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Bonje @lemmy.world
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Need help with making Linux my home

https:// lemmy.world /post/6808898

I'm starting to get ads in my Windows notifications so it's time I move.

I got Manjaro KDE Endeavor OS with KDE installed and got my most played non-steam games running through steam proton which is awesome.

But I have a few big issues.

  1. My network randomly drops. A restart fixes but I can't even download Cyberpunk with my 1GB connection before it crashes. Klogs showed something about the network manager successfully shutting down but I can't find much else.

  2. No Radeon software. I sometimes need to record clips/ stream so relive is nice but the biggest problem is my second 1080p monitor I Super Resolution to fit more programs on it. I can't find a way to replicate that functionality. I also do not know how to control Radeon anti-lag, chill, Smart Memory Access, etc.

  3. HDR controls. Nothing in the display settings so I'm lost

  4. Alternative Software I haven't spent a lot of time looking but things like wallpaper engine, rainmeter, powertoys.

If anyone ran into the same things and has solutions it'd make my day.

EDIT: With the overwhelming note from everyone here I distro-hopped to Endeavor OS with KDE (I liked that it let me install multiple DE's) biggest loss is the App store but I was already using winget/choco on Windows so having to do pacman -S is pretty much the same. EDIT: Added KDEs Discover and its backend, seems to be alright.

installing plasma-wayland-session and switching to Wayland let me set display scale below 100% removing the biggest need for Radeon Software.

Network thing I'm still digging into but it persisted from the distro hop and I think is Steam-related because if I don't launch steam it just doesn't happen

EDIT2:

netmon logs - https://pastebin.com/wKZrV04Y demsg - https://pastebin.com/3rAPcAve

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51 comments

  • My network randomly drops. A restart fixes but I can't even download Cyberpunk with my 1GB connection before it crashes. Klogs showed something about the network manager successfully shutting down but I can't find much else.

    Share the output of sudo dmesg logs as well as sudo journalctl -u NetworkManager | cat. The first is the kernel logs about what's going on with your connection, and the second one is from the utility that manages networking on most systems (there's alternatives but pretty sure Manjaro uses NM). It should give us more info as to the reason of the disconnections.

    No Radeon software. I sometimes need to record clips/ stream so relive is nice but the biggest problem is my second 1080p monitor I Super Resolution to fit more programs on it. I can't find a way to replicate that functionality. I also do not know how to control Radeon anti-lag, chill, Smart Memory Access, etc.

    Most of these things are more deeply integrated on Linux, so you don't need to worry about them for the most part. Some of them are also buzzwords for marketing purposes for features that really should be default on, which on Linux, when it's reasonable, do default to on. For example, you don't turn Smart Memory Access on: if it can use it, it will use it. Same with VRR, at least on Wayland: just on by default on KDE.

    • ReLive: you can use any screen recorder that will work on any GPU. Right now with the Wayland transition it's a bit weird and OBS is the better choice there, but on an Xorg session you can just use something like Simple Screen Recorder. On KDE, Spectacle, the default screenshot utility also has the ability to record short video clips but it can be a little buggy.

    • Super Resolution: just set the monitor's scaling to less than 100% in the display settings. It's technically probably better than Super Resolution for apps that supports <100% scaling, because instead of making a fake 4K display for example, it'll render everything at 1080p still but instead cause apps to render smaller, achieving the same result but with the potential of remaining pixel perfect. It won't be doing any AI scaling though, so YMMB.

    • Anti-lag: it's kind of a hack, and on Linux we're trying to get things right for the graphics stack with Wayland. But if you're running Wayland, KWin is already doing what it can to reduce lag on the desktop, and individual applications have to implement similar methods if they want to. Have you run into specific things where it's noticeable? Linux is generally pretty good when it comes to input lag already.

    • Chill: you can run games in Valve's gamescope wrapper to limit framerate. That's exactly how they do it on the Steam Deck. You can also use CoreCtrl to underclock the GPU.

