Apologies if this is the wrong place to post this, but I was at a loss for places to ask for help and thought that the forums for the King of Linux (Wendell) might be a good place to start.
I decided that my new years resolution was to do the 1 year Linux challenge on my main rig. I have been looking at swapping to Linux for a while as WIndows 10 has become increasingly problematic and with how much more intrusive Microsoft are becoming with how they deliver updates etc and thought that the 1 year Linux challenge from 2021 to 2022 seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so.
After 4 days of screwing just trying to get Linux working I have settled with Manjaro Gnome with the proprietary drivers. Right now I have two main issues and a few smaller ones.
Main Issues:
FIrefox is crashing A LOT I am a gamer, and I enjoy watching Twitch. However it seems that whatever combination of Manjaro, Firefox or my hardware basically means that FIrefox is crashing every 5 minutes. Itâs not exclusive to Twitch tabs, but they are definitely more prone that other tabs. I have tried removing all my addons thinking maybe it was an issue with them, but for the brief amount of time I was on Ubuntu before Manjaro FIrefox was working perfectly with no problems with my addons. I would like to use Firefox since that is my browser of choice even on Windows but itâs getting incredibly frustrating that I canât watch a stream for more than 5 minutes at a time
None of my display settings are seemingly saved between restarts I have three monitors: a 1080p 60 hz monitor to the left, a 1440p 144 Hz monitor as my main monitor in the middle and a 1440p 60 hz to the right. Upon installation of Manjaro and getting the proprietary drivers installed so it would finally display an image to the 1080p monitor I set my monitors up as described above making sure to set the high refresh monitor to 144Hz. Now whenever I restart my PC Manjaro just loads my monitors in some seemingly random order, sometimes changing which monitor is the main monitor and has now locked my 144 Hz monitor to a top refresh rate of 100 Hz.
These are my two main issues that are giving me serious cause for concern about whether or not the 1 year Linux challenge is going to be worth it. In my opinion these are both unacceptable scenarios for an operating system, especially the latter where it is actively ignoring or not saving my settings as a user.
Now onto the minor issues:
Pressing caps lock to fast doesnât register quick enough This isnât necessarily an issue but more of a quirk. I type pretty fast and I also use caps lock to capitalise letters rather than shift. Now on Windows this was never an issue and I could type as fast as I wanted no problem, but on Linux I find that when I press caps lock a second time to turn it off and continue typing what it is it doesnât register the key press fast enough and almost every time the letter immediately afterwards is also capitalised. Is anyone aware of a solution that would make it so I can type at full speed without constantly having to correct accidental capitals (solutions that include âjust type slowerâ or âjust use shiftâ and similar solutions will be ignored)
Sound Problems with Proton As mentioned above I am a gamer and most of my game library is on Steam. I have tried a few games with Proton and WINE and some have worked and some havenât, but consistently in all the games that I have tried so far is the volume sliders in the audio settings donât work and that they will all be maxed out all the time. Meaning that the only way to make the game quieter is to selectively reduce the volume in the volume mixer, which also doesnât allow me to balance the audio out in game which is usually the reason I am changing them in the first place. I tried googling for this one unfortunately all the answers Google was returning was for people who had no audio whatsoever rather than people who just had no control over their audio.
Canât uninstall apps via add and remove software There are a lot of apps default installed in Manjaro that I am pretty confident that I will never use. However whenever I try to uninstall the via Add and Remove software it just sits on checking dependencies forever and never actually uninstalls anything until it eventually freezes and I have to force close it via the system monitor
Most of the last list I can live with, even the audio one as annoying as it is. And if I was being honest I could even live with the 100 Hz refresh rate instead of the top 144 Hz refresh rate, but the fact that I basically canât use Twitch in Firefox and that I have to reset all my display settings every reboot is giving me serious thoughts about swapping back to Windows. Which is not something I want to do especially so early and would be a shame if I did. But ultimately I would rather have a functional PC on WIndows and deal with Microsoft than a none functional Linux installation
Apologies for the essay
Any help is appreciated and thank you in advanced.
Iâve never used Manjaro, however your issues donât really seem like they would be distro specific. So Iâll try to help where I can, with the lack of details.
For Firefox I dunno, have you messed with your RAM in your BIOS recently?
For your displays, you can likely fix this by adding them to your Xorg or Wayland configurations etc. Alternatively you can kick off with something like xrandr --output DP-3 --auto --primary --output DP-1 --left-of DP-3 --output DP-2 --left-of DP-1 when your session starts. This stuff is usually handled by the DE. Iâm just running i3 (which is just a wm and not a full fledged DE) so I fire the above in ~/.bin/set-xrandr and kick it off as part of the startup.
xrandr should allow you to set your âprimaryâ and refresh rates as well as layout.
Not too sure about your sound problems, I generally just pass through my entire soundcard to a VM, and then I can adjust stuff in game no problem.
As for uninstalling software, Manjaro should have pacman in theory right since itâs based on Arch. You can always try it from the command line to see if itâs just hosed in whatever UI application your using.
Something like pacman -R packageyouwanttoremove should do the trick to remove a package.
You can also query your installed packages with pacman -Q packagenamehere
Yes, use pacman. In the Unike-like world, you need to become familiar with your distributionâs package manager. As a aside, I believe the Software center was created by Ubuntu and was meant for Debian based systems (Like Ubuntu) and more importantly for managing SNAPS (Ubuntuâs containerization solution.) I run Ggnome on Debian and Arch but I donât use Software Center. It is buggy and more than likely, missing half of the software that I have installed.
