Bluetooth sucks on all platforms. It may be worse on Linux, but given how often my coworkers on Mac and Windows have audio issues it meetings, not by much.

Get a good set of RF wireless headphones and only use Bluetooth when you’re traveling.

I frequently switch between audio outputs (headset for calls and focused gaming, speakers for other use). I installed an audio switcher applet to make changing that easier and faster. But cosmic is perfect for me other than that.

I have a cache drive in my NAS for reads, thinking about putting a second drive in there so I can have a read/write cache array. It makes a huge difference over just having spinning rust. I’d love an all-flash array, but 36TB of SSD would be very expensive right now.

Note to others reading this: If your main use case is gaming (or anything other than storing/processing buttloads of data), I’d suggest just getting a bigger pcie3 drive instead of a faster pcie4/5 drive. Going with a faster drive won’t be a noticeable difference, but having 2-3x the capacity (for the same price) will help.

The scheduler is limited but it can still schedule across all the threads and cores in a given system. It’s just doing it less efficiently. The headline is misleading.

Desktop or laptop? Do you need peripherals included? Honestly for under $500 I’d highly suggest looking at refurbished machines. You’ll be able to pick up an off-lease Dell or Lenovo or HP system for < $300.

50-60% of my initial attempts at connecting to something via bluetooth is my accidentally selecting the wrong device. I’d say maybe you’re one of my neighbors but I definitely wasn’t up at 5am.

I’d recommend avoiding Epic Games, they seem to love breaking Linux compatibility. Publishers that force you to use their launcher, even if you have steam, can be annoying sometimes.

I’d suggest an AMD graphics card if possible. It just makes things simpler. I think Nvidia is still having issues with Wayland.

There were apparently 2 different MX150 chips with very different power consumption (10w vs 25w), core clocks (937mhz vs 1468mhz), and memory bandwidth (40GB/s vs 48GB/s). I don’t think either of these are going to play GTA5 well, but the 10w part is probably much worse. Can you confirm which one you’ve got?

Apple makes such weird decisions with their hardware sometimes. Like running the trackpad and keyboard off the Bluetooth controller in some models. I think it’s intentional just to make other OSes less compatible sometimes.

In college I was an apple certified tech and I had to replace a hard drive in a MacBook one day. The wireless card was glued to the top of it. No clue why. What was a 6 screw procedure on every other laptop vendor at the time was 20+ screws and 15 minutes of gentle prying on that thing.

Yup, you can do this pretty easily. But I didn’t want the added latency of another hop wherever I’m on cell service.

I’m using nextDNS so I can have it outside of home too. If you want someone to use on your phones when you’re away from home wifi, I’d give that or AdGuard a try. But PiHole is easy to do for home in an SBC or container.

I’ve been using Linux for 2 decades and I still use Debian for containers and servers and Pop_os for my desktop and laptop. If I was going to run a straight gaming machine I’d probably use something Arch based.

What kind of experience are you looking for? Something that’s bleeding edge? Something that’s going to give you 99.999% uptime with minimal hassle? Something to give you a hobby?

I love how Cosmic just stays out of your way and let’s you work. Never looked back after switching to it, hopefully the new one is the same thing but faster.

I wonder if pop_os is going to stick with Ubuntu with snap being pushed so hard now. It’d be cool if they switched to Debian.

Edit: looking at the pop repos, the branches are named after the new Ubuntu release still. Hopefully they’re removing snap dependencies at least.

This is neat. In college when I had really crappy hardware, I’d do Ubuntu core or debian core installs. Feels very similar to those but more intuitive.

Flatpak started working on payments earlier this year, so that is happening. But have we forgotten about Steam? It’s mainly used for games yes, but your can sell software on it too. I’ve even bought some software on it.

Flatpak can provide file system isolation, but not to the level of chroot. It provides a sandbox for things to run in and a way to distribute packages and dependencies. And it has a permission system to keep things in check. But with lutris, you may want to let it write to ~/Games/ or whenever you want your games at.

Maybe give the docs a skim for more details.

I guess the flatpak package would be the easiest, and most supported, option you have. You can use flatseal to restrict what permissions it has, including what directories it has access to.

I can use my computer without it installing software I don’t want (like when Windows installs candy crush) and without it advertising to me.

Is it not open vpn with a custom skin? Haven’t heard of Zyxel yet, but most corporate VPNs that I see these days are just open vpn with a skin on them.