    • Smart Memory Access: it's just marketing for Resizable BAR, and it's on by default. You can check with sudo dmesg | grep BAR=, if it's greater than 256M and equal to your GPU's memory size, it's working.

    [    7.139260] [drm] Detected VRAM RAM=8176M, BAR=8192M
[    7.576782] [drm] Detected VRAM RAM=4096M, BAR=4096M

    HDR controls. Nothing in the display settings so I'm lost

    Yeah that one's still WIP unfortunately. It's technically possible on Xorg but you have to run everything HDR all the time and things break. It's coming along fairly well!

    Alternative Software I haven't spent a lot of time looking but things like wallpaper engine, rainmeter, powertoys.

    • Wallpaper Engine -> KDE's desktop backgrounds have a lot of options to do similar stuff including animated wallpapers. Go to change your wallpaper, there's a button to download new modules and new backgrounds. For example: https://store.kde.org/p/1413010
    • rainmeter -> Conky, or KDE's desktop widgets. Right click on your desktop, add graphical component.
    • powertoys -> A lot of those have built-in and better equivalents. Fancy zones: we've had that as standard for a good decade here. You can also fairly easily make your own or use other people's KWin scripts, which lets you manipulate the desktop however you want. Here's some examples: https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=210&amp;ord=latest

    You can even download desktop effects, if you like your windows to burn down or have a glitch effect or whatever: https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=209&amp;ord=latest

    It takes some time to adjust, but welcome abord! Depending on how much you customize, you may find it difficult to go back to Windows!

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    • Ty for the tips! Makes sense that a lot of those Radeon settings are default. I did mainly have a slight underclock on the GPU and a minor auto bump on the CPU after tweaking the curve optimizer to -15.

      I'll do more digging with the network thing when I'm at my PC and update as I go.

      How do I set display scaling below 100%? That was the instinct but there is only a slider and it doesn't go below 100%, some googling got me some xrand commands for making a 1440p profile but that ends up with an out-of-range message on the monitor.

      With the gamescope util, the %command% would be the path to the game exe/bin that's usually there?

      I did end up finding things like snapping from Powertoys which was my biggest thing now looking for shortcuts for them. Think the other is finding a run menu, I've heard there are some just need to find one.

      For Wayland vs X, I'm not sure what this version is running but I'm hoping I don't have to think about that much. The main usage is just games which I got working in an hour tinkering and occasional vscode/ium and Arduino IDE. Still need to tinker with making xprog work or finding an alternative that works with that USB programmer.

      Speaking of games, is it possible for Steam to consolidate its sandboxes? I imagine having so many redundant copies of mfc140 and other DLLs would be eating at the space? There also seem to be some effects missing, namely, Bloom. It seems to have issues rendering in comparison to Windows, is this a case of missing DLLs or just the proton layer not translating them yet?

      Thank you so much for your time and info, I'm quite excited about making this all work!

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      • How do I set display scaling below 100%? That was the instinct but there is only a slider and it doesn't go below 100%, some googling got me some xrand commands for making a 1440p profile but that ends up with an out-of-range message on the monitor.

        That might be Wayland-only. If you're on AMD, you can launch a Wayland session by selecting Plasma (Wayland) before you log in with your password. Bottom corner iirc. There are some drawbacks, but it's the future of the Linux graphics stack and where all new developments happen.

        For Xorg, see "Scaling the desktop and simulate/render a new resolution" of https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/596888

        For Wayland vs X, I'm not sure what this version is running but I'm hoping I don't have to think about that much. The main usage is just games which I got working in an hour tinkering and occasional vscode/ium and Arduino IDE.

        You can ignore the gory details, but the gist of it is that Linux has used Xorg to drive the graphics for a good 3 (4?) decades, and was originally designed for terminals and mainframes so you could run applications on a remote server and render it locally. For perspective, for a while when you ran a 3D application, it straight up displayed the 3D box as an overlay on top of the desktop, so you couldn't overlap other applications over the 3D app because of the hack. Been solved for 2 decades, but that gives an idea of how much it's not made for that. As such, it's old and complicated and just not designed for how we use computers these days.

