Incorrect, actually. Firefox for Android uses Gecko like the desktop version, while the iOS version is stuck with WebKit.

Maybe your GPU is set to a low power mode? I wonder if something like CoreCtrl might help you.

I don’t have this problem on my Debian 12 machines, which both use this browser on XFCE, but they have AMD graphics. Then again, I don’t online game that often, but when I have, I don’t recall any problems.

Actually, with the work done on box86/box64, you might be able to get stuff running well - last I heard, they got triple A games running around 45 FPS on Asahi on Apple M1.

However, it would be totally unsupported, and who knows how well the Apple M series optimizations will work on another member of the ARM family. (Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been tried on Ampere at least once.)

Really, the biggest issue is probably power usage - I don’t know if it’s enough to increase your power bill significantly, but it would definitely consume more power than say, an i7. This is due to Altra CPUs really being more for server usage - performance per watt will likely be better overall for those kinds of workloads, but you’re probably not going to make full use of the hardware. These systems are really more of server dev kits than daily drivers.

For a desktop, I’d just recommend a PC with a high end consumer grade CPU like an i7 or Ryzen 7.

How old is your laptop? Pretty much every Windows machine I’ve ever owned after a certain year requires you to type in your Bitlocker key, including my first-gen Surface Go from 2018.

Also, you often have to manually set up encryption on most Linux installs as well - I did it for my Thinkpad. I need to do it for my desktop as well - I should probably do a reinstall, but I’m thinking of backing everything up and trying to do it in-place just for fun. On top of that, we can finally transition to btrfs.

I do use that sometimes. I was able to use it to look at similar laptop models to my Thinkpad to inform my purchase. I then uploaded a probe when I got my hands on it.

I see the need for posts with recommendations in some ways, though - neither the main site or the forum are the easiest to parse, and it doesn’t have every computer model. It is nice to have a human to guide you - it just isn’t so nice when the community starts to get cluttered with these requests.

Honestly part of it is some of these people just don’t do online research, and they might not read the community rules anyway, but it would be nice if we had an explicit rule that hardware recommendations either go to the annual post or be for very oddly specific needs.

I have been using Debian - it’s the only distro I’ve used in my 3 years of Linux as a daily driver, and I started using it in VMs instead of Ubuntu a while before that.

I also like stability and Debian’s community-oriented nature.

I am currently on Testing for my desktop, but plan to either go stable or do a reinstall when Trixie hits stable - I’m tired of rolling release and my programs changing frequently. I have really enjoyed Debian 12 + Flatpaks on my Thinkpad, so I think I will do that when summer rolls around.

Oh certainly. OP is probably doing something wrong. This was just a good excuse to vent about real problems with GTK.

On another note, I sometimes get tired of “Please recommend a good laptop” posts - they’re always just the same old advice: “I liked my Framework” or “Get a Thinkpad”.

I kind of wonder if we could just have an annual mega-post for Linux hardware that gets pinned and mentioned in the server links. For example, “(Pinned) Linux Hardware 2025”. Then we have a rule that you don’t do hardware recommendation posts unless it’s something extremely oddly specific, like “Best Linux hardware for a Pentium II build” or maybe even a question about people’s experiences with VFIO on recent motherboard.

I mean, this might be a bit more your fault in this case, but I agree with the sentiment.

They’re always changing something about the CSS sheets, and I find it a pain to develop for, granted it’s been a few years since I last touched it, and on a very hobbyist level at that. I quickly switched to Qt for that project. Now I use wxWidgets, which I guess just uses GTK, but I like that I don’t have to directly deal with GTK.

Fiddle with OpenRGB and see if it works. If it doesn’t, check if there’s any open issues for your model of card - you might be able to aid testing, and if you’re likely, someone might have already made a branch that hasn’t been merged yet. That was the case with my keyboard.

Googling it, some might also have support for using hooking to the motherboard RGB header instead of internal controls.

Tried that already.

Based on the report, this seems to be an actual bug - it was working fine for everyone before the update and only happens in the presence of FluidSynth.

Ubuntu probably hasn’t had this version of PipeWire yet.

My work around is working just fine for now, though.

I’ve done it with ffmpeg before - I think the command’s on the Arch wiki. I preserved subtitles as well. I overall remember it being pretty reasonable since I didn’t set it up to re-encode, just pass through original video.

I’ve had a very good experience with a similarly-speced AMD E16 gen 1.

The only issue I’d warn you about is the Wi-Fi modem might be a Realtek on some models. Mine came with one, and while on recent kernels, it mostly worked well out of the box, it had one issue: something went weird with ACPI when I switched between certain networks, which caused the card to crash and completely disconnect to the system unless I rebooted. I was able to find a fix by changing some options with modprobe.d, which I detail here: https://startrek.website/post/14342770 . Since that, it’s been an extremely smooth experience.

Debian is on the right track. XFCE might work - I remember it running pretty well on a laptop with 4 gigs.

Not necessarily - pavucontrol switched to GTK4, and there are a lot of other applications that I use that are on it as well. If XFCE stays on X11, I wouldn’t be able to run any application that updates to GTK5 (except through some hack like running Weston nested in X, which I used to do when I used Waydroid).

Stares in Debian Testing. (Though I use Bookworm on my laptop, probably soon to be Trixie. Nice thing about Trixie is I’ll no longer have to use the Backports kernel on my Thinkpad and can just stay on the LTS one.)

Let’s just hope XFCE can finish the transition before then. If not, I am not looking forward to having to shop for a new DE.

I think it wasn’t actually Stallman - it’s a common misattribution.

Depends on your hardware and distro. Linux-libre not be so bad assuming it’s one of those old Thinkpads. Also, though, if you’re on Debian; they deblob their kernel already and put the blobs in separate packages so they can be optionally used. Don’t install any blobs and you’re good.

I agree. The only feature where I’d say it’s weaker feature-wise is it doesn’t have any form of virtual GPU acceleration - either you deal with software rendering or have to pass through a graphics card (I’ve done it, but it’s not easy.).

Otherwise, I’d say it tends to run better than VirtualBox, though it’s been years since I last used Vbox anyhow. A plus is Virt Manager comes in most distro repos, whereas VirtualBox doesn’t. Also, it allows you to directly edit the XML, so you can do some cool stuff that would be really annoying (not impossible) to do in VirtualBox.