Arrense

  • Jul 15, 2019
  • Joined Mar 2, 2019
  • 0 best answers
  • Screen tearing in firefox is resolved by enabling hardware acceleration in firefox. It's disabled by default as it causes issues in some setups. Firefox was last updated March 24th and it did not change this default setting.

    You can read about it and other solutions such as enabling Force Full Composition Pipeline in nvidia-settings here : https://discuss.getsol.us/d/146-linux-survival-guide should you find the problem hasn't been solved by Celtic magic. 😛

  • JoshStrobl As I've mentioned before, our market is not the 1% that already uses Linux (or trying to woo a few percentage of that 1%), it's the 99% that doesn't.

    Pretty canny, and I'm sure that was your vision in the Doherty days as well. I was looking to bail on M.S. forever and of all the 'flavours' I was immediately drawn to what I considered to be the feisty, visually resplendent, independent. In other words your marketing philosophy worked in my case.
    Congrats on the positive review. Someday you guys will get paid!

  • Distrowatch did a fairly comprehensive review of Solus 4 here.

    Some of their issues:

    1. Partitioning is a little awkward since we need to use a third-party tool to divide up the disk, but otherwise I found the installer to be quite friendly and easy to use.

    I agree that the mix of gparted for partitioning and the Installer for partition assignment (or using our other "disk strategies") can be awkward. In the case of gparted and requiring occasional reboots, this is actually because the kernel is still reporting the previous disk configuration to gparted, gparted floats that issue up to us. I'd like to see this get remedied in some form when we begin our installer work, which we intend on splitting up into two stages to simplify the installation process and push some of it to post-installed Solus where we have a bit more control of the environment.

    1. Something I noticed early on in my trial was the screen would automatically turn off and lock after five minutes. We can adjust the delay or disable this power saving feature in the main settings panel.

    I do agree that 5 minutes is way too short. Something like 15min OOTB would be more reasonable. Fortunately that's as easy as a gschema patch to the gnome-settings-daemon schemas.

    1. My one concern with running Solus in VirtualBox was the distribution used more of my host system's CPU. Typically, a Linux distribution sitting idle at the desktop uses around 4% of my host's CPU (according to top). Solus used three times this, idling at 12%. This did not have a significant impact on either the host or the guest system.

    Meh. I don't really care about VirtualBox performance. It's mainly targeted at distro "reviewers" like this one. Real world, bare-metal installation is what we target. I'm not saying the additional overhead is entirely acceptable, there's certainly stuff we can do along the lines of nuking tracker off the face of the Earth that'd almost guarantee to claw back CPU usage in the majority of cases.

    1. One item I found in the menu that seemed out of place was the Help program. Clicking the Help icon opens the GNOME documentation, which is sometimes helpful for dealing with a few GNOME components installed on the system, but it feels out of place (and even misleading) on the Budgie desktop since the two desktops do not share the same layout or controls.

    Unfortunately not much we can do on that front beside just not providing any YELP-based documentation to begin with, but then you'd just get errors if you click on the Help menu items for applications, and we'd have to patch every single one. I guarantee you upstream GNOME would reject documentation improvements that document how do you do x, y, and z under Budgie since they just care about GNOME Shell.

    1. I made some other observations during my time running Solus. One of them is that non-admin users cannot install software packages, perform updates or run commands through sudo. This may seem obvious, but I have run a couple of operating systems so far this year where non-privileged users could do just about anything on a system and it was refreshing to see Solus enforces users' roles.

    I didn't even really think about that. Seems kinda abnormal to allow non-admins to perform admin capabilities, surely.

    1. There were some side-effects of the dark theme though. Sometimes I had trouble telling where one window stopped and another began since the windows were all dark and did not have distinct borders. I also found the icons in some programs looked faded, as if they were disabled, though they could be clicked.

    Well, seeing as I'm going to have to fork Plata-Theme to re-introduce MATE support, this is something I can work on.

    1. This cuts down on the need for translations, but it results in more trial and error when exploring what controls do.

    I mean, a star for favoriting is pretty universal. I'm sure I could pull up dozens of Android apps and native desktop apps that use those icons if I had the time.

