I totally pulled a LTT and removed my kernel. >_< There was a “real time” kernel listed in apt, and I installed it because I was curious if it would reduce lock latency for a project I was working on. (I wasn’t trying to solve a problem, just curious) It didn’t and I figured it was probably a bad idea to leave it installed. So I did an apt remove, and the rest went something like this.

Apt: Are you sure you want to remove the your kernel? Y/N

Me: Oh jeez… I don’t want to do that.

Motor Memory: Y <return>

Apt: Are you really really sure? Your computer will not boot if you do this. Y/N

Me: Oh, crap! That’s not what I meant to do. Definitely not!

Motor Memory: Y <return>

Me: No! Why would my brain betray me!?

Fortunately this was on a PopOS machine, so I booted into the recovery partition. Even if fixing it only took a minute, I still felt very very dumb. >_<

Hmm. I still have my old 2013 MBA that I’ve used with Fedora, but it’s an HD 4000 IIRC. I feel you on Apple’s locked down stance to repairs. It was ultimately what pushed me off of OS X. I needed a newer laptop in 2020, and they only sold hardware with non-upgradable RAM and SSDs. So long and thanks for all the fish… I had already replaced my desktop machine with Linux a few years earlier. I used the Mac 70% as a Unix machine anyway, so it was a pretty comfortable transition.

My Air worked great as a stand-in laptop when my System76 Lemur died last summer. Honestly I was blown away by how perfectly usable it still was for basic tasks. Parallel stuff like compiling was slow, but single threaded stuff still ran just great. Heck, I was even using it again yesterday to test OS X builds of my game on older hardware and it ran like a champ.

Looking forward to giving VRR a shot again. Last time I tried a couple years ago was pretty underwhelming on a couple different machines. Some games worked well with it, but a lot of software felt subtly broken. A lot of weird micro-stuttering and stuff just not feeling smooth even when the average framerate was high compared to boring synced 144 hz.

Well… they don’t like the design of a “system tray”. To be fair, it’s a very Windows centric idea, and the notion that they must provide one because Windows has one seems… similarly questionable to me too. Speaking personally I hate the idea, and always have. It’s a real dumpster fire because:

• Lots of drivers (on Windows) assume you don’t know how to launch programs, and force a permanent launch shortcut on you.
• Programs assume you don’t understand how to minimize or hide a window, and put themselves in the tray instead. (launchers, chat programs, etc)
• Some programs seem to use them just to put their logo on the screen. You can’t really do anything with the tray icon.
• Few icons match stylistically, and even on Windows, they don’t match the system style. (White icons on a white taskbar? FFS)
• Programs often don’t provide an option to disable their tray icons, and it’s rare that I want them.

I guess I found the lack of them to be a breath of fresh air when I first tried Gnome 3 a few years ago. The current iteration doesn’t quite work though… 99% of the time I just want an option to kill the damn things, but I’ve have had some programs that only provide functions through the system tray. It’s dumb, and I hate it, but it is what it is.

Yeah, IIRC the 16 doesn’t have a significantly faster CPU than the 7840U in the 13. If you want a gaming laptop it sounds neat though!

Egh. I kinda sorta agree. I had a 10th gen i7 Lemur Pro. It was nice and had excellent battery life. (15 -25 hours as an average range) The screen was a perfectly nice IPS, the keyboard/trackpad were fine (maybe not great), and the speakers were… well… pretty terrible. The software/firmware support for an otherwise generic laptop was great!

The problem was that I had multiple hardware failures on mine and getting warranty repairs was painful. The 3rd time it happened took several weeks to convince my rep it was a legitimate hardware failure. When he was finally convinced, he said something like “Well, that seems pretty obvious it’s a motherboard failure. What would you like us to do?” The response was obvious. It was under warranty still. I wanted it fixed! By the time it was working again it had taken 9 weeks. (!!!) Less than a year later, it died again. Put a really bad taste in my mouth. :-\ I bought a Framework to replace it.

I had a 10th gen S76 Lemur. The hardware was a mixed bag. Chassis was nice and light (compared to Apple), but enameled so the edges eventually chipped. Keyboard/trackpad were average. Speakers were awful… Battery life was excellent like usually got around 20 hours on a charge (and often more with a little effort!). I also had a number of hardware failures and dealing with their support was pretty terrible… Broken control key out of the box, Wifi died twice, second time they replaced the motherboard (and that took like… 9 weeks), then it completely died a year later when it was finally out of warranty. A real mixed bag of Pop OS being nice, and having great software/firmware support, but also multiple hardware failures coupled with terrible warranty support.

OBS Studio mostly. It’s not the most convenient for a quick screencap, but I can record 720p@60 fps video downscaled and resampled from my 1080p@144hz monitor and it just kinda works fine. The other nice feature of OBS is that you can have it recording all the time and then press a button to dump the last few seconds when something interesting happens. Handy when trying to get interesting clips of my game. For quick recording I usually just use Kooha or the built in Gnome one.

I’ve been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:

1. Some games didn’t work right a few years ago. (Under Proton or otherwise. Haven’t had issues for a while)
2. RenderDoc, a vital bit of graphics debugging software, works poorly on Wayland. (Easy fix is to force X11 for QT via QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb)
3. Had some issues with mixed integrated/NVidia graphics on a laptop I was using for a demo once.
4. Covering or otherwise hiding a Wayland window blocks a program’s graphics thread. This is sometimes problematic.
5. VR development had issues a while ago? (This was for work. It just… stopped working at some point. Dunno if it was a Linux, SteamVR, or Unity3D issue. My work machine mostly runs Windows 10 now as a result. Oh well.)
6. Screen recording didn’t work well a while ago… (continued)

Overall, it’s just worked great though!

My anti-complaints:

1. Mixed refresh rates on monitors “just works” now. (I have a 1080@144 for gaming, and a 4k@60 for work)
2. Video frames don’t have half drawn content. (ex: when resizing windows), except on XWayland stuff
3. Video tearing has basically disappeared.
4. Video timing issues seem to be improved.
5. Input handling for keyboard layouts has improved.
6. Screen recording in Wayland is way better than it ever was on X11 now. I do this a lot to share gamedev stuff I’m working on.