Dan's Blog

Just another tech blog from a Kiwi

Tag: linux

  • The continuing adventures in Linux

    Yeah, it’s been a beat. Last time, I shared that I had moved to Linux and giving it an honest go.

    Well we’re in June now and Fedora is still my primary driver.

    Has it been smooth sailing? 🤷️ Maybe not.

    When I share with others that I’m using Linux these days, and do game, they’re often of the opinion that they just want a game to “just work” and not fiddle around with settings.

    Often I laugh it off (who doesn’t play around with the settings when they launch a game on PC?). But I would be lying that every experience has been perfect.

    So after six months of Linux, what has been great and what hasn’t?

    Claude is a saviour

    Do your own research they say. The Linux community isn’t exactly the most welcoming however.

    For example, I noticed that updates weren’t auto-installing. Generally, I don’t want to worry about loading the Software app every once in a while to update everything. Just do it.

    My search for how to configure this though? “Why not go back to Windows?” was the first result.

    In comes generative AI. I set up a project in Claude to let it know my system configuration and that it should search the internet to find answers. It works great. After installing Claude Code I also created a small script that let me “ask” Claude what command I should run for certain actions.

    The use of Claude as my go-to support for any issue has been really helpful. It hasn’t been perfect, there definitely have been times where it has lead me astray. But it gets me most of the way there.

    (If you want to use Claude Desktop on Linux, there’s a community that has created the Claude Desktop for Linux app that works great, even with Cowork. The project is called “claude-desktop-debian” but it supports many distros now.)

    Steam Link is mediocre, and getting Sunshine to work took effort

    I like to game from my couch at home, so in Windows I used a mix of Sunshine and Steam to do the streaming. On Linux, Steam has some interesting quirks with Wayland that lead to me launching games only to be greeted with an error that I need to run Steam with a specific switch.

    Fine, I’ll go to Sunshine. But it took me some time to find a build of Sunshine that actually worked properly for Fedora and its security systems. Which one did I go with?On a check, it’s from the LizardBye Copr stable repo. It’s updated fairly regularly.

    Sunshine works great, especially now I have an ethernet connection.

    However there are quirks there too. For example, if I installed a game via the Heroic launcher (Control, from the Epic Game Store), and then tried to run it through Steam, it wouldn’t pick up my controller.

    Speaking of controllers, through my Apple TV I use a PlayStation 5 controller. On my PC I use an Xbox controller. The PS5 controller is set up as a touchpad device, which overrides the touchpad controls. I had to do some udev magic (thanks Claude) to disable that (although I later found that it may have just needed a long-press of the Start button, Sunshine’s docs aren’t clear).

    But even then, the PS5 controller just would not be picked up. And it turns out it’s a Heroic issue.

    At least Control is available for about NZ$6 on Steam right now. That’s five bucks. If it means I don’t have to deal with Epic Games, then that’s a win I suppose.

    Defrag? In 2026?

    One day I booted up my computer only to find that it ran sluggish. Barely anything was running. I couldn’t understand it, but I knew in the Windows days that it usually meant I was low on disk space. So I looked at the free disk space in the Files app.

    Plenty there!

    Strange. I dug some more. And it turns out it kinda was true, but also wasn’t.

    So the BTRFS file system can get to a point where it doesn’t clean up space that was taken, but is now free. This is called “rebalancing”. While everything was telling me that I had enough free space, the reality was that it was 99% taken up and the difference was that those blocks weren’t being tidied up. Here’s an example Reddit thread complaining about it.

    To fix it, just sudo dnf install btrfsmaintenance. The BtrfsSig Fedora group don’t believe it should be installed by default, but since then I haven’t had any issues.

    No Apple Music client

    There is no official Apple Music client that supports Windows, and the Windows app can only be accessed via the Microsoft Store so isn’t usable in Linux land at all.

    The good news is that there is a web version of Apple Music at music.apple.com.

    There are some downsides:

    • Any playlists that are “Smart Playlists” won’t work, and some stations. This includes your “Favourites” playlist.
    • It requires specific DRM requirements, that the mainstream browsers support, but just be wary of.

