bunnyconda
.
@bunnyconda,
Trying desktop Linux for the umpteenth time as of Sunday, I have plenty of issues to try to solve right now and as much as I want to keep digging and see what else I can fix or what other cool things I can do, given that it's currently 4 AM I think I'd be better off stopping for the night, and with the enthusiasm I have right now, just share some of the problems and surprises I've run into so far.
This PC was built primarily to be a strong VR machine, and while it's fantastic at doing that in Windows, there is one little word that throws a wrench in the works once I move over to Linux...
NVidia
First off I will say that what turned me off from trying Linux on this machine before was reading that undervolting an NVidia card was just not possible in Linux, after I had already done so in Windows (chopping off 25% power consumption for, what, 5% performance at most?) BUT, that was a misconception; the tools to do so in Linux are there, although it's not as simple as directly editing a voltage curve, there really is a surprising amount of granular detail and control nvidia-smi and nvidia-settings offer.
Meanwhile Ryzen 7000 monitoring is damn near nonexistent in Linux, which is very funny even though I'm not sure in what way exactly.
Still there is the dumb random nvidia bullshit like permanent black screen after waking from suspend (which seemed to fix itself after an update? I'll just assume it'll happen again, I'm not holding my breath), and maybe it's because I haven't dialed in settings yet but this GPU seems VERY eager to boost compared to windows, just while watching videos in MPV; more boost = MORE HEAT, and I undervolted this card for a reason...
X11 VS Wayland
I really hate the feeling of expecting what one would think is a reasonable ideal and then seeing that the reality is just a see-saw of tradeoffs; as bad a reputation NVidia on Wayland has, my #1 issue with Wayland (on the only compositor I've tried, but seems to be a common thing) is cursor latency; I whined hard about latency for everything BUT in Windows post-7, looked for invasive workarounds to make certain games more tolerable, eventually got a 144 Hz monitor which made the problem irrelevant, and now the fact that I can feel cursor lag on a 144 Hz display is just infuriating; it's not enough to be a real problem, but it is enough to bother me; a computer shouldn't feel like this, especially one that you have so many ways to customize.
Meanwhile X11 feels incredibly snappy; screen tearing is a bummer but only for my common use case of playing a video on one monitor while doing anything else on the other one, and yeah I know there are workarounds, I haven't fully explored them all yet; it's just worth it to me to have a system that feels so responsive.
Software
Heaven bless Valve for shaking things up, no longer can I say that there's "that one program" that I use all the time on Windows but doesn't work at all on Linux; SAI 2 is sort of that (even then I "sort of" had it working before in Wine) but I'm trying to migrate to Krita as it has useful features I want to use that SAI lacks. Granted the only game I've tried on here so far is BTD6, and it ran well, but I have high hopes for other games; vanilla Minecraft had around 40% higher framerate than on Windows, a smaller (but still significant) gap with Nvidium, and if by some miracle SteamVR works without issue then I might not even have to set up GPU passthrough, which I had already mentally prepared myself for...
Customization
It's just fun to be able to say "I don't want to see the temperature, the national headlines, my entire list of running programs, the clock, ANYTHING unless I have a specific key held down" and not have the OS fight you on it. I can hide title bars, hide anything else I don't care about, define my own behavior for window management; I have a social media "quarantine" where Telegram, Discord, Twitter etc all stay on one workspace and I can show and hide as I choose; I've tried to replicate this setup on Windows 11 but I just haven't found it quite as robust as something like i3.
Not to mention all the "cool" stuff you can do visually; I barely customize things visually (my most recent phone had the default wallpaper for like 2 years before I changed it) but just knowing what's possible and seeing all the available tools you're encouraged to use feels magical in a way that's much more absent from computers now than it was 20-30 years ago.
Will I continue down this path or will I give up and go back to Windows yet again; idk, but I'm having fun and learning things, and that's the most important thing right now. And now it's almost 5 am...
