I left 10 years ago and decided to come back to see if things have improved.

It’s 90% there, but there are still too many bugs and quirks that think I I’m going to go back to Windows.

I started my reintroduction to Linux using Mint. Mint is pretty good, but the UX design was terrible and the “start menu” would lose its relative aspect ratio and my 4k monitor would display a 400x200 pixel start menu. Also, when trying to install apps using flatpak, the results was convoluted. I am trying to install tailscale. Why are there so many results? Which one do I need? Maybe this one?.. Nope, not that. How do I uninstall it? Installing apps was a chore and I couldn’t get anything to run correctly.

Switched over to Pop OS which is what I’m using to post this. Oh man, its so much better than Mint. Apps install like I expect from a Windows machine and uninstall the same way. Just 2 options for Tailscale with descriptions on which one fits me better.

But there are so many quirks. The multitouch trackpad is great. The 4 finger workspace swap is amazing. 2 finger “back” button works great too. Except it doesn’t translate to anything else. Firefox/Chome/Edge doesn’t recognize the back gestures. So, I spent 30 minutes looking for a solution which led me to touchegg, which is available in the Pop Store. But after trying to install it, it freezes my computer. No worries, try again. Freeze again. Arg… that’s annoying. Whatever, my mouse back button works. I’ll live without the touchpad feature.

Install all my productivity programs (zoom, slack, office, etc) for some reason it takes forever to install these and there is a constant lag between installs that persists across all apps. Where is the progress on all the apps I selected to install? Why must I research the app to see if its done or frozen. Whatever, I only need to do this once.

I start working on my new system and I don’t really notice much of a difference between working on my Win11 machine vs Pop OS since most of my work is on a browser. After a few hours of working, I walk away for a few hours. I come back and the system is sleeping. I push the keyboard and mouse to wake it up and it’s not waking up. The power button doesn’t work either. I hard reset the system and lose some work that wasn’t on the browser. I’m super annoyed now. I spend the next hour trying to figure out how to fix my sleep issue and have yet to figure it out.

I’m running these OSs on a Dell Precision i7 with an NVIDIA dedicated card and 32gb of ram. Should I give up or is there another distro that is more turnkey?

  • angel@iusearchlinux.fyi
    6·
    8 months ago

    Swap is only required if you want to hibernate your system, it’s the linux equivalent of hiberfil.sys on windows. When hibernating, the kernel freezes all processes and writes the contents of the RAM to swap (usually a separate partition on the disk), where it can be restored from on the next boot. Since you have issues with sleep/suspend, adding swap won’t help you here, and I also assume PopOS configures swap automatically during the install process anyway. (Also, swap is used as additional memoty in case the RAM is full, so it also functions as the pagefile.sys equivalent.)

    Anyway, suspend/sleep may fail due to various reasons. It doesn’t work on my desktop (same symptoms you also have), but works fine on my laptop. The command you executed (sudo kernelstub …) adds a kernel parameter to your bootloader, that advises your kernel to use S3 sleep instead of modern standby (S2Idle), see this wiki article for the differences: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate

    Since the kernel is only loaded when you start the PC, my question is: Did you restart your PC after running the command? Check via cat /proc/cmdline, whether the parameter is present. You can also configure this while the system is running via echo deep > /sys/power/mem_sleep (needs to be run as root, i.e. login as root via sudo -i before running it). See also: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate#Changing_suspend_method

    If you use a desktop PC I would honestly just disable automatic suspend via the PopOS system settings. If you use a laptop on the other hand, I can understand why you would want sleep to work. You can try reading the Arch Wiki article I linked, it contains a lot of information regarding sleep, but keep in mind that the instructions there are for Arch Linux, not for PopOS, so if the Arch Wiki advises you to change something, you’d have to look up the PopOS way of doing that. Unfortunately I don’t have any further hints I could give you, but I hope this information at least helped you to understand some of the terminology. Best of luck!

    • T (they/she)@beehaw.org
      2·
      8 months ago

      This was very informative. I am not very knowledgeable so I just assumed it might be related to swap (since I had this issue before configuring it and never again afterwards).

      I assumed sleep/suspend would work kind of the same as hibernate. Thank you for your knowledge!