Übercomplicated

The Serval WS is also more than twice the price of my Pangolin… and I had a one year warranty, so I’m not sure what you mean with lifetime support. As for the specs (i.e. the screen etc.), yeah, they are great. But the case is very poorly designed on my pang12, and gets bent out of shape, which can cause mechanical failure in the hinge, quite frequently, despite the aluminum chassis. My complaint is just that it is far from rugged, which is problematic for me, as I travel a lot with it. But your mileage may vary.

PS: one more thing that really bothers me is the known problem with the touchepad on the pang12, which regularly fails. Mine also came with a faulty motherboard, which suggest bad quality control. Over all, these issues have caused me to lose faith in System76 hardware.

I have a Pangolin 12. While it has great specs and software support, the build quality is horrible, and over the course of two years now, I have had to screw it open and bend the laptop case in position more often then I’m comfortable with. It is the far, far opposite of rugged, which is the main reason I want to replace it. Twice now, it has just randomly decided to not boot for one or two weeks…

Anyone here have a StarLabs laptop (briefly mentioned in the article) and am opinion on it? I’m thinking about replacing my crappy System76 laptop and looking for something with good build quality.

I had a 3060 Ti.

I couldn’t game on Wayland for about 20% of my games (very frustrating), couldn’t use specific Window Managers like Sway, experience constant screen tearing on X11 (which I often had to use, because the game would crash on Wayland) when gaming, and had a significant performance hit in some games.

CS:GO ran like a dream and actually better than on Windows, but with the release of CS2 my performance on Linux was about 20% worse than on Windows. My 1% lows were also crazy on Linux (median=190fps, %1=80fps). This meant, among others things, that I just couldn’t play death match anymore — my FPS would make it unplayable. This was largely an optimization issue and I think some of the 2025 Nvidia driver updates of improved the situation a little for CS2 specifically. The screen tearing on X and the buggyness on Wayland were enough for me to switch though, even if eventual improvements might come.

I am now extremely happy with my 7900 XT, which I got for less than any available 9070 XT (in my region) and which amusingly actually has better performance in CS2 then then the 9070 XT on Linux. It’s massively overkill though, I could have just as well gotten a 7800 XT or 9070 (non-XT).

I am still very, very pleased. Hopefully this will last me a few years, unlike the gosh darn 3060 Ti.

Alright, I’m done with my huge block of text. Hopefully this was helpful.

I’m pretty sure clap is completely cross platform, which is pretty cool. But the infamous VST is unfortunately not; you need to create separate Linux and Windows VSTs :(

Dyslexia strikes again…

Bitlocker many meanings: in this case, it just refers to your disk encryption, and not the pro feature. Duel Dual boot can be a pain. I wish you good luck!

A nice alternative for Linux on Wayland might be swww: https://github.com/LGFae/swww

River is sooooo good when it doesn’t break (it’s stable, you just need to get it working in the beginning). The guile config is beautiful, always reminds me of xmonad.

Wayland: SwayWM, River (the most customizable wm I’ve ever used).

X11: DWM (configured via C, a little bit of effort if you’re not a minimalist), xmonad (via Haskell, on par with River).

My recommendation for getting started is Sway, but the others are definitely more customizable, as they use PLs for configuration. BSPWM and i3 are also good for X11, and a good middle ground between DWM’s nerdery and xmonad’s Haskell barrier. Wayland offers a much better experience if you’re not using Nvidia though. Some will recommend hyprland, but I really don’t like (IMHO). There are also some controversies around it’s leadership…

Yep, same for me both with vim and keyboard layouts. When I first started using Colemak and dreymar’s extend (https://dreymar.colemak.org/layers-extend.html — highly recommend) it took me months of typing 40wpm. Now I type 150wpm with no pain whatsoever. Very, very happy.

Duuuude I was trying to replace my 3060 ti as well, but all 9070s in my region sold out in 2 minutes (I’m not kidding). Now it’s still 80€ more expensive than launch (which is another 80€ more expensive than the US launch; wtf). I am at wits end…

Damn, everyone using iwd (my favorite), wicked, or connman — those are the only wpa_supplicant alternatives I can think of — is out of luck. God I love iwd, it’s so fast…

Lol same. Eventually (maybe the fifth exam or so) they just stopped caring about me though, and let me use my own laptop with openSUSE. Zero security, I was even hooked up to their WIFI and could easily have cheated… I didn’t though; the only exams where it would have been tempting were hand-written anyway.

It sucks that education institutions care so little for people not using giant corpo microshit though.

That’s an ethical question, and as such rather difficult to answer. I prefer open source codecs, but you have a headphone designed with LDAC in mind. I don’t think you should feel bad about trying to get your money’s worth and using LDAC if it suits your needs.

Thx for the correction, I was writing from memory.

LDAC is proprietary, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t available on Linux. You can probably use SBC-XQ, though, which is open source and lossless. Try installing pavucontrol and check what codecs it offers you for the headphones.

Edit: SBC-XQ, not QX.

You might be interested in river as a awesome replacement:

https://codeberg.org/river/wiki

You and me both with League; the day they forced Kernel level Anti-Cheat was the day I killed my dualboot setup. I can’t get into Dota, so it’s the end of an era for me, but I’ll survive it. LoL was getting worse and worse anyway… quietly sobs

It was made a little bit easier for me since I was maining Linux on all my other machines already anyway, but I feel your pain. I never ranked either, but usually played with international friends (horrible, horrible ping). I still keep up with them, but for the most part, they were the kind of friendships that were relying heavily on LoL. Honestly though, I’ve been happier since I quit. Now my gaming PC is 100% Linux, and I don’t feel guilty everytime I sit down for a game.

In regard to question one: it depends. Pretty much everything without a shitty, Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat (my autocorrect corrected to antichrist — for good reason!) will run either by default on steam or with something known as Proton. But you still may run into occasional difficulties.

For example, if you play Counter Strike 2: up until January this year, playing on Linux meant ≈20% less performance (CS2 is unoptimized for Linux and Vulkan unfortunately); this number has changed since the last few updates and since the new Nvidia driver, so I need to re-run the benchmarks. Your going to occasionally experience things like that, where performance isn’t on par. In the case of CS2, the devs love Linux, so they will optimize for it in the future. It’s just going to take a while.

Another example: I had to use Proton on a game that supposedly was native to Linux. Native implementations may sometimes suck; the good news though, is that you can easily use Proton, both inside and outside of steam. Seriously, I freaking love Valve for Proton, it’s a fantastic tool.

This is all to say, that while gaming is absolutely possible nowadays, you will occasionally need add some flag, or familiarize yourself with proton, etc.

The exception, of course, being Kernel antichrists. Goddamn them. I can’t play LoL anymore because of it. Well, I hate Riot so much now anyway, I’m not sure I’d want to anymore.