i went downstairs to make some dinner, came back to my workstation and found my cpu fan at full tilt, with gnome-shell, xfreerdp and xwayland all ripping 100% of a core each
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i went downstairs to make some dinner, came back to my workstation and found my cpu fan at full tilt, with gnome-shell, xfreerdp and xwayland all ripping 100% of a core each
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@atax1a that was of course the first thing i did, with essentially zero improvement in knowledge of going on. just a bunch of socket comms between each other (some very short frames of a few bytes each). there was nothing in any of their log streams.
anyway, i had a Hunch, brought up the rdp session and copied 1 character from notepad on my windows machine. the cpu immediately calmed down -
i went downstairs to make some dinner, came back to my workstation and found my cpu fan at full tilt, with gnome-shell, xfreerdp and xwayland all ripping 100% of a core each
@astraleureka that sounds like a stable and mastered technology
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@astraleureka that sounds like a stable and mastered technology
@ska every year that goes by I have more and more difficulty distinguishing Windows behaviour from the behaviour of mainstream Linux distros
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@ska every year that goes by I have more and more difficulty distinguishing Windows behaviour from the behaviour of mainstream Linux distros
@ska please excuse the impromptu blagpost but i developed a sudden case of historical waxing combined with an urge to rant about an immediate dilemma
the last time I daily drove Linux on a laptop was in 2017 - system76 oryp3 (i7-7700hq+16gb+nv 1060) running Fedora rawhide with Xorg+openbox+tint2+dmenu. that config was comfy & familiar and I had run some variation of it since fedora core 6 (dang.. i don't miss that pentium 4 though)
however 2017 had other plans and I found myself repeatedly having to patch the kernel by hand (because nvidia of course:))). nothing wild, just little struct ordering adjustments and swapping out EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL because lol proprietary drivers.
unfortunately the recurring feeling of 80x25 on a 17" screen quickly became grating; I lasted all of 2 months before reaching the end of my rope. I flashed the OEM (clevo) UEFI image, installed windows 10 and never looked backthat same OS install is still present. the machine still works even though the battery holds about 4 minutes of charge (when new, it held about 50 minutes!!!), the heatsink no longer conducts heat effectively, and the CPU & GPU hit 95°C immediately after boot. despite all that clevo makes a fine machine and even under max load it only throttles about 10% from max clocks at the expense of sounding like the concorde taking off. on the other hand, 16gb for windows + hyper-v is very cramped these days; for single-tasking it is just barely sufficient. suitable for working in wsl2, browsing the web, running discord, playing a game - but no more than one at a time
i finally broke down last spring and got a new laptop after 8 years for a much needed hardware refresh, another system76 - addw4, i9-14900hx+64gb+nv 4060. it shipped with pop_os 22.04 which is essentially ubuntu + system76 hardware integrations + supposedly "plug and play" nvidia drivers.
my initial thought was: "i'll try and feel out today's mainstream linux ecosystem" fully expecting to become fed up, wipe the OS nvme and install alpine within a few weeksinstead, wtmp begins Wed Feb 12 13:06:50 2025. i am still using the stock gnome environment, albeit on wayland rather than the stock Xorg setup. wayland was necessary due to complex interplay between Xorg, the nvidia kmod, i915 & DP MST, and my USB dock. any time an EDID I2C transaction was invoked, it caused i915 to spin on a lock for 10-15 seconds whilst waiting for acks on the DP aux channel. this, of course, made the rest of the kernel (and Xorg) very unhappy. EDID probes happen surprisingly often, too - multiple times during boot and logon, while changing VTs, even just launching winecfg led to a hard-stalled display for upwards of 30 seconds. despite kthread stacks and DRM debug looking nearly identical when querying available displays & resolutions, wayland does not exhibit the same behavior
surprisingly, the dock (dell WD19) is otherwise really good. all the peripherals Just Work; fwupd supports it natively; it drives 2x1440p@170Hz along with 1GbE and multiple USB3 ports without breaking a sweat. it's my first experience with a USB-C dock. all that throughput over one dinky little cable still feels like magic
gnome is so goddamn bad; every single day I nearly reach breaking point before my mind is flooded with deep, dark thoughts about how large my local aports tree would be (although that's why i opted for a ridiculous core count), interspersed with a sense of dread around trying to hammer the nvidia userland blobs into a musl-compatible shape.
