Actual Problem: C → Segmentation Fault

Do you use the ttf/off version? I just tried to install them in KDE (off some sketchy git repo) but they look really wonky as a UI don’t.

JetBrains Mono NF masterrace represents!

Honestly if I have to choose only one mono font family to use for the rest of my natural life, JetBrains Mono without a shred of a doubt.

This was before he discovered that Jenson was an aborted spawn of lucifer himself.

Same, does it work? If it means booting into a DE and being able to move your mouse and type on your keyboard, sure most distros can do that.

It’s those little gotchas everywhere that gets you. Enabling video acceleration on Nvidia in firefox? Getting LDAC to work on Bluetooth? Etc. etc.

Do most distros work? Yeah, only if you don’t mind software encoding, or compiling from some user-provided repos.

I have a few hobby boxes running all flavours of distros, but whenever I need something to just work with no caveats, I go back to w11.

Yes indeed, it just works when I need it to. Just 10 minutes ago I regretted installing Arch as I had some trouble trying to get my WH1000XM4 to connect. I was able to figure it out eventually as I was missing a bunch of missing packages for bluetooth and bluetooth audio that for some reason archinstall decided wasn’t part of the core packages. There was zero prompts from KDE as to why the pairing was failing and I had to figure out with some trial and error which ones were missing and which ones I needed. And after doing all that I still couldn’t get LDAC to work.

Seriously reflecting on my life choices right now, should have stuck to a distro with some sensible defaults when I just need shit to work. Of all the problems people have with M$, windows always just worked for me. Perhaps Linux and I just aren’t fated to be together. I always come back a couple of times a year to try out the state of Linux and while it has gotten a whole lot better, its always these little gotchas that result in me telling myself “maybe next year will be the year of linux”, which has been happening for the past ~15 years for me now.

Same, my next GPU will likely be an AMD or Intel, been itching to give Intel my money for sometime. They need battlemage to just barely keep up with the same generation xx60ti and they’ve got my business.

Ditto, really respect what System76 has done but I need a long break from Ubuntu and GNOME. Looking forward to Cosmic DE but until it’s mature it is difficult to see how far they’d get.

Which GPU are you using?

I spent a good 10-20 hours just trying to get it to boot to a largely error-free experience with SDDM and KDE. I set out to daily drive Hyprland and what a shit show that turned out for me on Nvidia GPU and Alder Lake CPU.

The basic gist is you have add nvidia, nvidia_uvm, nvidia_modeset and nvidia_drm to your mikinitcpio conf, regenerate your initramfs, then adding kernel boot parameters nvidia-drm.modeset=1 and i915.modeset=0 before it can even boot to a usable state. Apparently since 6.0, the igpu grabs the display and refuses to give it back. I don’t know how the fuck any “normal” user is going to figure out how to do all of that. Then I spent another evening trying to figure out how to get VAAPI working properly. There’s lots of outdated info in the wiki and not much else to go on, but I figured it out eventually.

BUT, having said this, I do recognise when you go Arch, you’re asking for all of these jank. And, for science, I wiped and tried out endeavouros, and it was surprisingly painless, mostly just worked out of the box (I didn’t check if it was nouveau but it might have been, I also didn’t check if VAAPI was working).

In the end after what seems like 400 wipes and reinstalls, I got it working just right. But it wasn’t painless and it certainly isn’t meant for the faint hearted.

Yes I know the fault largely lies with Nvidia and their shitty proprietary drivers, and so on. But the exact same machine worked just fine in W11, without a single jank or terminal command (not 100% true because I did run OOBE\BYPASSNRO to skip the online junk).

Moral of the lesson: go vanilla Arch if you are comfortable with figuring out shit on your own. Otherwise, stay the hell away and pick a starter distro like Fedora or Pop!_OS that is mostly jank-free.

obligatory I use Arch btw.

Real men write their own OS in assembly!

Ubuntu was my first-ever training-wheels gateway to Linux. I started from 8.04 Hardy Heron, and it felt like such a counter-culture move back then and I wanted to be part of the ‘cool’ edgy goth kids that DGAF about the mainstream normies.

15 years later, I still daily-drive windows, but I have many linux boxes for various specialist use-cases, mainly for scripting or self-hosting services, and still have 22.04 server versions running here and there. But this will be my last version of Ubuntu, and the only reason its still there is because migrating them is going to be no fun.

The Ubuntu today feels like a completely different animal than when I started. My breaking point was the ‘upgrade to pro’ message on every apt run. I DON’T WANT TO SIGN UP FOR YET ANOTHER METERED ACCOUNT. I use Linux to escape all the mainstream commercialism and monetization once in a while when I’m up for it. Next thing I know, it starts popping up in Linux OS’s and even terminals asking me to login with an account so that I can be monetized.

Don’t get me wrong, I know people need to eat and companies need revenue streams to pay their staff. Linux was my occasional escape back to my engineering and tinkering roots, but corporatism is creeping in like what happens to all good things (eventually).

Most people just want a browser and a word processor plus simple spreadsheets once in a blue moon. For extremely simple and popular use cases many distros already work okayish OOTB, including those with GNOME DE.

While I absolutely don’t like GNOME and its design principles (prefer KDE), but I can see why it works for many people.

Now, for anything but the most popular use cases, that’s a whole different story altogether. I just spent the whole weekend installing and reinstalling every imaginable flavour or Arch and OpenSUSE and trying to get Hyprland or KDE to work on my NVIDIA gpu without issues and failing, then trying to stop my screen from flickering like a drowning sailor desperately trying to Morse code and SOS while on Alder Lake iGPU, and failed too. Two hours ago I wiped for what seemed like the 420th time and went crawling back to W11.

Paper beats rock so the superior choice is clear.