True, but it also didn’t help that Microsoft set really low system specs for “Windows Vista Ready”. So we had a lot of computers with an official Vista badge that weren’t really capable of running it well.

The specs to earn that badge were 512MB of RAM and an 800MHz processor, which was absolutely not enough for it.

gtx 750

That card only supports Vulkan 1.2 in hardware and Steam’s Proton does not run well on that (it needs Vulkan 1.4), so most games crash (or have graphical issues) because the DirectX calls cannot be translated properly.

I have a 780Ti card and I used Proton-Sarek from here, it makes it work with a lot of games: https://github.com/pythonlover02/Proton-Sarek

In general, I would recommend an AMD card for Linux. Nvidia is just painful, especially older cards that aren’t well supported on Nouveau.

Those old Nvidia GTX cards also don’t support adaptive clocking, so they run on low clockspeeds by default. You might need to set the clocks manually if you want (kinda) the same performance you get on Windows.

You can list the available power states with cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pstate and then set one like this (if 0f is the one you want): echo 0f > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pstate (only if you use the nouveau driver, not the one from Nvidia)

Sometimes apps get very…wonky when moved from a monitor with a normal 100% scaling to one where it has 150% scaling or so.

I just love it when I take a screenshot on the edge of my screen with Spectacle but the “Copy to clipboard” button gets lost somewhere between two screens with different DPI.

That’s hilarious! :D A friend of mine bought a Sony Vaio laptop back then which had a 64bit CPU, but only 32bit drivers. Not even XP, only Vista, so you couldn’t even downgrade.

Deepwater Horizon sinking in the Gulf of Mexico on April 22, 2010.

It caused an equivalent oil spill of 4.9 million barrels and exposed the surrounding wildlife to toxic materials, covering thousands of animals in oil. The cleanup efforts took years.

A prime example of humans messing up this planet for their own gains.

Windows Vista also needed more than 1GB and some manufacturers still sold their subpar devices with it. Some things never change.

It seems like your LS50X neither support LDAC nor aptX for delivering low latency audio. That’s an absolute dealbreaker, sadly. :(

or fixing X11 ASAP

There was this one guy doing major work on X11, but while he did some good work he also submitted breaking changes, was then barred from submitting patches and in turn created an angry fork (XLibre) breaking even more important things (e.g. the whole Nvidia driver).

That’s why we can’t have nice things. He probably turned a lot of people away who could’ve helped the project (and it also didn’t help that he was an anti-vaxer that even pissed Linus Torvalds off with his nonsense).

Since most of the X11 devs are Wayland devs now it’s understandable they don’t want to ever go back to it anymore. They know the limitations and the horrible, ancient feature-creep of it. This talk from 2013 explains their motivations for abandoning it pretty well.

Imo the best way to maintain phpstorm is to just use the JetBrains Toolbox. It’ll install it natively and keep it updated for you.

Same here, virt-manager and qemu makes this all so easy.

I always use protontricks if I need to install something additional to a Steam game or Heroic Games manager, it can run arbitrary .exe files in a wine/proton prefix.

I can’t get the Windows based firmware updaters for my motorcycle helmet Bluetooth headset and joystick fully running under Wine/Lutris/Whatever. They both use USB and just will not connect.

They’ll probably never fully work on wine, since the USB stack is very different between the OSes. It’s a technical limitation. For Windows programs that need full USB access I was very successful using virt-manager and qemu with the guest additions. When I have Windows booted in a guest window (and in focus), I can just plug in a USB device and it gets handled by the guest.

When I installed Fedora KDE, there was a button to enable third party repos. It actually worked but it only enables NVIDIA and Steam repos so I had to go over to rpmfusion to get the ones for non-free ffmpeg.

They also still enable their own Flatpak repo even though its quality is subpar and it’s been criticized for years. It’s one major gripe I have with this distribution. Just let go of it already and use Flathub like everyone else.

Lacking Hardware support for Fingerprint readers

This annoys me as well. I rocked a ThinkPad L390 Yoga until last year. Everything worked, except the fingerprint reader. Then I got a GPD Win Max 2. Again, the fingerprint reader doesn’t work!

At least there’s an experimental driver for the GPD device, but this is just so annoying. How hard can it be for these damn FP manufacturers to write a driver?

I have a Reverb G2 and while I did get it to run (somewhat), not all games run with it and the Windows driver works much better (motion-smoothing, room tracking etc.)

VR support still seems to be pretty rough in general. But I got it to run through Envision, which does the annoying Monado setup (mostly) automatically for you.

According to the wiki, Envision does support the WiVRn interface needed for the Quest 3, so maybe that would work for you.

My HP Deskjet 1110:

The only other option the driver provides is Color or Grayscale. It’s pretty clean.

I had that problem with my Sony XM5’s, too, for a while. But it got fixed with either a kernel or software update a few months ago (running the latest Fedora here).

Bluetooth works, but latency is high for gaming.

I don’t notice any latency with my Sony XM5’s using the LDAC codec. Sometimes they don’t switch back from headset mode after taking a call, which is a bit annoying, but just one click away in the volume panel.

VR support is still pretty bad, at least for my HP Reverb G2 headset. On Windows, everything just works out of the box. Plug in the headset, start SteamVR and every single game works well.

On Linux, I have to install Envision to set-up Monado which provides the neccessary OpenXR runtime for games. But the controllers are not supported in the main Monado branch, so you’ll have to set up a specific fork of it, which is not that well documented.

It does run fine with some games, but not all of them. Half-Life: Alyx refuses to launch, for example. There doesn’t seem to be any motion smoothing, so moving your head is really rough, it almost looks like your eyes receive 24fps (even though the headset does run on 90Hz) and I get nausea after a few minutes. Tracking your surroundings also doesn’t work well, when you move around it’s all very “jumpy”.

And I wasn’t able to get the SteamVR application to run at all. I always get an error because it seems like the cameras used for motion tracking are detected as regular webcams. On some other WMR headsets a firmware update can solve that, but I already run the latest firmware on my G2.

Maybe other VR headsets work much better, but this one is in absolute alpha state and the only reason I still dual-boot into Windows. Given the fact WMR has been declared obsolete by Microsoft and removed from Windows 11 last year we might see improvements. I got my headset for 120$ which is really affordable for one that can do 2160p per eye.

To be fair, though, the very first line in the Envision Readme states:

This is still highly experimental software

So I absolutely knew what I was getting into and it’s great that it even (somewhat) works at all.

It’s pretty heavy which was weird for the first few days, but I got used to it. At first, it was a bit hard to hold that heavy brick in my hands and reach the keyboard on the bottom without losing my balance, but now I don’t have a problem with it anymore. And I notice now that I can start typing blindly more and more, which is super cool.

The OLED screen on the back is a gimmick I rarely use. But I really like that the device sits flat on a surface if you put it into the official case. There’s no camera bump tilting it at an angle, like so many modern smartphones do.

Be aware that they use old BlackBerry screens, which have been sitting in a warehouse for years. They have great resolution, but some of them started to delaminate at the edges and that looks like stains on your screen. I got lucky and my screen is pretty good, but other people got really messed up screens. Unihertz is not handling those issues well, it seems, only offering a free case or very low discounts.

And for now, there has only been one small software update. No security updates at all. They released initial software for early reviewers, then one update for the Kickstarter backers and a bugfix. That’s it.

They have promised one more major Android release, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’ll be their final update, to be honest.