    I tried to wrap it in a PWA, and because Firefox abandoned their PWA efforts a few years ago you need to download an extension and third party app to make it work.

    There is an app called Cider that seems to be hooking in to some of the same Apple Music Web things, but in a custom UI and a paywall.

    Someone else recently created a nicer Electron-wrapped version of the main Apple Music web client, with notifications and audio pipeline integration (so you can play/pause etc via the system controls). It’s called Sidre, and it’s quite easy to install.

    Not backing down yet

    Overall, I’m still not planning to switch back to Windows any time soon, and if anything moving to Linux has been a nice little hobby so I’m not just doom scrolling on my PC.

    The progress Linux has made to be an easy to use OS is great, but there’s definitely still the edge-cases that haven’t been solved yet.

    The biggest win was upgrading from Fedora 43 to 44 with no issues. One day I might try KDE. But for now, I’ll stick to what is working for me.

  • A week with Linux

    A week with Linux

    As with every year, we hear that it’s the “Year of the Linux desktop.”

    Linux has been growing with popularity, in December breaking the 3% mark for the first time in the Steam hardware survey (it had previously languished at 1%).

    When I last tried Linux was… let’s see… 19 years ago? Definitely around my Uni days. But the primary driver for me to stick with Windows was everything “just worked.” You never had a problem with it. Right?

    However Windows 11 has just been presenting me with small cuts that are just building up to frustration,

    • I feel like I’m frequently asked to back up to OneDrive, to upgrade to Microsoft 365.
    • Whenever I start my computer I’m presented with GamePass ads on my lock screen, or being told to consider subscribing to another service.
    • I try to search my computer and goes through Bing (why?)

    (To me it’s no big deal that Copilot comes with Windows 11, as I just ignore it).

    It’s the Holiday season, and with time on my hands, I considered “Why not?” I finally dipped my toes into the Linux waters.

    What do I do with my PC anyway?

    There are really only three things I do with my PC these days.

    1. Coding – yes, I do still code from time to time, but on Windows I do it all through the Ubuntu subsystem (ie. Windows Subsystem for Linux).
    2. Gaming – I love to game and my PC is primarily for my city builder and strategy games, with the occasional full on 3D game. I do stream games from this to my Apple TV to play comfortably in the lounge, but I do have an Xbox controller to play around with.
    3. Internet bumming around – what else am I going to do with all these tabs?

    The internet has no problems running on Linux, of course. All the distros come with Firefox pre-installed, or you can have Chrome. So that is no problem.

    With my coding mostly being done in Linux anyway, even through Windows, it felt like I could just go straight to the source (or learn devcontainers at last?). Visual Studio Code is Linux friendly, and with Linux being Docker-native, I don’t need to do much to get containers or other things working.

    Gaming, however. Well that was going to be an interesting one. The Steam Deck famously runs SteamOS, a Linux distribution. Valve have also built a library/system called Proton, based on WINE, that adds a compatibility layer for Windows games. How will it fare? There’s only one way to find out.

    Flavours and Spins

    First though, which one to choose? There’s so many different variants of Linux. I had four options in mind…

    1. Linux Mint. This one is very popular with the new-to-Linux crowd, and had a moment earlier this year. It uses Cinnamon as its Desktop Environment.
    2. Bazzite. Also popular with the new-to-Linux crowd, since it prides itself on being the closest thing to SteamOS that’s not SteamOS. It’s built on top of Fedora however, and the commentary I saw around it earlier in the year was it wasn’t the best for nVidia.
    3. Ubuntu. We’ve all heard of Ubuntu, it probably powers most of the web by now. The primary distribution to reach to, making Linux easier.
    4. Fedora. Based on Red Hat, a more community oriented flavour. Probably more “pure” to the Linux and Gnome philosophy than Ubuntu.

    At first I tried Linux Mint, downloading the ISO and giving it a bit of a stretch on my machine. I gave it a partition on my primary SDD, and fired it up.

    Immediately I was presented with a very Windows-like desktop environment. Start menu (or just, Menu), in the lower left. Clock in the lower right. I was impressed that the Driver Manager tool can just find my nVidia graphics card and get it working with a couple of button clicks.