I am at a loss for what distro to run: what project is trustworthy enough while simultaneously capable of being driven without thought on occasion, like a windows machine? i'm fine with building some stuff, hell i'll even maintain personal patchsets (already am for freeRDP and others b/c ubuntu repos are so horribly outdated), but i do not want to be spending hours mucking about for basic functionality.i feel like i'm kind of asking for an unrealistic set of conditions given the current state of F/OSS desktops. there's a lot of pretty decent newbie-friendly stuff out there like bazzite and cachyOS. problem is I don't want the extra layers of hand-holding that they're built around, while wanting the common-case ease of use that they're designed to provide. either I have rose-tinted glasses about how much of a headache classic fedora & arch used to be, or there really is a significant degradation when it comes to the extreme power-user (but lazy) niche which used to be somewhat well provided
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@ska please excuse the impromptu blagpost but i developed a sudden case of historical waxing combined with an urge to rant about an immediate dilemma
the last time I daily drove Linux on a laptop was in 2017 - system76 oryp3 (i7-7700hq+16gb+nv 1060) running Fedora rawhide with Xorg+openbox+tint2+dmenu. that config was comfy & familiar and I had run some variation of it since fedora core 6 (dang.. i don't miss that pentium 4 though)
however 2017 had other plans and I found myself repeatedly having to patch the kernel by hand (because nvidia of course:))). nothing wild, just little struct ordering adjustments and swapping out EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL because lol proprietary drivers.
unfortunately the recurring feeling of 80x25 on a 17" screen quickly became grating; I lasted all of 2 months before reaching the end of my rope. I flashed the OEM (clevo) UEFI image, installed windows 10 and never looked backthat same OS install is still present. the machine still works even though the battery holds about 4 minutes of charge (when new, it held about 50 minutes!!!), the heatsink no longer conducts heat effectively, and the CPU & GPU hit 95°C immediately after boot. despite all that clevo makes a fine machine and even under max load it only throttles about 10% from max clocks at the expense of sounding like the concorde taking off. on the other hand, 16gb for windows + hyper-v is very cramped these days; for single-tasking it is just barely sufficient. suitable for working in wsl2, browsing the web, running discord, playing a game - but no more than one at a time
i finally broke down last spring and got a new laptop after 8 years for a much needed hardware refresh, another system76 - addw4, i9-14900hx+64gb+nv 4060. it shipped with pop_os 22.04 which is essentially ubuntu + system76 hardware integrations + supposedly "plug and play" nvidia drivers.
my initial thought was: "i'll try and feel out today's mainstream linux ecosystem" fully expecting to become fed up, wipe the OS nvme and install alpine within a few weeksinstead, wtmp begins Wed Feb 12 13:06:50 2025. i am still using the stock gnome environment, albeit on wayland rather than the stock Xorg setup. wayland was necessary due to complex interplay between Xorg, the nvidia kmod, i915 & DP MST, and my USB dock. any time an EDID I2C transaction was invoked, it caused i915 to spin on a lock for 10-15 seconds whilst waiting for acks on the DP aux channel. this, of course, made the rest of the kernel (and Xorg) very unhappy. EDID probes happen surprisingly often, too - multiple times during boot and logon, while changing VTs, even just launching winecfg led to a hard-stalled display for upwards of 30 seconds. despite kthread stacks and DRM debug looking nearly identical when querying available displays & resolutions, wayland does not exhibit the same behavior
surprisingly, the dock (dell WD19) is otherwise really good. all the peripherals Just Work; fwupd supports it natively; it drives 2x1440p@170Hz along with 1GbE and multiple USB3 ports without breaking a sweat. it's my first experience with a USB-C dock. all that throughput over one dinky little cable still feels like magic
gnome is so goddamn bad; every single day I nearly reach breaking point before my mind is flooded with deep, dark thoughts about how large my local aports tree would be (although that's why i opted for a ridiculous core count), interspersed with a sense of dread around trying to hammer the nvidia userland blobs into a musl-compatible shape.
