What was your latest improvement to your Linux setup?

i officially left windows yesterday! :)
- One of us one of us
  Edit: hows it going? Everything working ok?
  
  i installed manjaro and tbh I don't think I'm going to touch windows again unless I have to. my only unsolvable issue so far is (I think) my PC is having a hard time detecting Linux when I restart my computer. it just sometimes will tell me to restart and change to a bootable drive through BIOS.

Definitely my Framework 13 AMD. This machine is truly perfect
- How's the battery life? I was considering one recently but saw some claim that the battery would only last 4-6 hours and that put me off.
  
  I have the 55Wh battery. When I’m not using the Power Saver profile, I’d say it lasts for 5-6 hours. Using the Power Saver profile, I get around 6-7h. Keep in mind I have the base Ryzen 5 model and 16GB of RAM, so power utilization may vary depending on your configuration

Switching over to a tiling windows manager has been really enjoyable. It feels like a futuristic paradigm shift
- Happen to know anything about how windowed games work with a tiling manager? I often stream a buddy's Elden Ring gameplay while playing myself, but having only one screen means I have to have the Discord popout in the top corner and the gameplay in windowed.
  
  I haven't tried that exact set up myself but in hyprland the default tiling would have your Elden Ring on one half and your friends the other half. Then if you opened up discord it would split one of the halves in half again. If you wanted to have discord instead floating and over top of the stream you could do that, or send it to the next "desktop" over if you don't need to see it. You can customize each of the tiles however you like, border or no border, you can move them around..
  
  In i3wm you can set a key bind to float a window above the tiling and it'll do just that; You can even automate it with some custom for_window rules if desired.
  
  I just started tinkering with this yesterday in Gnome on Pop! and it looked like there are options to exclude certain programs from tiling if that's what you're looking for.
  
  Its hit and miss, likely you have to set up window rules to get a good experiemce.
- Yeah it makes a big difference. My desktop experience is quite a bit worse since bismuth stopped working in KDE.

Just flat out getting Debian to install. This was my first OS swap on a Dell Latitude. Holy whirlwind that bios is locked down with half a dozen secure boot “features”.
My problem ended up being in storage configuration. After I set it from raid to achi Debian install was able to detect the drive. Why my laptop with a single m.2 slot was configured for raid, I’ll never know.
- I remember a time when that was a common thing for laptop drives to come preconfigured as Raid 0. Maybe the OEMs thought it would be easier to add storage that way...?
  
  I get that maybe it’s preconfigured which might make sense on dell pc’s that’d fit a few drives in empty sata slots, but it took me nearly two days to think of that solution.
  I figured throw it out there in case someone else has issues with an install locating the main drive on a Dell.

Not the latest, but one of the biggest improvements was the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard. Now I have programmed the keyboard to have VIM navigation at the keyboard level. The latest was switching to neovim and setting it up properly.

This nice little one liner bash script, assigned to a shortcut Meta +Shift + O. It opens the flameshot GUI, let's you select an area of text in your screen and click Ok. It OCRs the screenshot and puts it into the clipboard. It checks for whether you're using Wayland or X11 to use the appropriate clipboard tool. Beyond the more typical text in an image scenario, it's a convenient way to copy non-selectable text in error popups. Not my original idea, copied the concept from a suggestion in a GitHub comment thread and adapted it.
exec &> /dev/null [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" = "wayland" ] && (flameshot gui --raw | tesseract stdin stdout | wl-copy) || (flameshot gui --raw | tesseract stdin stdout | xclip -in -selection clipboard)

Deciding on the folder where to keep backups to cloudsync so i can reinstall everything from scratch.

