Documenting my switch from Windows 11 to Linux

my-linux-journey.md

Intro

After pewdiepie's video I decided that I also want to try and switch to Linux for daily driving. My usecases are basic coding, trying out bleeding edge tech, photo editing for personal use with Lightroom and Photoshop and gaming. Basic office stuff too.

I've used headless Linux for a while now with my dedicated servers and raspberry pi's over the years. Also a little bit of using desktop envionments but I don't even know which ones.

I knew that I didn't want to ditch windows 100% mostly because of Games with Anticheat that don't work on linux (yet) and Photoshop and Lightroom. So I decided to buy a secondary NVMe SSD and install linux on that. Didn't feel like dual booting (or am I dual booting?) so I just made this ssd my default boot drive in the bios. If I want to switch back to Windows I just reboot and hit F12 to change it in the boot menu.

Getting started (picking a distro)

Tried mint first. Liked it but quickly figured out that it doesn't have HDR support and I got a HDR monitor just a year ago and have had lots of fun exploring how bad content is color graded and how messy the support is. Never the less I felt like I got it working pretty well with Windows 11 auto-hdr for games that don't have native HDR support, RenoDX, liliums hdr shader for reshade and MPC-BE with RTX-HDR support for video content (more on HDR later). Apparently KDE Plasma 6+ on wayland has the best HDR support right now. Reddit told me that TUXEDO OS is great, I tried it for about 30 mins but it didn't work out for me. Not even sure what the issue was but it didn't look that great to me from the beginning. Then CachyOS catched my attention because it was on the list "Distributions featuring Plasma 6" and on distrowatch #2 at the time. And that's the distro I'm still running until now.

My problems and solutions

Webcam not loading

Issue:

My webcam would only load once. For example after a boot I use it in discord. Whenever I tried to use it in a differen application it wouldn't load. Of course I disable my webcam first in app A and only then enable it in app B, but even then it wouldn't load.

Solution:

Reload the webcam driver after disabling the webcam in app A:

sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo && sudo modprobe uvcvideo

Flickering with low fps scenes

Not a linux issue, it was my monitors bad vrr. But CachyOS had it enabled by default. After disabling not more flickering and games (tested with Far Cry 5 on Lutris) runs smoother too.

Mic volume would change all the time

Issue:

Turns out apps that use some sort of automatic gain control don't do that by processing that internally, but by chaning my systems microphone volume.

Solution:

So disabling agc in discord and in firefox solved that (mostly). Sometiems it still goes to 100% (75% should be dault), but at least it doesn't go down anymore. I was pretty sure that zapzap (whatsapp for linux) still changed my volume but I had inconsistent results trying to test that. I created this config file for wireplumber, maybe it did something:

~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/99-stop-microphone-auto-adjust.lua

table.insert (default_access.rules,{
    matches = {
        {
            { "application.process.binary", "=", "zapzap" }
        }
    },
    default_permissions = "rx",
})

OBS hotkeys not working unless focused

Solution:

Running OBS in xwayland mode instead of native wayland fixed that (source). Just add QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb to the environment variables of the .desktop shortcut.

OBS different audio track per application

Solution:

Install obs-pipewire-audio-capture plugin.

KDE tries to re-open application that are in autostart

Issue:

KDE re-opens apps that I had previously open in my last session. Generally I feel like thats a useful feature but sometimes also can be a bit much. Where I had an issue was with manually adding OBS with start parameters to the autostart to use it as a replay clips tool, KDE would try to launch this instance again and OBS would throw a error, complaining that it is already running.

Solution:

Go to System Settings -> System/Session -> Desktop Session and add obs to Ignore applications.

Secondary SATA SSD wouldn't mount automatically and ask for password when accessing

Solution:

Get the ID with sudo blkid dd the SSD to /etc/fstab:

UUID=3536f002-d296-482c-b3ad-2584ae24867f /mnt/4TB       ext4    defaults,nofail,x-systemd.device-timeout=5 0 2

Syncthing tray plasmoid not showing

Issue:

Syncthing tray was complaining that I was running it as a standalone versio and that I should rather use the plasmoid since I'm running KDE plasma. But it didn't show up for me when looking at the list of widgets.

Solution:

I should've read the installation guide better and all I had to do was install the syncthingtray-qt6 package from aur.

AirPods would go into hands-free/headset mode

Issue:

My AirPods would sometimes connect in hands-free/headset mode which causes the output to sound terrible, with bad quality and cracking sounds. Mostly happened when restarting the system while the airpods where connected.

Solution:

Add Disable=Handsfree to the [General] section in /etc/bluetooth/main.conf.

Gamescope makes games freeze seconds after launching

Issue:

To try out HDR I need to use gamescope to make the games run in HDR but whatever I tried my games would freeze seconds after launching or whenever I tried to press a button.

Solution:

Setting the envrionmental variable VKD3D_DISABLE_EXTENSIONS=VK_KHR_present_wait fixed the issue.