I am at a loss for what distro to run: what project is trustworthy enough while simultaneously capable of being driven without thought on occasion, like a windows machine? i'm fine with building some stuff, hell i'll even maintain personal patchsets (already am for freeRDP and others b/c ubuntu repos are so horribly outdated), but i do not want to be spending hours mucking about for basic functionality.i feel like i'm kind of asking for an unrealistic set of conditions given the current state of F/OSS desktops. there's a lot of pretty decent newbie-friendly stuff out there like bazzite and cachyOS. problem is I don't want the extra layers of hand-holding that they're built around, while wanting the common-case ease of use that they're designed to provide. either I have rose-tinted glasses about how much of a headache classic fedora & arch used to be, or there really is a significant degradation when it comes to the extreme power-user (but lazy) niche which used to be somewhat well provided
@astraleureka You are describing pretty much exactly the reason why my desktop is still Windows 10 and will stay that way until it is so unmaintained and holey and leaky that it will be too risky to use even behind my infernowall. At which point I will reevaluate, and probably, kicking and screaming, install some version of Linux on my desktop. I am not looking forward to that day.
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@ska please excuse the impromptu blagpost but i developed a sudden case of historical waxing combined with an urge to rant about an immediate dilemma
the last time I daily drove Linux on a laptop was in 2017 - system76 oryp3 (i7-7700hq+16gb+nv 1060) running Fedora rawhide with Xorg+openbox+tint2+dmenu. that config was comfy & familiar and I had run some variation of it since fedora core 6 (dang.. i don't miss that pentium 4 though)
however 2017 had other plans and I found myself repeatedly having to patch the kernel by hand (because nvidia of course:))). nothing wild, just little struct ordering adjustments and swapping out EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL because lol proprietary drivers.
unfortunately the recurring feeling of 80x25 on a 17" screen quickly became grating; I lasted all of 2 months before reaching the end of my rope. I flashed the OEM (clevo) UEFI image, installed windows 10 and never looked backthat same OS install is still present. the machine still works even though the battery holds about 4 minutes of charge (when new, it held about 50 minutes!!!), the heatsink no longer conducts heat effectively, and the CPU & GPU hit 95°C immediately after boot. despite all that clevo makes a fine machine and even under max load it only throttles about 10% from max clocks at the expense of sounding like the concorde taking off. on the other hand, 16gb for windows + hyper-v is very cramped these days; for single-tasking it is just barely sufficient. suitable for working in wsl2, browsing the web, running discord, playing a game - but no more than one at a time
i finally broke down last spring and got a new laptop after 8 years for a much needed hardware refresh, another system76 - addw4, i9-14900hx+64gb+nv 4060. it shipped with pop_os 22.04 which is essentially ubuntu + system76 hardware integrations + supposedly "plug and play" nvidia drivers.
my initial thought was: "i'll try and feel out today's mainstream linux ecosystem" fully expecting to become fed up, wipe the OS nvme and install alpine within a few weeksinstead, wtmp begins Wed Feb 12 13:06:50 2025. i am still using the stock gnome environment, albeit on wayland rather than the stock Xorg setup. wayland was necessary due to complex interplay between Xorg, the nvidia kmod, i915 & DP MST, and my USB dock. any time an EDID I2C transaction was invoked, it caused i915 to spin on a lock for 10-15 seconds whilst waiting for acks on the DP aux channel. this, of course, made the rest of the kernel (and Xorg) very unhappy. EDID probes happen surprisingly often, too - multiple times during boot and logon, while changing VTs, even just launching winecfg led to a hard-stalled display for upwards of 30 seconds. despite kthread stacks and DRM debug looking nearly identical when querying available displays & resolutions, wayland does not exhibit the same behavior
surprisingly, the dock (dell WD19) is otherwise really good. all the peripherals Just Work; fwupd supports it natively; it drives 2x1440p@170Hz along with 1GbE and multiple USB3 ports without breaking a sweat. it's my first experience with a USB-C dock. all that throughput over one dinky little cable still feels like magic
gnome is so goddamn bad; every single day I nearly reach breaking point before my mind is flooded with deep, dark thoughts about how large my local aports tree would be (although that's why i opted for a ridiculous core count), interspersed with a sense of dread around trying to hammer the nvidia userland blobs into a musl-compatible shape.