        Wayland is the new one in development since the 2010s ish that aims to get everything right for the foreseeable future. But it still lacks some features, like until recently, no screen sharing and stuff. What it does however works really well. My Wayland session is way snappier than the Xorg one on 3 monitors. Worth a try, if you don't like it, just go back to Xorg.

        Speaking of games, is it possible for Steam to consolidate its sandboxes? I imagine having so many redundant copies of mfc140 and other DLLs would be eating at the space? There also seem to be some effects missing, namely, Bloom. It seems to have issues rendering in comparison to Windows, is this a case of missing DLLs or just the proton layer not translating them yet?

        I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's not a complete copy. A lot of those are just stubs so that they exist. On some filesystems, I think they're basically copy-on-write so they don't really take space even though they might show up as being large. The files only become copies when they get modified, so unless modified by an installer or whatever, they're the same file. Basically CoW is, you can copy a 10GB file 10 times over, it copies instantly because it doesn't actually do the copy, and although it measures as 100GB, it's only using the original 10GB. If you modify it, then only the changes take actual space. That might be btrfs/zfs exclusive though, my system has automatic deduplication and compression set up and I have more space than I can find uses for.

        But otherwise, the copies have advantages in that one game may use one version, and another a different version that's not compatible, but it just works. Each game can get its own container with the ideal version of everything for it to work.

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      • With the gamescope util, the %command% would be the path to the game exe/bin that's usually there?

        Yes, but you also leave it as-is. Steam replaces it for you, so basically gamescope -w1280 -h720 -W1920 -H1080 %command% in the launch options would AMD FSR upscale the game from 720p to 1080p and Steam will fill in %command% with whatever it needs to run Proton and then the game in it. Just need to make sure the options are between gamescope and %command% for them to be interpreted correctly.

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    • netmon logs - https://pastebin.com/wKZrV04Y demsg - https://pastebin.com/3rAPcAve

      So I pretty much can narrow it down to Steam. If I download stuff and let it go zoom with uncapped rate, it crashes. I pause the download for a bit and it eventually recovers. Wild.

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    • Another tip off. During large downloads nothing else except the process doing the downloading works. I don't get it. Technically the network works but only for that one app. It's like something locks for some reason?

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  • Hmm... Manjaro has a history is breakage/SSL issues.

    Try a copy of Debian KDE

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  • Manjaro should literally never be used, it's a terrible, terrible distro that just makes arch worse and provides little to no benefit.

    If you don't want to use a TUI or touch a terminal, try endeavoros.

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    1. For wallpaper engine you could check out wallpaper engine for kde. That will allow you to select wallpapers directly from your wallpaper engine library.
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  • HDR seems to be experimental/in development for Linux for now. If you decide to tip your toes in there expect that you may find some rough edges. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support

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  • If you have any additional software which you are looking for FOSS Linux alternatives for, feel free to list them. Your options are much greater than most people coming from Windows expect them to be, and many of us have already spent a lot of time deep down the rabbit hole of finding quality open-source software alternatives, so we can surely point you in the right directions.

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  • You've probably figured this out by now but KDE has all the theming and rainmeter style widgets available. I just installed most of my desktop aesthetics direct from the System Settings on KDE, it's mostly Catppuccin Mocha. Had to search for the Github for it to find some cool basic wallpapers that matched the theme perfectly.

    Steam has some weird issues and I had it set to launch in terminal so the progress and errors get posted in there. Then I could search the web with the error codes. I don't know the command though.

    For games try ProtonDB.com, and then sort by "Tweaks" or whatever to see what people did to make the game run correctly.

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    • Yeah, there is a good chunk to make it feel about the same

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  • Manjaro and Antergos are just asking for trouble. If you want Arch, use Arch. Otherwise Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, and Fedora are popular.

