dingdongitsabear

after trip-digit linux installs in the past year or so, here's my list for a seamless transition for people escaping windows/macOS who need to get work done:

1) don't tailor linux to your hardware, do it the other way around. get hardware that works OOB. no nvidia. no latest hardware. no weird realtek chipsets in budget deal-of-the week e-waste, no gaming (i.e. nvidia) laptops.

that don't mean breaking the bank, a thinkpad with 8th gen or newer CPU can be had for $100ish; add $50 or so to expand RAM and storage and that covers like 90% of use cases. a competent all AMD desktop a gen or two behind current tech that can game almost anything can be easily assembled for less than $400.

fedora and adjacent forums are littered with cries for help about stuff breaking or not working at all; 90% of those are nvidia related. can you make it work - absolutely. is that something you're willing to dick around on a deadline - hell nah.

2) no theming. no icons, no fonts, no plymouth screens, nada. as few extensions/plugins as you can, run it as close to stock as possible. shit's gonna break, this is a work device, you can't afford downtime because the single dev maintaining the thingy hasn't updated it for the newest Gnome of Plasma. Gnome don't feel like macOS? you'll get used to it; muscle memory is a removed but it's a tameable one.

an additional moment, especially if you're on a laptop, is to make the thing as fungible as possible. that's an easily breakable/losable thief-magnet, you want a setup that can be reproduced with as little fuss as possible so you can be operational again.

3) don't dual/triple/whatever boot. that's an advanced scenario, it's gonna break eventually and if that's a device you depend on for work or education, you don't want any of that. run it as a single OS occupying the whole disk; encryption on a mobile device is mandatory. if you absolutely need multiple OS, a 2nd device is stupid cheap and it compartmentalises your shit, i.e. one for work, one for private/gaming, etc.

4) no weird distros. no arches, no gentoos, no immutable thisisthefuture shit. when it becomes mainstream, we'll switch. until such time, middle of the road - fedora for newest hardware, mint for ancient stuff, ubuntu for everything else. a lot of people made sure they're operational OOB, it's less likely stuff will break and if it does, there's an army of folks who asked and answered whatever's bothering you.

5) no weird DEs. wayland only, gnome for laptops and tablets, plasma for desktops, there is no third option. you're transitioning from an infinitely polished UI and the best tech that money can buy, you want the closest possible experience and the widest used environment, worked on by the largest dev community aware of the widest possible usability issues, working towards fixing/implementing them. you're already relearning shit, invest that time wisely.

6) separate your system stuff from your applications as much as possible. purge all user-facing apps, like firefox and media players and such from the system's package manager (apt or dnf) and reinstall them from flatpak. that was a headache a few years ago, nowadays almost everything works OOB on wayland. the apps include everything they need to work, the setup is easy to maintain and recreate, upgrades are better (no reboots necessary) and all your settings and data are in one place.

this covered 90% use cases of 90% of the users I've dealt with. naturally, edge cases are gonna have a bad time - you want to ollama this and that and rock bleeding edge hardware and have a normal desktop experience? it's gonna hurt. you need mac-like power management and days away from power? doable but that needs work.

remember, this is a work device. for the same reason you don't decide to "upgrade" the suspension on the car that's supposed to get you to work the morning of, you don't mess with what's likely the only device you need for work/education.

greybeards dunking on you because you're not a "real" linuxer? enamoured with the spicy screenshots from linuxporn? get a $20 thinkpad and go wild - arch it, sway it, have the scrolling text on boot, rice it till it bursts. but leave your workhorse be.

if you're a long time PC games pirate, I'd like to divert your attention to an area you probably haven't looked at (I know I haven't) - Playstation 3.

you're free to look up its history, but in short, it's tech that premiered in 2006, so def on the old side. nevertheless, it's still in active use with game development reaching into 2017.

the kicker here is - it's almost flawlessly jailbreakable, allowing you to play anything that was produced for it, including games for PS1 and PS2! two caveats: a) I haven't registered nor used a PSN account, as I see no value in it so no idea if network play works and b) I only tried 15 or so games.

they can be had in the $30-50 range, the older models (fat and earlier slim) being preferable because they support the persistent hack, while later slims and superslims are less so, but still hackable with a non-persistent hack (you need to patch it every time it powers on).

the hack is super easy and straightforward and involves no hardware mods of any kind - it wouldn't hurt to clean and repaste a 20 year old device, though. the new hack with the custom firmware (CFW) is persistent, so it's there forever unless you decide to flash the original firmware (OFW).

because it's such an old platform there isn't super active resistance from sony towards the hack scene, so you should be good on that front for many, many moons. in contrast, the rare PS4 hacks are quickly patched and rendered useless, even though it's pretty ancient tech from 2012.

