TheTwelveYearOld

This has turned out to be more tedious than I thought. I did the usual looking up tools to use, and found they use ddci, like ddcutil and ddccontrol, but they're very slow. Before setting them up, KDE's brightness slider did software brightness, now it does hardware brightness but now takes a whole moment with each brightness, I can't smoothly slide it back and forth like I can on laptops. I have a Dell G3233Q connected via USB For USB ports and DisplayPort.

I spent much of today trying to get WinApps running on NixOS. The VM performance is meh after following all the setup steps in the documentation, and I can't get the RDP part working. I'm not asking for help, which would probably take lots of back and forth commenting. but if I should even try to continue. The steps don't even mention Nix, only how to install dependencies via package managers.

I tried finding videos of Photoshop in WinApps but didn't find any, to see what performance actually looks like. Would it even be decent, or should I just suck it up and do GPU passthrough? Ideally I'd like Photoshop a window part of my linux desktop instead of switching back and forth between OSes. Making something work has been a PITA so far.

Subject: [PATCH RFC 21/22] phy: apple: Add Apple Type-C PHY
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 15:39:13 +0000[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20250821-atcphy-6-17-v1-21-172beda182b8@kernel.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20250821-atcphy-6-17-v1-0-172beda182b8@kernel.org>

The Apple Type-C PHY (ATCPHY) is a PHY for USB 2.0, USB 3.x,
USB4/Thunderbolt, and DisplayPort connectivity found in Apple Silicon SoCs.
The PHY handles muxing between these different protocols and also provides
the reset controller for the attached dwc3 USB controller.

There is no documentation available for this PHY and the entire sequence
of MMIO pokes has been figured out by tracing all MMIO access of Apple's
driver under a thin hypervisor and correlating the register reads/writes
to their kernel's debug output to find their names. Deviations from this
sequence generally results in the port not working or, especially when
the mode is switched to USB4 or Thunderbolt, to some watchdog resetting
the entire SoC.

This initial commit already introduces support for Display Port and
USB4/Thunderbolt but the drivers for these are not ready. We cannot
control the alternate mode negotiation and are stuck with whatever Apple's
firmware decides such that any DisplayPort or USB4/Thunderbolt device will
result in a correctly setup PHY but not be usable until the other drivers
are upstreamed as well.

Co-developed-by: Janne Grunau <j@jannau.net>
Signed-off-by: Janne Grunau <j@jannau.net>
Co-developed-by: Hector Martin <marcan@marcan.st>
Signed-off-by: Hector Martin <marcan@marcan.st>
Signed-off-by: Sven Peter <sven@kernel.org>

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-Vulkan-AV1-Encoding

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-Lands-Whisper

https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/

I think the least that distros can do, is allow listing all packages and system settings in config files like .toml rather than having to type in every single package to install, or click through system setting GUIs to setup. Would that require using a whole programming language or system like NIx?

While NixOS works much differently from most distros, that's the only reason I use it: package and system settings in text files. If I fix something, it's fixed permanently, I don't need to hunt down files in random directories if I want to change a setting. If I ever need to reinstall the OS I don't have to write dnf install every single damn package and manually setup all that up all over again. Having daily-drove Windows macOS & Fedora as throughout the years, my setups have felt hacky as well as houses of cards as I've wanted or had to set them up again (I don't mean Fedora specifically, but distros in general).

Basically it feels insane that it's the way most linux users and servers in the world operate. If I, a humble computer hobbyist can figure out Nix, why don't more users do so, and why is Nix so niche?

I want to see either a persistent rectangle box on the edges of the region being recorded (anything outside the box isn't recorded), or dim the parts of the screen that aren't being recorded. I looked for screen recorders for hyprland & wlroots and didn't find any with this functionality. wf-recorder + slurp works for me but I want a boundary visual.

I've been on the fence since I've been trying Hyprland. What I want out of a window manager / DE is lots of window customization settings (borders, animations, etc.), & having configuration inside one file or one directory with hot-reloading (I'm switching from KDE since its config files all over the place). Hyprland is very popular among WM users with a large ecosystem, though I prefer stacking rather than tiling. I can make it work with some window rules, and shell scripts using hyprctl & jq.

I'm wondering how many little things I will need to fix / figure out. For instance, when I open the firefox bookmarks library with CTRL SHIFT O. When that window is open but not focused, and not on top, if I press CTRL SHIFT O again on a DE it comes back to the top, but not on Hyprland. I could probably find a fix for that?

I might be answering my own question but I really want to hear thoughts.