Microsoft is warping the PC industry into something unrecognizable

Do you have any tips using KDE Connect with a local VPN (Wireguard)? It works great for me on the same network, but unfortunately fails to connect outside of my network despite one (or both) devices connected to my VPN

Protonmail–I’ve used them for my custom domain email for the last 4 years and have had very few problems (other than needing to recompile the Protonmail Bridge app so I could use it on an ARM server)–I think I pay around $50/year. I selfhost Nextcloud for everything else (files, calendar, news, etc.)

Savages … and legends

Very true–the specific EOS repo has given me a bit of trouble in the past, but it takes like 3 commands to remove it and then you’ve got just arch (although some purests may disagree 🤣)

I disagree–a system (even Arch!) should be able to update after a couple months and not break! I recently booted an EndeavourOS image after 6 months and was able to update it properly, although I needed to completely rebuild the keyring first

I’m using the Surface Laptop Studio with EndeavourOS (basically arch, so I have all the latest packages)–the performance issues stem from Nvidia’s drivers, so AMD should not suffer from the same problems, although I don’t have any AMD cards to test if hotplug with monitors is functional

I have extensively used an eGPU (Razer Core X) with an Nvidia RTX 3050 for gaming under Wayland. Using X11 gave me nothing but problems, but Wayland allows for full hotplug capabilities (as long as no monitors are ever connected to the GPU).

Of course, performance is fairly bad with the official Nvidia drivers + Wayland, but it’s good enough to play The Outer Worlds and a few other single player games, which is good enough for me! I have been entirely unable to get external monitors to work with the Nvidia driver (any help would be much appreciated), although they did work (coldplug) with the Nouveau driver.

When I was using Windows, I was able to hotplug/unplug the eGPU with monitors attached, effectively turning the GPU into an external docking station–I am closely following driver improvements, as this would be great to have on Linux to get around the 2-monitor limitation of the Intel iGPU.

One program that comes to mind is Protonmail Bridge. I first tried installing the RPM via Discover, and it silently failed every time. Next, installed it from the terminal and got an error about missing DejaVu fonts–no problem, I’ll just install them from here, but unfortunately I was getting the same error. I tried to “install anyway” ignoring dependencies–failed again!

Another issue trying to install the linux-surface kernel. The GUI package failed to install (again, silently), and command line packages kept failing since the linux-surface kernel was on 6.6.6 and the rolling release kernel was on 6.6.7–eventually I chrooted in from a live USB, removed the kernel, and replaced it with the linux-surface kernel, but the fact that it kept failing with a “success” message was confusing! Then I had to compile iptsd–on Arch I’d ‘pacman -S git meson ninja gcc etc.’, and searching and selecting package groups via YAST (and hoping my compilation worked) just felt clunky.

I did manage to get everything up and running eventually (save Protonmail), but at that point I’d messed up my installation to the point where I had to start over, and I just loaded up EndeavourOS instead.

I’m sure a lot of these issues stem from a lack of understanding of Tumbleweed itself, and when I get another desktop I’ll be happy to try again. I did love the setup process though–super polished KDE Plasma, and everything that was possible with the stock kernel (even autorotate!) worked out of the box!

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed–coming from Arch, it just felt so refined and ready to go right out of the box. Then I started installing programs and ran into dependency hell–now on EndeavourOS with the AUR which is great

Additionally, the combination of terminal + GUI to do things just felt wrong

especially flickering and performance

If my experience is any indicator, your GPU is fine :(. Any chance you’re using mixed display scalings? I’ve got an RTX 3050 eGPU for my Plasma/Wayland laptop, and for the most part it actually works fairly smoothly (albeit more slowly compared to windows), but if I try to run a game at a higher resolution than my monitor (used by Plasma for mixed scaling) I get constant flashing/frame shifting, but when I drop it down to the native 1080p it starts working again

As a side note, X and eGPUs do not play well together, but Wayland is literally plug and play after installing the drivers–I can even hot plug/unplug as long as nothing’s using the GPU!

just don’t Blink

I use AnySoft as well–it has a predictive word function that seems to work just as well as GBoard’s (albeit I haven’t used GBoard since 2017)

The interface is different (e.g. swype left on the entire keyboard for numbers), but give yourself a week or two to adjust–most things can also be fine-tuned from the settings app

Thanks for the monthly reminder to open DavX5 🤣

I generally like being as close to mainline/AOSP as possible, and I used LineageOS for years on my Essential PH-1. That being said, it does look like the Pixel suffers from no lack of custom ROMs, so I may “distro hop” for a bit in the future

Perhaps not, but your mobile carrier will! I use a Pixel 5 with LineageOS installed (and no google services), but I also needed to install Google Docs for a project (since the web interface refuses to load on Android) which means that Google is still able to access my IP address–but I think that’s better than Google’s “location history”, or Play Protect on Android sending a list of all installed apps

According to the press release it’s about 3 times faster–only time will tell but I’m optimistic!

I’ve love both Firefox and Okular (KDE’s evince), and both “technically” support PDF inking, but the experience is just subpar to what Edge offers now for notetaking and reviewing articles. Xournal++ is the gold standard and fully supports my Surface Pen, whereas Edge does not recognize pressure or the eraser. However, I work with a lot of embedded files (Logseq), and the fact that Xournal++ cannot bundle a PDF in a single file and instead needs a reference, plus the fact that PDF is a universal file format, makes Edge the most enticing option for now

I use Edge daily–trying to use mostly non-proprietary software, but when I need to annotate a PDF, Edge just works. It’s no drawboard PDF, but it’s free and runs on Linux!

The only solution would be, to create - yet again - a universal alternative to the AUR.

https://xkcd.com/927/