    1. Ideally I would have preferred one settings panel instead of two. The GNOME panel offers many more options and deals with operating system configuration while the Budgie panel deals specifically with the user interface. However, there is some overlap between the two and that sometimes meant it took longer for me to find settings I wanted to tweak. That being said, the Budgie settings panel is beautiful in its explanations and simplicity; other desktops could learn from Budgie's example.

    If it was easy, it would've been done already. But it's going to take having our own window manager, our own settings daemon that is much more comprehensive than our current one, and actually implementing a lot of the functionality GNOME Control Center does (e.g. display configuration, network management, user management, region & language (I want it to be two separate sections, your measurements and units shouldn't have to be tied to your language, some of us are multi-lingual and prefer using our native language but different units).


    Overall quite positive, which is refreshing. This user sounds like they actually get Solus and as they said:

    I was happy with my experiences with Solus 4.0 and think it will definitely appeal to new Linux users and more experienced users who want to install their system and just have it work.

    Our target is not the same people that would want to customize the hell our of their system, build loads of packages from scratch just because they can, have minimal installs, etc. Those people can install Arch or Gentoo. As I've mentioned before, our market is not the 1% that already uses Linux (or trying to woo a few percentage of that 1%), it's the 99% that doesn't.

    • Hi,

      After running TLP for 2 weeks I don't notice any improvement on battery life.

      I'm still getting only around 2 hours doing light stuff (one or two documents open in Libreoffice Writer and two or three tabs in Firefox; or watching videos using VLC).

      Since this thinkpad x250 has the smallest external battery, and both the internal and the external batteries only have around 2/3 of their original capacity, I'm thinking this might be the most I can get.

      Nonetheless, I'm going to try running Powertop instead of TLP . I want to be sure that TLP is correctly uninstalled before installing Powertop. Would a kind soul tell me how to do this?

      Is it enough to run "sudo eopkg remove tlp" (or do the same through the Software Center) and then install Powertop?

      Should I also uninstall hdparm, smartmontools, and ethtool?

      And will simply removing tlp undo all tlp configurations? It would be logical for this to be the case, but I'd rather be sure.

      This is what I did after installing TLP (at least, it's what I remember doing...):

      sudo systemctl enable tlp.service

      sudo systemctl start tlp.service

      sudo systemctl enable tlp-sleep.service

      sudo systemctl start tlp-sleep.service

      sudo systemctl mask systemd-rfkill.service

      and I installed the abovementioned packages that @abdulocracy recommended.

      On a side note, the laptop's fan has been spinning like crazy (4000 to 5000 rpm) with just the use I described above. This started around the same time that I installed TLP. I cannot fathom how these issues could be related, but can they be or is it just a weird coincidence?

      Thank you for your patience with my computer ineptitude.

    • Update #2: We're deploying an update for ferryd to reduce our worker sleep durations by changing from a semi-linear backoff to a jitter (in the milliseconds + a minimum time of a couple seconds). This should hopefully mean less wait time for workers to fetch and perform work, which may reduce worker job delays upwards of 20s for each job.

      tldr; Able to process copy source (copying an eopkg from one repo to another), re-index, and delta operations faster, which should mean faster sync times, including for this re-indexing operation we're performing now on the stable repo.

    • Update regarding the current status of the stable / shannon repository. Last night during our normal sync to the stable repository, our repository management system (ferryd) encountered an issue with generation of eopkg deltas, which are used to reduce the total download size of packages by only shipping files which have changed.

      We are currently performing re-indexing of the repository, which will resolve the issues with the deltas. Due to the size of our repository and the varying amounts of deltas which need to be generated, it may take some time for delta generation to complete. We are working on various improvements to ferryd to improve the speed of delta generation, syncing, and indexing in the future. In the meantime, we kindly ask for your patience as we work towards resolving the issue and apologize for any inconvenience.

    • We are aware of current issues with the repository and are working to get this issue resolved ASAP.

      Thank you for your patience and understanding.