A script full of functions that I perform often, like:
Probe every 5min for internet connection. Play Black Sabbath when there is. (My internet goes down often.)
Create individual tarballs/zips/rars for each subdir.
Extract all tarballs/zips/rars from a dir. (It detects the format on its own)
Extract all files of a DwarFS file into a dir.
Re-encode all vids from a dir.
Delete all thumbnail pictures from my user.
Find and remove all desktop.ini and thumbs.db files in a dir, recursively.
My .bashrc then sources that script, so to use those functions I simply open a terminal. And if I ever need to delete my .bashrc and recreate it anew, they're safely stored in my scripts directory.
- The black Sabbath for Internet connection is hilarious. Did you get that from the Bitcoin mining trigger bit on Silicon Valley?
  
  No, that's a coincidence. I wanted something that: started loud, was easy to recognise, I don't mind hearing, and my neighbours don't listen to. Wicked World it is.
  Here's the code by the way, with the echo translated:
  
  lvxInternetCheck () { while [[ $(ping -c 5 8.8.8.8 | grep -o "100% packet loss") == "100% packet loss" ]] do echo "No internet at $(date +%R)." ; sleep 300 done echo "Internet came back at $(date +%R)." cvlc /[redacted]/08\ -\ Wicked\ World.mp3 }
  It's dirty but it works. (My functions start with "lvx" to avoid the tiny chance that they might clash with system functions.)
- If you're comfortable running Docker, check out net probe. It comes with an all in one logging/graphing stack that will probe your internet quality based on lag and packet loss. Default configs is good enough to get you going and you can tinker to your heart's content from there. Probably won't play Black Sabbath automatically though unfortunately!

Fish, and a searchable command history.
- What were you using before?
  
  Just bash
- First thing I install in each platform is fish
  
  Yeah i had avoided it cos it wasn't behaving with vscodium in flatpak but finally got around to reinstalling code on the machine directly.

Edited my kernal parameters to prevent my CPU from going into a low power state that had been causing crashes for years apparently.
Edit: if you use 1st gen ryzen and have been putting up with intermittent crashes thinking it was your shitty old used GPU like me, try disabling c-state 6.
- Ryzen crew, never rest, never sleep!
  I am so confused that this is still an issue, but be warned even with more "modern" Ryzen it is an issue. My Ryzen 5(?) Huawei matebook still can't run Linux without this shit.
  
  Weird. I've used 1000,2000,3000,4000 series without any issues ever.

unlocking luks over ssh

Lowering swappiness to get more usage out of my RAM.

Switched to an immutable system after I finally managed to wrap my head around the concept.
I've tried it before but left frustrated cause my normal workflow doesn't apply anymore.
But if you're looking for an OS that basically disappears in the background, it's great. I even removed the terminal cause I have no use for it on my laptop.
- Can you explain the idea and advantages? Excluding use cases like setting up a laptop for your grandma.
  
  Generally I use my computer to launch programs that do the stuff I want to do, or edit my files.
  My files are in /home and programs for the tasks I need are available as flatpaks.
  So I don't need to rummage around in the rest of the file system. You could call it "a laptop for grandma" except I'm not that old. I use my laptop for office stuff, gaming, photo editing, streaming music and video, browsing, mail, messaging, ssh'ing into my servers, etc. What I don't use it for anymore is tinkering with my OS. I'm fine with default Gnome and I don't need to adjust every little thing, I can just adjust myself a bit to how the GUI works.
  I just don't want to read Arch news before I update weekly, set apt-pinning priorities to disable snap, deal with recommended dependencies, meta packages, mirrorlists, third-party repo urls, gpg keyfiles, file permissions, executable flags, systemd services, and all that jazz anymore.

I just bought another (cheap quad core 256GB SSD) thinkcentre as a tinker platform.
So I'm going to add that to my Linux uh setup (of machines).
- I've been thinking about getting a thin client or similar for Hi-Res music listening for a while. I tried a Raspberry Pi 3b+ and the music sounded harsher and would crackle as soon as the Pi was doing anything else at the same time.
  Having my PC on all day in summer is a bit overwhelming.
  
  I have an external DAC, so I don't need to think about how good music the PC/Raspberry/... produces.

