SpaceCadet

and if I make some server-like setup with multiple drives, I’d go with some kind of raid with redundancy instead of just stitching the drives together (or mb yolo and raid 0).

Server setups are usually virtual machines nowadays, with virtual disks (i.e. vmdk or qcow2 files in a storage pool). Stitching virtual disks together is valid in this case because redundancy is handled on another level, invisible to the vm.

Yeah I found that, but it seems that it can't arrange my desktops in a 3x2 grid. A 6x1 grid makes the desktop miniwindows a bit small.

In the meantime I found a few more nice ones ...

• Mouse cursor does not always obey the selected cursor theme, so depending on which window I hover over I get the white Breeze Light cursor or the black Adwaita cursor... Oddly enough, it's the new QT6 applications that get the Adwaita cursor. I couldn't replicate this on a "fresh" desktop with a clean user account, so it must be something in my existing settings that caused b0rkage in the 5 to 6 transition.

• Can't toggle mpv to fullscreen. The F key does nothing, neither does the --fullscreen switch.

Here's an overview:

• SDDM crashed with some error about the theme: I haven't looked into it yet though. For the time being I disabled SDDM and reverted to console login and startx.

• All my kwin window rules stopped working. Apparently, the window title matching string now should include the window class (i.e. "urxvt URxvt" instead of just "urxvt"), so I had to redo all my window rules.

• ksysguard is gone, together with all my customized monitoring pages and its replacement plasma-systemmonitor is broken. It's complaining about missing sensors, and core dumps on some screens.

• Some of my custom keyboard shortcuts were not working anymore. Had to reconfigure them.

• Desktop overview is gone, replaced with something that has less functionality: I can move windows from the currently selected desktop to another one, but I can't drag windows between desktops.

• The Breeze theme now shows a very thick (and IMO ugly) outline by default. Thankfully you can tune or disable it in the settings.

• Floating taskbar by default is also not my thing, but easy enough to disable. New "edit mode" feels a bit janky though.

• When navigating between panes in System settings, it often shows the "apply settings" dialog even when no settings have been changed. Stop gaslighting me ksystemsettings, I know what I clicked.

• Resizing the window of some (but not all) applications now produces a kind of rubber banding effect: like the contents of the window get stretched and then snap back into place multiple times during the resize. It looks and feels really janky. It doesn't appear to affect QT and GTK applications, and Firefox isn't affected either. Applications that are affected: chrome/chromium, vscode, freetube, tigervnc, urxvt, xterm and all the x* utilties. Turning off compositing "fixes" it, but who wants to run a desktop without compositing nowadays?

• Screen locking is completely broken. When I press Meta+L, instead of simply showing me the lockscreen, the display turns off and starts to flicker on and off multiple times while showing just a black screen and a mouse cursor. After a while the lockscreen does appear, and I can type my password to unlock but instead of showing me my desktop it dumps me back to a black screen with a mouse cursor. After a while, if I'm lucky, the desktop reappears. One time my entire system froze and rebooted (!) before I got my desktop back, and I lost my unsaved work. I disabled automatic desktop locking for the time being, and am fighting against my muscle memory to press Meta+L whenever I leave my desk.

Especially the last two are bothering me.

Smart. I wish I hadn't updated. It kinda caught me by surprise and I'm experiencing a lot of issues.

Hah, yeah. Most of my piracy nowadays is digging up old gems from the past.

I gotta say, it's working. I pirate a lot less than a few years ago. Not because I'm afraid of getting sued, but because it's all shite not worth pirating nowadays.

Yeah I did that for a while with firefox.

And then firefox broke apulse again due some sandboxing permissions, and you had to override it with some about:config flag: security.sandbox.content.write_path_whitelist

So that worked for a while and then the audio in some proton games stopped working, and that's when I said fuck it and gave up. I'm only prepared to play the whack-a-mole game for so long, and if the solution to pulseaudio flakiness becomes even more alsa related flakiness, it's not worth it anymore.

It runs on top of ALSA, as far as I know.

Possibly hardware dependent?

I always had audio hardware that was well supported by ALSA, I never had any ALSA issues until applications stopped supporting it.

clients (apps) should continue to use the PulseAudio/JACK APIs because the PipeWire API is not designed for general use

Really? That is news to me ... explains why mpv's pipewire audio output was briefly broken a couple of months ago.

And rightly so. There's a reason we're migrating away from pulse to pipewire.

For the longest time the solution to any audio issues was "just uninstall PulseAudio, and use plain ALSA", and that usually worked. I held out for years and ran an ALSA only setup because it just worked and PulseAudio was always giving me one issue or another (audio lag, crackling, unexplained muting), until some applications started to drop ALSA support.

Then Pipewire came along, and so far it has been rock solid for me.