    I don't think the full Radeon suite is on Linux but there are tools for screen recording like simple screen recorder and OBS.

    There is lots of 3rd party software available on all of these distros in their respective package managers, but Ubuntu has the advantage with PPAs allowing for more 3rd party repos to be easily added to the package manager.

    HDR support is still very early/basic right now: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support

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  • Network: I constantly have problems with ipv6 connections to steam on Linux, try disabling ipv6. It's counterintuitive to have ipv4 run faster and more stable than 6 but for whatever reason that's a thing.

    Rainmeter: try conky.

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  • For all those people saying to not use Manjaro if you want an alternative that just works try Mint or Fedora. Arch is great but requires a lot more work that you might not be interested in.

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  • Manjaro was my choice as well when I jumped ship a bit over a year ago. I do not plan on sticking with it. If you do, learn how to recover an unbootable system using timeshift. And set up timeshift, so if the worst happens, you can recover.

    1. I'd be looking at journalctl logs for the networking.

    2. I use OBS, as well as Spectacle and SimpleScreenRecorder. To fit more on a screen, you are likely looking for the desktop scaling setting in KDE. As for actually messing with the display resolution and such, I know how to do that on Nvidia, but not AMD. I know freesync should work easily, if you are running under wayland.

    3. HDR on linux is currently not a thing, AFAIK. There is work happening, but all the things that would be needed for it to work, weren't complete last I checked.

    4. KDE has powerful wallpaper plugins, everything from shaders to some kind of wallpaper engine support. I just use a folder slideshow, with wallpaper blur when a window is focused. For rainmeter type stuff, look into KDE widgets.

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  • For super resolution you can use gamescope

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  • Just adding to the chorus of users who had issues with Manjaro. It’s a great distro, but sometimes quite frustrating, especially if you’re new.

    I switched to Fedora, which is really nice. It’s Gnome, but there’s probably a KDE spin too. No big issues so far, and it’s been almost a year. One small issue is getting video codecs installed. Be sure to select third party repos at install, then look for “gstreamer” in the software app and install all the plugin packages.

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    • I've had a good experience with it the couple of times I used it in the past. I tried Rhino before eventually settling on manjaro as I quite like rolling updates, makes it simple for my monkey brain.

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    • If you only consider manjaro the things they put ontop of arch, it's actually an awful distro.

      Everything they added makes arch worse.

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  • My network randomly drops. A restart fixes but I can’t even download Cyberpunk with my 1GB connection before it crashes. Klogs showed something about the network manager successfully shutting down but I can’t find much else.

    Are you using Wi-Fi or Ethernet? What's the output of inxi -Nx when you run it in a terminal? (it's a cool system information tool, you can install it with a sudo pacman -S inxi)

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  • For Radeon Software I found https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/amdgpu-installation on AMD's site but I would heavily recommend that you first try to find if your distro has already repackaged it somewhere.

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  • I don't know what "super resolution" actually means but if you're on Xorg / X11 then you can set arbitrary scales for your monitors if you want a 1080p monitor to have 2 times as many virtual pixels than its native resolution then you can run xrandr --fb $((1920*2))x$((1080*2)) --output --pos 0x0 --mode 1920x1080 --scale 2x2 fb is the whole desktop size, increase it if you have multiple monitors. For finding out what ID you need to give for --output run xrandr without any arguments and try to recognize your monitors, or trial and error. Pos is position, if you have several monitors then your 2nd monitor should not be at 0x0 but somewhere like 1920x0 for example. Mode is the unscaled resolution you want to give the monitor, with scale 2x2 an actual 1920x1080 will be 3840x2160 virtually, your fb parameter needs to be configured WITH the SCALED size, not unscaled.

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  • I can’t help you with your issues but I’m interested to see what the recommendations are for alternative applications. I’m planning a switch to Linux soon

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