I am at a loss for what distro to run: what project is trustworthy enough while simultaneously capable of being driven without thought on occasion, like a windows machine? i'm fine with building some stuff, hell i'll even maintain personal patchsets (already am for freeRDP and others b/c ubuntu repos are so horribly outdated), but i do not want to be spending hours mucking about for basic functionality.i feel like i'm kind of asking for an unrealistic set of conditions given the current state of F/OSS desktops. there's a lot of pretty decent newbie-friendly stuff out there like bazzite and cachyOS. problem is I don't want the extra layers of hand-holding that they're built around, while wanting the common-case ease of use that they're designed to provide. either I have rose-tinted glasses about how much of a headache classic fedora & arch used to be, or there really is a significant degradation when it comes to the extreme power-user (but lazy) niche which used to be somewhat well provided
I feel this. I would say Ubuntu has degraded significantly, especially with their stupid EEE snapd fetish.
For a long time what I did for 'work machine' was Fedora, because of COPR. You can just upload RPM specfiles and get hosted repos to add to the computer. You can even point a COPR recipe at an arbitrary git repo. It'll automatically carry stuff forward and build for newer Fedora releases (and rawhide) as time goes on.
Nowadays I maintain a work machine which is Debian, but with both testing and unstable in the sources list. This gets me the latest shit in the Debian system, and if something in unstable is broken, I can just pin it back to testing. I don't use the stuff I used to put in COPR, so this works for me, plus it's 'compatible enough' with Ubuntu that I can run Slack, Signal, ROCm, CUDA, and other horrible shit when I need to.
I haven't used anything but Linux, BSD, and Plan 9 since like 2006 or so, until recently. My new job mandated a Mac... I used to think GNOME is a bad copy of MacOS, but now I think it's a fixed copy of MacOS. I have no idea how people use this shit.
CC: @ska@treehouse.systems
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@astraleureka You are describing pretty much exactly the reason why my desktop is still Windows 10 and will stay that way until it is so unmaintained and holey and leaky that it will be too risky to use even behind my infernowall. At which point I will reevaluate, and probably, kicking and screaming, install some version of Linux on my desktop. I am not looking forward to that day.
@ska wow, to be honest I expected you to be running Linux in a considerably customised fashion, but now I suspect we might have very similar feelings
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@ska wow, to be honest I expected you to be running Linux in a considerably customised fashion, but now I suspect we might have very similar feelings
@astraleureka I do! ... on my servers. Which already takes a considerable amount of time, which I'm willing to spend because maintaining distroless machines with super-selected software is a skillset I want to maintain.
If I had a client machine running Linux, I would also want to understand how it works inside, and I would be horrified by what I find, and I would almost certainly want to scrap and rewrite everything, which would of course be impossible in a lifetime. It would be a constant source of frustration and distraction, and my productivity would nosedive.
With Windows, I know it sucks, but I'm not tempted to look under the hood or understand or improve it. I'm very much a luser and fine with it: it allows me to focus on what feels important to me, which is making low-level Unix userspace as good as possible.
