LTT 1 month Linux Challenge thread

Floatplaners, DO NOT SPOIL IF YOU HAVE EARLY ACCESS. Not even with a spoiler tag. This thread follows when a video gets published to the public. If you have Floatplane, that’s what the private Discord is for.

PART 1:

The Raccoon Review (WARNING, OPINION, not statements):
Well, first problem is more a problem with online SEO companies making top ten lists because of how Google is still being gamed by SEO people to make certain results rise higher than others. TechRadar and the other site at the top of the results likely are owned by the same company, paying low effort writers to just give “specifically worded” articles to rise higher in search results. The fact SEO plays a role sometimes adds to the confusion while burying genuinely useful information from individual people.

Edit: GamingOnLinux agrees with me on the SEO trash aspect:

Next, both made the mistake of expecting multi-monitor to just work. X11 is ancient and Wayland still isn’t done. It’s also impossible to do a proper spanning screen across 2 GPUs on X11 on NVIDIA by default (Which both were running Nvidia).

The next problem is the 470 drivers have too many issues to count, like crashing on exit when VLC exits. The actual stable driver is 460.91.03. This is more on Nvidia than the community as a whole though.

Getting a random system monitor may have caused dependency hell with 21.04. In the end KDE with KSysGuard would have fit better, so getting the switch to Manjaro might have helped in that front.

I think the PopOS issue is more to do with the fact it’s 21.04 than it’s PopOS itself. 20.04.3 works pretty good and the LTS version should be what’s recommended over 21.04, so this was slightly on System76 for advertising the newest 21.04 and not really explaining well what are the benefits of a LTS version over the latest version. (Remember, the less clicks the average person takes to get information, the better. Currently LTS info is not present at all immediately after clicking “download”. It defaults to 21.04 with 20.04 LTS an option on the right. There’s no tooltip pointing you to the LTS version and a comparison list of which suits your needs.) This is also (speculating) slightly on Canonical for having a 32bit dependency hell (Remember when there was that 32bit support drama?) while Steam is still natively a 32bit app in some repos.

Cave Story was a multi-monitor issue. That was it.

Audio in Manjaro over DP, you got me there.

I also have very little hope the GoXLR will function properly once they start streaming.

In fact, here’s what Presonus PR said directly to me about the Revelator io24 on Linux:

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Linus and Luke have given various updates on their Linux challenge in the WAN show (every Friday on the LTT channel) so some “leaks” are already public.

That said, IMO the L1T forums is not the place to discuss (in any depth) the contents of another YT tech channel. Mentioning it is fine, discussing should be the reserve of that channel, IMO.

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At least it’s another sounding board for opinions. Considering the trouble Liam from GoL had commenting, there needs to be other discussion places than a central location.

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That is a fair point, but both the LTT YT channel and the LTT forums are not known for censorship of those who disagree with views held by LMG management.

YouTube itself is though recently, at least I’ve seen more of it. But that’s not a rabbit hole we want to go down.

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I dont think its wrong to expect monitors to work. I also think the idea of multimonitor computers is just as ancient as X11.

Also there is the expectation of a latest driver being the correct driver to use. Regarding 470 drivers. Same goes with PopOS 21.04. The expectation is that, these work smoothly as it is not labeled as beta software.

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Yes, but getting it working across multiple GPUs is kind of a nightmare on X11 and even more so NVIDIA.

Linus was running a single TITAN RTX, but I’ve seen cases on the Radeon VII where multiple 4K monitors just cause the DE to just plain crash.

this is just Standard Issue “links hidden in comments by default” on YT. It wasn’t necessary for them to include a link, repeatedly, and feel like they were having their comment removed or w/e. That’s just how YT works. And, on top of that, I don’t even think there is much to be said here, and certainly I wouldn’t want to attract any negativity.

The lack of negativity even on /r/linux is, frankly, astonishing. Ergo, there is literally nothing here to be negative about. And nothing anyone needs to get their knickers in a twist about.

Also, unpopular opinion, I’d rather use framebuffer (or, maybe, you could talk me into a framebuffer boot menu option “mandatory”) vs nouveau for the installer. And to the extent that if you were going to use nouveau I might want to make sure the default ‘recovery’ option also blacklists nouveau. Nvidia makes the noveau folks’ lives unnecessarily difficult and that isn’t something I’ll ever forget but… for anything but the most common configs… there will be trouble with nouveau.

I disagree.

No, was just a missing i386 package the package manager was trying REALLY REALLY hard to satisfy. So much so that it said “hey uhh you might want to REALLY look at this you sure?” but if you have never encountered “normal mode” from the cli package manger and, on your first outing, you encounter “idk are you REALLY sure?” you might not know that’s not the normal behavior and is in fact a low-key “DANGER, WIL ROBINSON” behavior from the package manager.

I recognize some folks might have some pent up energy they want to share about this, but… that energy is maybe better spent redirected to self-reflection.

There are some observations that can be made. And I especially like that Pop has added an additional safety for situations like this in the future.

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Okay, thank you for the clarity on the 32bit dependencies. Some people were pointing wildly to the kernel and it kinda didn’t make sense that a kernel upgrade could cause this.

Also, yes, I very commonly use nomodeset for a kernel boot parameter for my installation media. I go out of the way to modify the grub config file in the ISO after copying the files to a flash drive to include nomodeset.

For anything Pascal and newer, there will be trouble with Nouveau. I don’t even know if the 970/980 work enough to run a live environment with Nouveau, but Kepler definitely works.

LTS is fine if you’re doing a server you don’t want to do major distro maintenance on for the next 6 years, but for a gaming system, you should really be on a leading edge rolling distro. Get the latest mainline-ish kernel and keep your mesa/xorg/core graphics libs up to date.

