I’ve got a 7900X as my main machine, but it’s been very busy lately reducing the file size of tv shows via handbrake. I don’t like to use the pc when it’s doing this and I’m getting a bit fatigued using my laptop and it’s tiny screen.
Machine Spec
I’ve pulled out an old i7-7700K machine that is old and couldn’t have Win11 unless I used Rufus etc., so I put a spare RTX 4000 GPU in it. It just has:
32GB DDR4 RAM
250GB NVMe drive
Initial thoughts
Forgive me but I’ve been a Windows users for decades (the S/W I use for income doesn’t work on Linux), so it’s a little different, but certainly usable - using it right now in fact. The only times I’ve really used Linux is as a VM when something simple is needed, never used for anything really. No complaints so far, it’s been a bit of a learning curve, but not that much. I’ve connected to my server, logged into various accounts, used it for media streaming and all is well. Performance is good now - initially I only had a 512MB GPU and it was dog slow. Putting the RTX 4000 in, cured that.
Changes to default
I wasn’t keen on the wasted space on the top and bottom of the screen, so a brief amount of searching revealed an extension called “Dash to Panel”. Have to give the author/dev credit for that, the standard setup is to have a bar at the top that only shows the time and other things, and then ‘taskbar’ at the bottom, just doing the app shortcuts. The extension allows everything to be on the bottom of the screen, much nicer and it allows size adjustment so it can be as small as is needed.
I turned off Mouse Acceleration…seems like that doesn’t help no matter what OS you’re using!
I tried to get my 3DConnexion mouse to work with it, but it doesn’t (via bluetooth).
My Logi MX Master keyboard works perfectly via Bluetooth, nice.
Things I'd like to fix
The scroll wheel on the mouse does work, but I can’t seem to click the mouse wheel and have it scroll up and down when I move the mouse. Not incredibly important.
Anyway, that’s about it, not bad at all, might try Mint before I make up my mind completely.
The only thing that kills me after nearly a decade of linux on the desktop is that using capslock to capitalize the first word in a sentence (bad typing technique, I know) usually results in something like THis. I’M too fast I guess. And Windows apparently does some kind of anti-specification magic to eliminate this issue. Apple too, I guess.
I tired PopOS, and as someone who had used Linux in some capacity since 2004. It was absolute crap. Glitches and issues I don’t see on this machine in any other distro. I complained about my issues in the comments section of a sponsored video about POPos cosmic, and someone from the projdct replied. Basically they are aware of all the issues I pointed out and it should be fixed by sometime in mid 2026, and chalked it up to growing pains building their own new desktop environment. But that’s my issue, if your custom environment is not ready for prime time, make it a second flavor or beta until it is. Don’t completely replace a stable OS with in your new experiment.
The “App store” flatpack versions of Steam, Discord, Chrome, Gimp, OpenRGB, all have the same graphical abnormality. 50% of the time when I open them, they open to solid black window. Closing an reopening fixes it temporarily. However the .deb installers/versions of those programs all installed fine and have zero glitches or graphical hiccups. Except for Discord, Discord woud open on all 3 screens in a weird mirroroed app mode, until I closed it and reopened it.
I run multiple sound cards and it would not use the card I specifird in settings, if I did, as soon as I adjusted volume it wanted to use the optical out of the Creative labs card. Even if I disabled it, not good if your recoding in OBS and streaming. Sad thing is it worked out of the box and broke when I uodated the OS. It fixed other ussues but broke audio…
Then most the time games would open windowed and off centered and refuse to go full screen.
I went back to Ubuntu Studio and everything just works, I forget I am even running something different. Pre-configured with restricted codecs and optimizations so OBS works with HW encoding and Virtual camera out of the box. I just wanted to try something different and POp cosmic looked promising.
I really liked the Cosmic UI, but it feels like a beta.
I have to say, something that always surprises me is how people accept the Windows/MacOS defaults of docks and bars on the top/bottom. All modern monitors have the extra/unused space at the sides, so why waste precious vertical space on stuff that stays there all the time?
Hence…I always keep my dock on the side and a thin (24px-ish) bar at the top for status/time/etc.
