milkjug

I replaced my 3080 Ti with a 7900 XTX, reinstalled Tumbleweed to start fresh, and KDE on Wayland has been running great so far. Before, visual glitches galore, GPU refusing to output a signal if iGPU is not blacklisted, hardware video decoding outright does not work, etc.

Now, with AMD, I have not yet experienced graphics-related issues in weeks, fingers crossed.

Its a travesty that MATLAB isn't in there somewhere.

VA-API trouble intensifies

Can confirm. Don't do it guys. Hardware acceleration for video decoding just doesn't work for me.

Scratch that, you can theoretically download the fonts from Apple, it comes with OTF/TTF embedded within their .dmg. Not advocating for any breach of licensing terms.

Do you use the ttf/off version? I just tried to install them in KDE (off some sketchy git repo) but they look really wonky as a UI don’t.

JetBrains Mono NF masterrace represents!

Honestly if I have to choose only one mono font family to use for the rest of my natural life, JetBrains Mono without a shred of a doubt.

Same, does it work? If it means booting into a DE and being able to move your mouse and type on your keyboard, sure most distros can do that.

It’s those little gotchas everywhere that gets you. Enabling video acceleration on Nvidia in firefox? Getting LDAC to work on Bluetooth? Etc. etc.

Do most distros work? Yeah, only if you don’t mind software encoding, or compiling from some user-provided repos.

I have a few hobby boxes running all flavours of distros, but whenever I need something to just work with no caveats, I go back to w11.

Same, my next GPU will likely be an AMD or Intel, been itching to give Intel my money for sometime. They need battlemage to just barely keep up with the same generation xx60ti and they’ve got my business.

Ditto, really respect what System76 has done but I need a long break from Ubuntu and GNOME. Looking forward to Cosmic DE but until it’s mature it is difficult to see how far they’d get.

Which GPU are you using?

I spent a good 10-20 hours just trying to get it to boot to a largely error-free experience with SDDM and KDE. I set out to daily drive Hyprland and what a shit show that turned out for me on Nvidia GPU and Alder Lake CPU.

The basic gist is you have add nvidia, nvidia_uvm, nvidia_modeset and nvidia_drm to your mikinitcpio conf, regenerate your initramfs, then adding kernel boot parameters nvidia-drm.modeset=1 and i915.modeset=0 before it can even boot to a usable state. Apparently since 6.0, the igpu grabs the display and refuses to give it back. I don’t know how the fuck any “normal” user is going to figure out how to do all of that. Then I spent another evening trying to figure out how to get VAAPI working properly. There’s lots of outdated info in the wiki and not much else to go on, but I figured it out eventually.

BUT, having said this, I do recognise when you go Arch, you’re asking for all of these jank. And, for science, I wiped and tried out endeavouros, and it was surprisingly painless, mostly just worked out of the box (I didn’t check if it was nouveau but it might have been, I also didn’t check if VAAPI was working).

In the end after what seems like 400 wipes and reinstalls, I got it working just right. But it wasn’t painless and it certainly isn’t meant for the faint hearted.

Yes I know the fault largely lies with Nvidia and their shitty proprietary drivers, and so on. But the exact same machine worked just fine in W11, without a single jank or terminal command (not 100% true because I did run OOBE\BYPASSNRO to skip the online junk).

Moral of the lesson: go vanilla Arch if you are comfortable with figuring out shit on your own. Otherwise, stay the hell away and pick a starter distro like Fedora or Pop!_OS that is mostly jank-free.

obligatory I use Arch btw.

Paper beats rock so the superior choice is clear.