Those things make Lutris, Steam and Proton a much better experience.

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I would wholeheartedly agree for AMD systems, but for NVIDIA with the frequency of kernel mismatches I lean towards disagree. Blackmagic’s proprietary blob is the same thing.

Also keep in mind the challenge was to replace their daily drivers, and they cannot afford instability in the bleeding edge.

Also, same potentially for VFIO. Too new a kernel for VFIO might have teething issues too. I’m on Kernel 5.4 because of a ACPI bug on my X299 board that the new kernels introduced that affects VFIO.

I think this shows that the real issue Linux has is the User Experience.

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With both SEO and power user stigma working against someone doing a simple Google search, it’s more of a problem with the wrong resources are being presented to the average person who doesn’t have the time to do deep dives.

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:point_up::+1:

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I did feel slightly targeted, but I’ll take that as a general statement. I don’t want to turn this into another personal thread.

The only reason I’m holding off on the latest Fedora for VFIO is that X299 ACPI bug I mentioned.

This was the bug which I was still seeing on Kernel 5.8 for some reason: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206313

Anyways, that’s my personal X299 system out of the way.

I was praising it as commonly good advice.

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Yes, but you never know when a personal issue can cause someone to read it the wrong way. That’s likely how most of those Reddit comment wars start.

And let’s end that thought right there.

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So I did dig up a GoXLR script:

Problem: It requires Windows to initialize the GoXLR using the GoXLR software for the scripts to work. You will either need to dual boot or use a separate Windows machine. This is no bueno for the challenge.

If they do go for a Revelator io24 I would love to find out if it actually works if you save your profiles beforehand on Windows, Mac or iPad, then just use it as a standard ASIO interface in Linux since the DSP is internal to the Revelator. (you would be able to safely power off, then recall the DSP preset… theoretically)

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PHAHAHAH when I saw that happen the reason I laughed was that I wasn’t laughing at him I was laughing with him. I did that when fedora was transitioning away from x86 and you had to add the multi arch support back and I lost my desktop. It was quite amusing to see him do it

That’s not a mistake. Expecting it to work is a good behavior. So when things fall short of expectation we can get the criticism we need to fix stuff. Honestly there’s a great side to the Foss community and then there is the side who wants it to stay esoterica and as a result they don’t want “normie” “multi monitor” friendly behavior out of the box. This mentality is plain wrong.

That said I’ve not had issues with multiple monitors on X nor Wayland. I only run a max of 3 though so I’m gathering issues happen beyond that. Especially with TB. But hey that’s any new tech. Windows has issues with new tech all the time. Each side has their pros and cons

So I :100: % disagree. Point releases are just fine for the purpose they are using it for. I did find his jump to manjaro amusing but its not a bad decision. Manjaro is a rock solid sane defaults stable build of arch Linux that I think most users can easily adjust to

Now reading the arch wiki might be a tad overwhelming for the new user but its not impossible.

Eventually they will start figuring this stuff out

BREAKAGE AND MISTAKES are a part of learning

I noticed that. That clever response. Hey “Yes I am sure” now if your not conditioned to say “hey dumbass what are you doing” to yourself when that pops up. Absolutely the mistake will still be made but most people will pause for thought upon this prompt. I really liked seeing that. I haven’t been on popos in sometime but they have done some amazing work. I love system76s laptops too.

That said as far as a Linux laptop goes I hear the dev team for framework is getting a bunch of new firmware people and they have been teasing coreboot. If they can do that plus get their TB4 certification with coreboot. That’s the perfect hobbyist linux laptop. I’m getting in the weeds now but that’s been a thought of mine. I may see if I can assist the project.

Yup

So I hate saying this but works on my machineI run arch BTW* with nvidia I have never had a nvidia centric issue. I have however had PEBKAK a lot but Never a nvidia centric issue. I honestly have never hated my NVidia experience on Linux. Personally AMD is a non contender for me and remains so despite the current release of GFX cards. Nvidia has always worked for me and NVenc and NVdec are features I absolutely love. Due to this I just accept that yes I will be running proprietary drivers. I install them properly and make sure the DKMS is set to build and you know what on the very rare issue it doesn’t

I manually rebuild the initcpo and the dkms if there’s an issue. So far I have only done that once. I’m not concerned and I do not believe Linus needs to be worried about your concern regard nvidia either @FurryJackman . both manufacturers have decent drivers (pros and cons to each) that are workable at this point for the average user and what they are venturing out to do.

All in all

Linus’ first steps were good. I give him a solid B- haha. He dared in. He didn’t give up. He made mistakes. He pressed forward. This is how people learn. Often some are too afraid to fail or put in the effort

Luke also did something I really applaud. No distro shilling. No arch elitism none of that. He chose a distro he’s familiar with. He made it work for him. He’s using that as a basis for his environment regardless of what the internet would say. This attitude needs to start becoming more strong and prevalent. Often you see so many people distro hop because they get the wrong kind of help and a lot of people who want to help people resort to extreme measures and changing someone’s entire workflow. Its my #1 gripe with the Linux community. To me its cancer and unproductive. If you cant solve someone’s problem using their existing workflow and reinforcing it. Don’t provide help. The exception being if there really is a known bug with that OS. Then you can suggest if necessary something more extreme

That’s my thoughts on this so far

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Floatplane is SO MUCH nicer than YT or patreon. IMHO its the best way to support. I love it. I won’t spoil but what’s nice is I’ll have time to solidify my thoughts long before y’all see it. So I can provide commentary occasionally after y’all see it

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