As far as you hardware issue, it may be because you hardware is simply not supported. IE some volunteer has got rudamentary support working for your device, but without data sheets or documentation, they cannot work around the quirks of the hardware.
Lastly, if you are running an nVidia setup, Wayland is not going to work well. Gnome support the eGLStreams protocal that nVidia ârequiresâ in order to use Wayland, but it is still a work in progress and is not the ideal solution for Wayland support. Use xorg instead and I am sure that you FireFox issues and display issues will go away.
If you actually want help, you are going to need to give us specifics about you hardware and system configuration (Kernel, Wayland/Xorg) and etc.
For audio, IIRC, itâs a wine bug related to Windows 7+ compatibility thatâs just low priority and was never fixed. When I installed Foobar2000, because there arenât any linux audio players anywhere near as good as FB2k or WinAMP, the volume slider wouldnât work unless it was specifically set to operate in Windows XP compatibility. Iâd imagine in-game volume sliders are using the same DirectSound API calls that are broken in Windows7+ wine.
Thereâs also quite a few games relying on XAudio or DirectSound that just donât work properly or at all in Wine or Proton.
For monitors, try going into Display -> Advanced and create a profile. I tmight be different for different environments, but thatâs where it shows up for me. There, you can make a profile for your set of connected displays that should(but doesnât always, tbqh) load when it detects that combination of displays. I remember having some problems with display configurations resetting after sleep or reboot and this mitigated the issue pretty well.
For firefox, try disabling hardware acceleration. Iâm assuming youâre using nVidia because you went for proprietary drivers, and AMD users should be using MESA. As a user of nVidia linux drivers as well, theyâre shit, and very unstable, and a source of so many problems. I donât get constant firefox crashes, but I have had system lockups related to nvenc h264 stream encoding and decoding. For some reason, watching my own nvenc h264 stream via common html5 players and direct streaming services, such as Picarto or Piczel, just sometimes, infrequently, locks up the entire machine. Got Krita on autosave every couple minutes because of this.
Thanks for all the answers, I will look into the answers in detail. I have some responses (Sorry for the additional long post)
I havenât changed anything in my BIOS or with my RAM between swapping to Manjaro from Ubuntu and everything was working fine in there.
Thanks, this one was super useful
Iâm not sure if Xorg and X11 are the same thing, but running echo $XDG_SESSIONS_TYPE returns x11
My NeoFetch results:
And Xorg for the Window manager.
Letâs hope this isnât the case, I will see how to run in XP compatibility mode to see if it makes a difference.
I will try this if the previous answer above doesnât work
I have to admit I did forget that hardware acceleration was a thing, although turning it off hasnât fixed it unfortunately. But the extent of this issue is any video service I have tried will run for around 1-5 minutes before either crashing the tab, crashing Firefox entirely, causing my system to hang up for a solid 30 seconds or in rare cases just freezes my machine until a hard reset.
I knew that this was probably not the best way to go about it, but after spending god knows how ever many hours in the early morning trying to get things to work I was at a loss for what to do and the only thing I could think of at the time was that Wendell always mentioned that you can get help on his Forums. So here I am. I promise to do better in future posts
Yes, they are the same thing essentially. xorg is a F/LOSS implementation of the x11 windowing system. Thanks for adding your neofetch.
I see tha you have three monitors, with two of them matching the same resolution and one that is off resolution. Are thes G-sync or FreeSync monitors? Do they all run at the same refresh rate?
What is the motherboard that you are using and are you on a relatively recent firmware?
Also, you seem to have a lot of RAM. Are you running VMs, containers, or doing any type of iommu grouping or hardware passthrough?
My monitor layout is:
1080p60 nor VRR | 1440p144Hz FreeSync (although I have no idea how to actually set that up on Linux or if it can be used with an Nvidia GPU like it can in Windows) | 1440p60 no VRR
For my MB I am using an MSI X99S Gaming 7 with the latest BIOS
And then for the RAM, there was no particular reason for having that much RAM other than when I went to get a new RAM for the board it was half price and I decided to spend the same amount of money I was going to spend anyway and get twice as much
Bro I settled on the same distro as well. Then moved to Zorin cause it seemed more stable / easier to troubleshoot. Iâd love to move back though cause I love Manjaro Gnomeâs classic layout option, and look & feel.
That said I have 3 monitors at same resolution & refresh rate (Pixio PX7 Primes) and have experienced weirdness. Not to mention that I canât get freesync working on even just one monitor. Let alone get Wayland to work.
I remember trying Zorin at one point a while ago because I saw it was Windows like in GUI and immediately was like âThis is the Linux for meâ but swapped back to WIndows at some point because of an issue that I no longer remember.
With the Linux kernel, you can actually get the nVidia driver to work with FreeSync. You will have to search on this, but I know that it was covered on Phoronix and Wendell mentioned hacking something together as well.
I think you video issue is related to your different resolution screens and refresh rates. At the least, you will need to restrict your 144Hz monitor down to 60Hz and then xRANDR should be able to allow you to keep your displays in relative order. Also your tearing and video crashing may be reduced. xRANDR basically buffers one large screen encompassing all of your monitorsâ dimentions and then paints that one buffer across all of your screens. Mixing and matching resolutions is possible but is a hassle.
I donât use nVidia products and I donât have experience with their stuff since ~2003 due to their practices and support in the Unix-like world. You may want to cross post in the small linux problems thread. We have a few team greeners that use GNU/Linux in that thread.
