Linux on phones and tablets is a thing. Typing from my Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro running postmarketOS and LibreWolf.

How is the external display connected? I have never seen Freesync over HDMI work. The early implementations were AMD proprietary and the new ones require HDMI 2.1 which has some ridiculous bullshit about not being implemented by open source drivers. HDMI sucks, use DisplayPort if possible. If your laptop doesn’t have a DisplayPort connector, try a USB-C to DisplayPort cable, as usually the type C ports on laptops support DisplayPort alt mode.

Pretty much all ext4 except for a few Windows installs on NTFS.

I wrote a program to do just that

https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/TouchpadEmulator

Maybe this explains why my webcam indicator is on when no applications are using it. It’s been confusing me for a while now. I’ve double checked anything that I expect to access it is not, and it doesn’t seem to be locked because opening it works, but it sometimes boots up woth the light on. I am using Arch with pipewire so I’ll check and see if this is what’s going on.

Ugh, I got a fair return from buying to AMD right before Ryzen came out. I sold some of it and bought multiple different chip companies so now I have some AMD, some Intel, some NVDA. Oh well, it’s not a huge amount but still sucks. I hope they can come back if only because AMD needs competition to keep them from becoming the evil that old Intel was. I was hoping Intel would also be a viable third GPU competitor, I like my Arc A770 for the price and I’m hoping they don’t kill off the GPU division.

I second this, second disk is best as you can keep your old Windows drive in case you ever need to go back for any reason. Modern UEFI makes dual booting way easier than it used to be as the UEFI itself provides a boot menu so you don’t need to fiddle with dual booting using a bootloader like GRUB.

Linux works well on supported ARM platforms, but the problem is that a lot of ARM platforms aren’t supported. I recently got a Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro (had to import it as it’s a China-only model) and put postmarketOS on it. The experience is surprisingly good. Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard/touchpad, it is basically as functional as a normal light-duty Linux laptop except for the lack of x86 support, which mostly just means no gaming. I have been attempting to run Steam via box64 and FEX, but pmOS isn’t a supported distro for that so I have been trying in a Docker container and in Distrobox. I managed to get it started but it crashes due to steamwebhelper, and I think it’s a dependency or configuration issue. Otherwise, for browsing, coding, videos, terminal use, office, etc. it’s great and the battery life is amazing compared to my laptop. This is on a Snapdragon 870. Open source games run and they can hit 120fps on the 120Hz screen. I hope to see ARM support continue to improve, but I am worried about bootloader locks on these new ARM Windows machines.

Mastodon added text search a while ago.

I’m not sure about FF specifically, but 99% of the time you’re connecting a microcontroller to a PC you’re doing so over a serial port (UART) of some sort. It may be a physical COM port or it may be a USB to serial adapter or even a purely virtual serial port over a USB connection, but the methodology is all the same. Unless you are running a serial terminal on that port (as in, a commandline on your PC served on the given /dev/ttyX interface, not a terminal emulator letting you read/write from the port), the microcontroller can’t just run scripts on the PC. Instead, you will want to write a script/program that opens the port and waits for a command to be sent from the microcontroller, then that listener script can execute whatever functionality you require. Note that only one application can have the port active at a time, so if your listener is a separate program from your event handler, you will have to close the port on the listener before running the handler, then reopen the port on the listener once the handler is done so it can start listening for the next event. Better to just make it all one program that is always running on the PC and does both listening for events and handling them so there’s only one program that needs access to the serial port.

It’s not specific to Microsoft, but the general idea of letting proprietary software install whatever it wants whenever it wants directly into your kernel is a bad idea regardless. If the user had any control over this update process, organizations could do small scale testing themselves before unleashing the update on their entire userbase. If it were open source software, the code would be reviewed by many more eyes and tested independently by many more teams before release. The core issue is centralizing all trust on one organization, especially when that organization is a business and thus profit-driven above all else which could be an incentive to rush updates.

It’s also a “don’t allow third party proprietary shit into your kernel” issue. If the driver was open source it would actually go through a public code review and the issue would be more likely to get caught. Even if it did slip through people would publically have a fix by now with all the eyes on the code. It also wouldn’t get pushed to everyone simultaneously under the control of a single company, it would get tested and packaged by distributions before making it to end users.

Who knew that allowing, no, PAYING third parties to inject whatever the fuck they want encrypted proprietary binary blobs into the highest privilege and most dangerous level of your operating system without any user acknowledgement or third party code review could possibly have negative consequences?

This is also why we shouldn’t be allowing kernel anticheat games on our PCs by the way. One day Crowdstrike, the next day it could be Riot Vanguard. Proprietary shitware has no place in your kernel (though in Windows’ case the entire kernel itself is proprietary, maybe do something about that next).

NVK is already usable, performancr isn’t 100% of the proprietary driver but I play Overwatch on NVK at 165FPS on my RTX3070 laptop a lot, low settings but very playable. This is with an Optimus configuration (VRR Freesync panel on AMD iGPU) in GNOME Wayland.

Even if so, it would likely still have proprietary blobs, just embedded into a ROM or flash chip on the card. Personally, I’d rather have firmware loaded at runtime over hard-coded, at least then the blob is able to be reverse engineered possibly.

I use Fennec F-Droid on Android and LibreWolf on Linux/Mac/Windows.

I’m not familiar with KDE’s new feature yet, but if it only supports sysfs LEDs then it won’t control 99% of keyboards. Few RGB keyboards have drivers that expose this interface. Most RGB keyboards are controlled from userspace on their official software on Windows, and that’s also what most Linux projects that control RGB devices including my OpenRGB project do. I wonder if it would be possible to write an OpenRGB plugin/script that exposes a virtual /sys/class/leds/openrgb device that KDE could talk to, then translate that into OpenRGB calls to set the color on all available devices. It doesn’t sound too difficult.

Also, explicit confirmation of your customizations and of your order. You can double check yourself to make sure it’s all correct before submitting the order while the distracted and overworked employee at the counter could hit the wrong button or skip a customization and you often wouldn’t know until you receive the wrong item. Then you have to create more work for the workers to get your order remade.

Radxa as well. I have a Rock Pi 4B running as my home server and it has been a great Pi 4 alternative. I also have an Indiedroid Nova with RK3588S which should be better than the Pi 5 bit the GPU drovers aren’t quite there yet. Once GPU drivers are in it should be an incredible board.

Both Huaying and Delta fans are OEM, your Deck could have either fan. Valve has multiple suppliers for some parts.