I stumbled onto one by chance, found a broken device sans Blu-Ray drive, seemingly useless for normies. thanks to the super-active community at psx-place, I was able to resurrect it, flash the latest 4.91 CFW with a noBD patch, got me a fake sixaxis game pad and an old 500 GB drive and everything works beautifully!

you can get games from dedicated "ROM" sites as well as torrents; I'm not overly familiar with the malware situation but I doubt it's a serious concern. the games can be transferred over the network using plain ol' FTP, copied from USB drives or even played directly from those. although it was the primary method of game distribution, I haven't needed the BD once. there are mods with store-like interfaces that allow you to directly download games from the internet and install them to the disk. also, DLNA is supported, I managed to play movies from my Jellyfin server!

although it won't hurt it, SSD are probably overkill. the SATA1 interface it has is congruent with transfer speeds of mechanical drives, so you're fine with repurposing one of those, as they can be had for next to nothing; max size is 1.5TB.

I've gotten a cheap sixaxis clone; cost me $10 NiB and it works. I don't know if I suck at playing dynamic games because it's shit or because I plain suck (never played with a gamepad before), that remains to be seen. I'm def not buying an original because they cost like $50+, and I'm not getting them used because yuck - who knows who sweated on them and what else they did with it.

a word of warning - you shouldn't spend a ton of money on them because it's decade+ old tech that's on the uptick part of a bathtub curve. the graphics chips they had, especially the early models, are prone to die and repair isn't viable.

it took me a while to piece together all the info as I've never had any interactions with consoles of any kind, let alone the hack aspects of it. if you're similarly challenged, ask away here or on ps3piracy and I'll try to help!

I want to create a minimal install for mpv playback through jellyfin-mpv-shim and macast. this is going to be a base for a FOSS media sink akin to a Chromecast. you attach it to your TV and it plays whatever you send it, like movies from your jellyfin server and youtube/vimeo/piped/etc videos. otherwise, there's no interaction with it, it doesn't handle input (remotes, mice, keyboards, etc.), it's controlled via apps (jellyfin android and allcast).

I've already made a proof-of-concept device running debian 12 with Plasma and it (mostly) works. now I'd like to trim the fat and install only what's absolutely necessary as I currently only have a 2006 macbook with busted screen and GMA950 with a mechanical HD. I'm gonna go with LAN only so I don't have to dick around with broadcom WLAN.

what do I need in terms of DEs and/OR WMs? do I need those at all? I seem to remember that I could run firefox in kiosk mode without anything else but X11, could I run mpv like that? or possibly wayland? what would be the absolute minimum package-wise to achieve this?

to reiterate, it's only going to display full-screen mpv when there's video to play, no menus, navigation, nada. possibly some slideshow-while-idle thingy in the future if it doesn't add too much in terms of software needed, but not right now.

I hate spending money on hardware when there's a software solution. like, I've got a subwoofer from a 2.1 system (without satellites) for free. instead of sourcing speakers for it, however cheap they might be, I'll just utilize the speakers from my monitor. pipewire to the rescue, it creates a combined sink that outputs sound to both DP and analog audio, et voila - a 2.1 sound system. people are like "your monitor sounds like that!?" and usually I play dumb: "yeah, yours doesn't? well that's linux for ya".

so, I have a desktop and a laptop and I'd like to share the same monitor, keyboard, and mouse. modern monitors have a KVM switch integrated, you connect your keyboard/mouse/etc. to it, one USB Type-C cable to the laptop, a couple to the desktop and you have a seamless switch; it even charges the laptop, how cool is that!