    Eventually, I felt I was in “tinker overload.” Cinnamon is based on Gnome, but has its own ideas about how it works. You can configure absolutely everything, such as have multiple panels, put the Menu where ever you want, move buttons, the lot.

    This became a bit overwhelming. Couple this with a UI that was like I was a mishmash of experiences that were between Cinnamon and Gnome, I felt like I needed something a bit more aesthetically pleasing and less configurable (I get the irony here).

    After scanning the web, and reading about distributions, I settled on Fedora. The primary reason being that I do like the Gnome experience, and has the strong backing of Red Hat.

    I stumbled on this video from YouTuber Switch and Click which explained it all, and its fate was sealed.

    However I didn’t read enough about Fedora’s philosophy on third-party or proprietary software. To get my Nvidia graphics card working, I had to find out what command I had to call. Fortunately it was straightforward, but it definitely was not a “terminal-less” experience getting started.

    Gnome

    But why am I stuck on the idea of using Gnome in the first place?

    I actually first encountered new-Gnome a number of years ago in a hostel where it was running Ubuntu on an old machine. I quite liked its charm, and felt it was trying to do something different, something new.

    KDE is unfortunately the main Desktop Environment I tried in my initial experiments when I was a teen, but did not like it. It felt like it was trying to be too much like Windows, while not solving the problems it had. Maybe, one day, I’ll try KDE Plasma.

    With one press of a keyboard key (the Windows or Super key), you are taken to the Overview, which is like a cross between MacOS’s expose, Spotlight, and dock. From here you can click on an open window, open a new app, or search from something. Amazing!

    Gnome apps are also simple, and clearly thought out. Simple options, clear screens, not trying to overwhelm you with choices.

    But if you do want to get under the hood, you can get Extension Manager. From here you can make tweaks you think are worthwhile for you. I installed the AppIndicator support, Media Controls, and Dash to Dock so that the “dock” that appears in the Overview appears on my primary screen (unless I have a maximised window).

    All in all, Gnome presents a nice middle ground with reasonable and beautiful defaults, with the option to dig deeper if you so wish.

    Gaming

    I use an Xbox One controller on my PC. On Linux I was surprised that when I started to play Forza Horizon 4 that the triggers started rumbling.

    Consider me shocked to discover a feature in a Microsoft developed device in a non-MS environment.

    To get my Xbox controller working fully, I installed xpadneo (it’s very simple to follow). I then paired my controller via Bluetooth and it rumbled awake.

    Next was to install Steam. This can be (and is preferably done through) the Software app. You might first need to enable the repository that Fedora does have set up just for Steam.

    Steam largely “just works.” From the Steam setting, you go to Compatibility to select your preferred Proton runtime (I haven’t bothered changing it). If I recall there was something else that needed enabling, but Steam is very upfront about that.

    Another thing you can turn on while in Settings is under Library enable “Show Steam Deck compatibility information in library,” as this will give you a good indicator if a game will work however in my experience even the games that don’t claim support do work well.

    Another way to see if games will work is to check out ProtonDB. Click on the profile icon in the upper right, and you can connect it to your Steam account to get a view of what apps are broken or not. It’s not the easiest to see what is broken, but there’s also a “Linux” filter in Steam that hides any game that is verified to not work (of which it was mostly some very old games or system utilities for Windows, so nothing lost here).

    It does seem that if it is popular, Proton can handle it.

    I loaded up Forza Horzion 4 as my “test” game, and came upon my first challenge – getting through the login to Xbox screen. I have a passkey, so it was trying to connect to the Windows system to work. In the end, I had to connect my Microsoft account up through Microsoft Authenticator and then I could verify my sign in through there.

    Will the experiment continue?

    So I was going to give it a week and see how I go.

    For now I’m pretty happy with how I’ve got Fedora set up and working. I have a couple of other experiments I need to try first though before I can say I’m fully going to stick with it, but for now I’m going to give it another week or two of experimenting and playing around.

    Not quite a Linux convert yet, but definitely on the cusp of it.

    Feature image: Pixabay stock image