Back on Linux
I seem to have never-ending problems with my desktop PC. The other day, during a Windows update, it restarted and nothing I tried would bring it back to life. Windows was booting, but the graphics were just not loading right. I'd been planning a re-install so my files were already backed up, so I started to do a fresh install with PopOS. However, the errors continued:
- On first boot, cryptdata would not unlock. It always said I had typed in the wrong password. This meant I had to re-install without disk encryption.
- After booting and running updates, I kept finding segmentation faults (core dumped) and tabs kept crashing on firefox.
- Internal apt databases were being corrupted.
One bad RAM stick identified later, I'm back up and running. I'm toying with staying with PopOS for now but need to figure out how to get past a few minor things:
- Microsoft Teams has no idea what to do with a 4K video source, or even 1080p. It sees the device, but can't load it. If you want to get your video working on Teams, you need to run it through OBS Virtual Camera at 1280x720p - the highest that it will support. This is despite the fact it will work fine on browser. Not too happy the virtual background support isn't available either. I can fix this with OBS plugins, but not ideal.
- Linux and audio is always a little troublesome, this time I seem to be struggling with my audio mixer. I can't choose it as a mono source, only stereo. Thankfully, most video calls are mono anyway so this only affects video/screen recording.
- I'm needing to find some alternatives to TextExpander, Krisp, and setup VLC instead of RDP for remote connections.
- Docker tries to install sources for Debian Bookworm, but that release isn't supported yet with Docker (only Bullseye), so needing to edit their bash scripts to run the right release felt a little odd but worked fine after the fact. Not sure why PopOS is using this on a LTS build, when it's apparently not released yet?
It's exciting to be back on Linux again, but there's always a couple of things to work on!