however, my monitor works just fine and I don't replace my hardware unless I really have to. USB KVMs with similar functions aren't cheap. also, the monitor already has multiple display inputs so I got to thinking, how do I re-create this with no money, or as little as possible, with DIY tech?

first, switching the display; this one took me no time at all. I have a USB Type-C to DP cable (with DP-Alt) and with the power of udev (detect a connection then trigger stuff) and ddcutil (sends commands to the monitor) I got it working as seamless as possible - I connect the laptop and it automagically switches the monitor over. when I disconnect it, the monitor falls back to an active connection, which is the desktop. awesome!

now how about switching the keyboard and mouse over? I'd like to do it in software, like barrier/inputleap does it but without having to move the cursor to the adjacent monitor. also, both machines are on wayland which isn't supported. eventual input lag to the laptop is unimportant, I game on the desktop. no idea if that can be accomplished or if that's even a thing...

that is a thing - it's called USB/IP, i.e. sharing your USB device over TCP/IP; it's a kernel module included by default for a long time now and that thing rocks! not only does the USB keyboard work without any perceivable lag on the laptop, it get's "disconnected" from the host, so your keypresses aren't disturbing the host. since it's a kernel module, no need to convince wayland to play ball! this also works for webcams, scanners, readers, etc., the client system thinks this is a local device and it just works.

so all we have to do is expand the shell script to bring over the keyboard and mouse along with switching over the monitor once the USB-C connection is detected annnd... success!

well, sorta. my wireless mouse is second-hand and I haven't got the USB receiver for it, so it connects over bluetooth. tried sharing with usbip and it works, but the radio connection gets interrupted or something and the mouse doesn't work there. maybe there's a workaround but I don't want to dig further.

also, how do I switch back to the desktop to shoot some peggies? I don't want to disconnect the laptop manually so I could come up with a slew of shell scripts and udev triggers and I'd also need a ssh tunnel, I don't want my keyboard input to travel over the LAN in cleartext, etc... kinda cumbersome. also, once the novelty wears off, the automagicallity gets tired, I'd prefer manually switching between devices with a keyboard combo.

enter rkvm. it's written in rust and as everybody knows that's super awesome. unlike usbip, comms are encrypted, so no sniffing possible, and hotkey switching is a default function, and it also handles the mouse!

now, rkvm currently doesn't support triggers, like "do X when hotkey combo pressed", but Plasma can handle running the monitor switch script on each device separately by listening to the same hotkey combo.

both solutions have their advantages and disadvantages, usbip requires more legwork but is more powerful whereas rkvm is simpler and easier to set up.

the final step, powering the laptop over the same cable. sadly, can't handle that in software, but there are power delivery injectors out there, some as cheap as $7. also, there's this cool project, looks easy enough to source and implement. not sure if I'm going that way or just go with a used dock station, as those can be had for a song for popular business ex-flagships, like the Thinkpad T-series, HP Elitebooks, Dell Latitudes, etc..

are there downsides? sure there are. numero uno, the host (desktop, in my case) has to be on all the time. not a big deal for me, it gets woken in the morning and suspended late at night. there are edge cases when rkvm geeks out, but for a thing that's in its 0.x version, this is more than usable.

so, I've been using this setup for the past week or so and haven't yet found it to break or have any negative side-effects. gaming on the desktop is as snappy (or shitty) as ever and using my mech keyboard and giant screen on the laptop allows me to easily compartmentalize my business and private stuff.

thanks for reading!

edit: edited title to clarify I'm talking about a Keyboard-Video-Mouse switch, not a Kernel-Virtual-Machine.