I got VFIO/IOMMU + single GPU pass-through working on Fedora 40 with my RX 6800 xt into a win10 VM.
More of a see if I could sort of thing, I don't imagine I will actually need it much, but it may help if any of my friends are curious about switching over.
- What are you using to run the VM? Regrettably, I need a Windows install to upgrade firmware on a USB device. I'm hoping I can get it done in a VM and at least not pay them anything. I tried a little yesterday but wasn't able to install from the Win10 ISO.
  
  KVM/QEMU via virt-manager. I would imagine that your use case would work if you pass the USB device or the entire usb host controller through to the VM, but I'm not sure. Please check the video linked in my other comment for more information on the single GPU setup
  
  I dunno what you were using but I recommend virt-viewer.
  The main thing for this one is that you'll want to get a PCIe USB controller card and pass that through directly to the VM so that unplugs/replugs/device resets don't connect the device to the host machine briefly while if determines if it should pass through.
- Oh my god, I wish! I have tried unsuccessfully before, but I was trying to just pass my onboard AMD igpu to the VM and keep an NVIDIA on Linux.
  When you say single passthrough, you mean splitting the one GPU to host and client?
  I have tried through the arch wiki and a couple of YouTube tutorials with no luck. If you found any tutorials/resources that really, helped, please share!
  Also, I really wish I had the foresight to have bought AMD instead of NVIDIA a few years ago, but it was before I was on Linux as my main driver and didn't know any better
  
  Hey there, just using a single GPU in this system. If you have multiple adapters, you can try something like LookingGlass instead. In my case, I would need a single GPU that supports SRIOV, which is typically relegated to data centre products (I believe someone actually managed this with an Intel iGPU + and experimental sriov driver!).
  I'm just passing my GPU through to a virtual machine; it takes precedence over the graphical session, leverages all connected displays and relevant peripherals, and gracefully resumes back into GDM / GNOME once the VM is powered off (can do this conventionally within W10).
  I mostly followed this video:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTWf5D092VY
  key thing for AMD gfx is to set ROMBAR = 0 in virt config, this will allow you to actually get functioning display output once the VM is started up.
  As for your buying choices, consumer AMD GPUs have issues with GPU reset (unlike Intel or Nvidia). I think your experience with nvidia graphics here will be better than mine here with amd.
  Byt yeah, since you have multiple gfx adapters at your disposal, it should be possible to get started with LookingGlass (a VM in a movable, resizable window that is fully hw accelerated with shared memory). The Level1Techs forum for LG is very helpful, though I believe the creator of the video above also has a relevant guide for this.

Reinstalled Arch. I had used Arch way back in 2006, but fell out of Linux because I primarily game. Now that proton has improved so much, I dropped my windows install completely. I have tumbleweed on my desktop but decided to try a real Arch install on my laptop. I appreciate how easy tumbleweed was to create an encrypted lvm with snapper rollback, but wanted to understand it a little more instead of having a GUI do it all for me.
Last night I successfully installed Arch with an "luks on lvm" setup, and was able to successfully boot! I didn't quite get snapper working 100% either rEFInd, but I think I'm close.
I definitely appreciate how easy Linux is to install now, but it's good to know I can do it the hard way if I need to, and learn some things along the way.

Learned how to use zoxide. Makes my terminal so much friendlier

Repartitioning one of the extra disks that was still on NTFS to ext4 and updating the fstab entry accordingly.
So, nothing big.

Cleaning up the junk.
I went through a lot, and put my dotfiles in my dotfiles repo.
- Are you using stow for that?
  
  Uhm I just symlink the files hahaha
  Is there a better way? There are quite some issues where I need to copy instead of linking.

I reinstalled from scratch. Went from Xubuntu to minimal Ubuntu with KDE de. And then tried wayland again. One the one hand, gaming performance went up by a lot which was basically my main issue.
On the other side it is buggy af. The file manager fails mostly at moving files. There are random graphical glitches. Had the whole DE crash/lock up a couple times And the tabbing/tasbar handling is (still) not what I want. I also have still not found out why zfs automount does not trigger.
But at least I have something useable again!
- On the other side [Wayland] is buggy af.
  I've been having the exact opposite problem since recently coming back to Linux after a long hiatus. For me, Wayland has been flawless, while anything x11 looks like somebody ran the screen through a shredder, discarded half the strips, and smooshed the rest back together.
  I don't know how to troubleshoot that. I don't even know what to type in a search engine to get relevant results.