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@ska please excuse the impromptu blagpost but i developed a sudden case of historical waxing combined with an urge to rant about an immediate dilemma
the last time I daily drove Linux on a laptop was in 2017 - system76 oryp3 (i7-7700hq+16gb+nv 1060) running Fedora rawhide with Xorg+openbox+tint2+dmenu. that config was comfy & familiar and I had run some variation of it since fedora core 6 (dang.. i don't miss that pentium 4 though)
however 2017 had other plans and I found myself repeatedly having to patch the kernel by hand (because nvidia of course:))). nothing wild, just little struct ordering adjustments and swapping out EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL because lol proprietary drivers.
unfortunately the recurring feeling of 80x25 on a 17" screen quickly became grating; I lasted all of 2 months before reaching the end of my rope. I flashed the OEM (clevo) UEFI image, installed windows 10 and never looked backthat same OS install is still present. the machine still works even though the battery holds about 4 minutes of charge (when new, it held about 50 minutes!!!), the heatsink no longer conducts heat effectively, and the CPU & GPU hit 95°C immediately after boot. despite all that clevo makes a fine machine and even under max load it only throttles about 10% from max clocks at the expense of sounding like the concorde taking off. on the other hand, 16gb for windows + hyper-v is very cramped these days; for single-tasking it is just barely sufficient. suitable for working in wsl2, browsing the web, running discord, playing a game - but no more than one at a time
i finally broke down last spring and got a new laptop after 8 years for a much needed hardware refresh, another system76 - addw4, i9-14900hx+64gb+nv 4060. it shipped with pop_os 22.04 which is essentially ubuntu + system76 hardware integrations + supposedly "plug and play" nvidia drivers.
my initial thought was: "i'll try and feel out today's mainstream linux ecosystem" fully expecting to become fed up, wipe the OS nvme and install alpine within a few weeksinstead, wtmp begins Wed Feb 12 13:06:50 2025. i am still using the stock gnome environment, albeit on wayland rather than the stock Xorg setup. wayland was necessary due to complex interplay between Xorg, the nvidia kmod, i915 & DP MST, and my USB dock. any time an EDID I2C transaction was invoked, it caused i915 to spin on a lock for 10-15 seconds whilst waiting for acks on the DP aux channel. this, of course, made the rest of the kernel (and Xorg) very unhappy. EDID probes happen surprisingly often, too - multiple times during boot and logon, while changing VTs, even just launching winecfg led to a hard-stalled display for upwards of 30 seconds. despite kthread stacks and DRM debug looking nearly identical when querying available displays & resolutions, wayland does not exhibit the same behavior
surprisingly, the dock (dell WD19) is otherwise really good. all the peripherals Just Work; fwupd supports it natively; it drives 2x1440p@170Hz along with 1GbE and multiple USB3 ports without breaking a sweat. it's my first experience with a USB-C dock. all that throughput over one dinky little cable still feels like magic
gnome is so goddamn bad; every single day I nearly reach breaking point before my mind is flooded with deep, dark thoughts about how large my local aports tree would be (although that's why i opted for a ridiculous core count), interspersed with a sense of dread around trying to hammer the nvidia userland blobs into a musl-compatible shape.
I am at a loss for what distro to run: what project is trustworthy enough while simultaneously capable of being driven without thought on occasion, like a windows machine? i'm fine with building some stuff, hell i'll even maintain personal patchsets (already am for freeRDP and others b/c ubuntu repos are so horribly outdated), but i do not want to be spending hours mucking about for basic functionality.i feel like i'm kind of asking for an unrealistic set of conditions given the current state of F/OSS desktops. there's a lot of pretty decent newbie-friendly stuff out there like bazzite and cachyOS. problem is I don't want the extra layers of hand-holding that they're built around, while wanting the common-case ease of use that they're designed to provide. either I have rose-tinted glasses about how much of a headache classic fedora & arch used to be, or there really is a significant degradation when it comes to the extreme power-user (but lazy) niche which used to be somewhat well provided
@astraleureka @ska I also switched to windows around 2018 or 2019 for similar reasons, but at this point I'm at my wits end with it. I'm strongly considering shoving adelie on a disk and taking back up my maintainership role.