I'm considering upgrading to a Ryzen 5 5600, they've finally come down to $100 locally (tray version sans cooler).

currently, I have a 1600AF (lower binned 2600, so Zen+) on a B450 board. the upgrade should be straightforward, my board supports it (latest BIOS) and it has the same power rating, so my cheap-ass PSU and stock cooler don't need upgrading.

reason I want to upgrade is I have a number of issues with it under linux so I'd like to check if someone runs a similar setup.

first, I have Cool & Quiet and C-states disabled and Power Idle Control to "Typical Current Idle"; otherwise the machine freezes when waking from suspend after a short while. the second issue is, I have 3600 MT/s Kingston Hyper-X modules that I have to run at 2400 because both XMP profiles (XMP1-3000 and XMP2-3600) are unstable and cause apps to crash (the latter sometimes won't boot at all, can't unlock LUKS).

supposedly, both those issues are fixed in newer gens; old Zen/Zen+ had issues with faster RAM, and the C-state handling is also better in Zen3. also, I can use the new amd-pstate driver.

my PC is plenty fast as is, I'm only considering upgrading to fix them two issues. if it's the same on the other side of the fence, I'd rather skip it.

anyone had first-hand experiences with this?

edit: thanks everyone who took the time to share their setup, I'm way more optimistic about making the jump!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11999240

anyone know what the last option does? I want to remove movies that were added by the list but were then taken off it. but the way it's written, it sorta implies that all movies that aren't on a list will be removed, which is what I very much don't want.

so, I have a weird problem with a Dell Latitude 5285, that's a 2-in-1 with a detachable keyboard akin to the MS Surface Pro 5. it has an i5-7300u, 16 GB LPDDR3 (on-board), 500 GB NVMe, 12.3" 1920x1280 3:2 touch screen.

I got it second-hand, unknown history, without a battery. they're stuck at 400 MHz without one, but Thottlestop in Windows and msr-tools in Linux fix the BD_PROCHOT throttling and the machine performed adequately for months.

I've sourced a replacement battery, removed the patch and my problems started. there's weird screen flickering, looks like bad video ram or a flaky connection. it's intermittent, sometimes it runs without issues for hours, sometimes minutes and sometimes it flickers from the start, so troubleshooting and checking if this or that fixed things takes days.

the artefacts are inconsistent with anything that is or isn't happening (load, temps, etc) or power source. the problem is mostly exacerbated when the battery is full and/or when waking from sleep, it's almost always super glitchy then.

here's a demonstration:

would be great if I could try a different battery or try this one in another device, but don't have that option.

at no point are there ANY glitches on the external display (tried DP-Alt over USB Type-C and HDMI over Dell WD19 Dock), regardless if the internal screen is enabled or not.

so, bad luck - faulty screen or backlight or RAM or something, right?

except, when I unplug the battery (but leave it in place) and connect it to power and reenable the BD_PROCHOT patch - zero glitches! it runs for hours - videos, GPU and CPU stress test, not one hiccup, tear, nothing!

if it were a normal laptop, I'd just leave it be and use it as a desktop. it feels like such a waste with the functional touchscreen though.

what I've tried:

• different USB Type-C chargers
• fresh paste on CPU, clean vent
• latest firmware, tried downgrading, no change
• memtest passed twice on thorough, all clear
• internal diagnostics also
• it never froze or crashed
• screenshot during glitches doesn't contain them
• disabling turbo, upping/lowering the max/boost GPU clock, forcing cores offline, limiting max frequencies with TLP
• the battery isn't deformed and doesn't exert pressure on the screen or any cables; also tried running it with the screen slightly lifted from the case, no change
• pressing, jerking, wiggling of the internal display cable/connector, no change
• same issues in Windows 11, Ubuntu 23.04 and Fedora WS 38; rarely but sometimes in BIOS/during boot
• sadly, can't undervolt the CPU/GPU (Throttlestop FIVER says it's locked) but some MSR writes are apparently OK (like disabling BD_PROCHOT works).

at some point, it had both charger and dock with PD attached at the same time to both USB Type-C ports; it's possible this fried something, although I have no evidence of that.

so, I'm sure this is NOT a linux hardware problem, but I would like to use linux to fix the problem. at this point, I am sure it's defective, whether it's age or physical or manufacturing defect or whatever; but since it definitely works perfectly without the battery, I'm looking for some tweaks that makes it perform with the battery the same as without it.

seriously doubt anyone's seen anything similar but are there any ideas what to look at? what to try?

edit: I'm not asking for free hardware troubleshooting, maybe I haven't expressed myself succintly. what I'd like is some sort of snapshot of all relevant registers with battery working. and then one without. and then have somehow the difference between those two computed, so I can see which setting I need to tweak. would this be doable?