I tried Wayland again on a new CachyOS install and I've only had a couple minor issues so far, so I'm sticking with it this time.

my employer gave us macbook pros' to work on and it so much spyware/malware that it made my router go off like xmas lights; so i setup a linux vm using kvm/qemu on my own hardware and retired the macbook.
i now fully expect my employer to somehow force a return to the macbook; but i've already returned it to the company so they're going to have to buy me a new one when they do so.
- I'm using Asahi daily these days; it is dual-boot by nature so you can rock your Linux OS everyday but still have "a macbook" (and be working on a work machine paid by your company, as should be).
  I'd be using it more if the keyboard wasn't so shit. Battery is good, screen too, processing power... really just the keyboard is wrong, wrong and wrong. Oh, and I love the touchscreen on my other laptop.
  Did you guess my other machine is a Thinkpad? Yes it is. With a touchscreen!

I bought a sager laptop, matching the models that system76 uses. Loaded pop os and away I go.
So far, very stable. I am forced to use Nvidia performance mode if I want an external monitor which is slightly annoying, but I can reboot into normal mode when on battery.
Its the poor battery usage that irks me. The battery life gets me 90 min of use, so not great.
I got steam for some gaming, guitarix and ardour for music, libre office, IDE and git tools all good to go.
Worth it

I use dex and picom now. Every few months I learn something new about running i3wm with no DE.

I thought it was when I switched over to pipewire, but no. I've got severe audio crackling problems now and I want to go back to pulse for all it's faults.
- Supposedly, you can correct that by modifying the config. There's some kind of issue with the default settings.
  I wish I could give you more info, but somebody had the same problem, and another user said it was the default config that needed to be tweaked.
  
  Oh, it's got other issues than that, but the crackling is the most unnerving.
  Some of the audio from my Jellyfin media player (flatpak) just hasn't been playing. So I check Helvum and sometimes it just doesn't even patch it over. I got the deb of JMP installed and that seems to have made it behave, but the maintainer of JMP hasn't made that easy with all sorts of weird patches and junk.
  My only issue with pulse audio was that I had to open Pulse effects each time I restarted my computer because it wouldn't auto load the settings.

I set up my outgoing email to relay through an external server. I used to have comcast business class but when I sold my house, my only option at my condo is the comcast provided by the HOA (Comcast communities) which is residential. So lots of sites refuse to accept email send directly from my server. Comcast has a relay but it has crazy low rate limiting which is a pain when we need to send emails to all players.
- Out of curiosity, what are you using (software and hardware) for the email relay?
  
  A homebuilt rack mounted server running Fedora and sendmail. I've been using/configuring sendmail since the 80's and we didn't have fancy .mc preprocessing back then.
  The outgoing relay is a paid service by Hostinger which resells titan.email. I just set the configuration in the relay to use the same credentials I set up in my SMTP/IMAP connections in tbird.

Bundling my two sata ssds into a single zfs volume, instead of manually moving stuff around between the nvme and two sata ssds. Combined with compression, and for my code folder deduplication it also resulted in a lot more usable space.

Booting directly from UKI signed by my Secure Boot keys.

@Blaze
Cpu upgrade from r7 2700 to r7 5700X and a new noctua heat sink plus 2 noctua fans

Nix! Just being able to run nix-env -i git and get a newer, isolated, git installation on an older Debian is very nice. Makes it easy to remove.
I can also do nix-shell -p <application I want to try out> if I want to test stuff out.
I've been able to ignore the Nix language pretty well so far, so no incredibly steep learning curve quite yet. Nix OS is still too spoopy for me.

Adding a terminal multiplexer. Now I understand why UNIX is an IDE.