OS.
Microsoft users like playing with their apps.
MacOS users like playing with themselves.

Have you tried NixOS? That one is kinda cool.

I have not tried Nix. It looks like the opposite of arch. In arch all the packages are tied together so to update one you have to update them all. It looks like a really cool idea! I used to have this big list of crap I had to do to get to the point I could develop with vulkan, and it was easy to screw up.

The one thing I'm still confused on with arch is the makepkg packages. Are they supposed to be rebuilt after a pacman update? I haven't and my stuff is still working so I dunno.

Here's some unrelated interesting info on the xz backdoor stuff

I'm not sure I do, this is my first! So far it hasn't been a problem, but it did catch me off guard when I first encountered it.

The only plus side is exploits like the above are fixed quickly.

I wasted hours saturday trying to get my complicated surround audio working. The default audio for arch seems to be pipewire, but it looks like pulseaudio. Like all the gui stuff is for pulse.

So I'm looking for config files that don't exist and get very confused. Finally figured out how to adjust speaker balance (I've got one speaker that is always too loud), but if you touch the overall volume it resets everything back to even. I guess I'll just keep the mixer open.

The windows-leaving-files-locked thing struck again during my frequent reboots back and forth from arch to windows. Eventually it got stuck waiting on something and I just hit shutdown anyway and it freaked out and had to be scanned.


Kinda neat that it did the scan over the top of my grub graphics

It looks like the only sure way to keep windows from doing that is to just fully shut the machine down. Really annoying.

Okay luinux bros..

Made a sort of digital signage on a raspberry pi using the piOS distro

I need to make an icon / button / "bat file" to just start up FEH - I have the command line, with all the timers, file location etc for FEH and it runs great, but I need to have it for the end user to "just press / run X icon" to make the slide show go.

in winders it would just be a bat file with the command...

thanks in advance

What's FEH? You could write a bash script to fire it up, or stick an icon on the desktop if there is one.

The Linux version of a bat file is a shell script. Create a file named startFEH.sh


Use an editor to add the following inside it.


Make it executable

Depending on the DE you may have to tell it to "always run" this file (or similar) the first time you double-click it.