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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • As of this week I’m giving Pop OS a try (coming from Windows 11) and this will be my 4th or 5th attempt at switching to Linux but I’ve always been driven off by odd issues that have no (clear) resolution or just general weirdness like bad performance even when just using a web browser. I was having a terrible time with high resource usage just sitting at the desktop, Firefox being sluggish, the entire DE freaking out for no reason, etc. and I kinda just came to accept that that’s how it is with an Nvidia card.

    I switched Pop OS to Wayland since there’s a toggle for it right on the login screen and suddenly everything is fine. Buttery smooth experience so far in terms of performance. Very little time spent playing games on it so far, but in my experience thus far it’s been better on Wayland. In X I booted up a game just to test and it put the game on a secondary monitor, upside down, and completely unresponsive to inputs. It also scrambled all of my windows and made my resolution weird and took a while for it to recover after force quitting the game.

    In Wayland, the same game booted up with no issues, Windows-like performance, and it didn’t mess up everything else. That was AimLab which I use for testing since it’s a smallish download.

    Second test was with Halo Infinite. Wouldn’t even run under X. Tried different proton versions but nothing worked. Under Wayland it booted up and ran. The campaign worked but I was having odd issues where it was kinda like having really bad ping in a multiplayer game where you rubber band backward and forward. Or like it was showing old frames mixed in with new frames. Low performance, about 55fps when under windows it’s 90-100. Still, better than X and could probably be improved with further tinkering.

    Ramble aside, it seems like Wayland with an Nvidia GPU is going well for me so far. I’m really not familiar with the technical aspects of Wayland vs X, but from an end-user perspective, I’m liking what I see so far.



  • I daily drove a Windows VM on Unraid for a solid 6 months. I did it because I’d wanted to try it out for a long time and after upgrading my server I finally had the resources to spare to try it out. Would I recommend it? Not for most people, especially if you intend to game on it. Most anything with fascistic anti-cheat will not run because it detects that it’s in a VM, so it really limits your options. Performance-wise, the games that did run ran pretty well. FO76 ran between 80-120 FPS at 4K with most settings maxed. Similar with Destiny 2. I didn’t do a lot of gaming during that time but those 2 titles were the most notable ones.

    As for regular desktop use, most of the time I didn’t even think about the fact that I was on a VM. There was a weird issue that affected only YouTube in Chrome where pages would load but most of the elements on the page would take 5-30 seconds to fully pop in. I tried it on several browsers and it had the same issue. That was really the only notable issue I had though.

    In summary, I’m glad I did it because it was something that I really wanted to try because virtualization in general I just find super interesting. If it’s something that similarly interests you a lot and you like tinkering, then go for it just to get it out of your system. I’m glad to be back on bare-metal for my daily driver PC though.

    For reference, my Unraid server consisted of a 7950x (16-core), RTX 3090 (now relocated to my daily PC), and 64GB RAM. I allocated 6 cores (isolated from the host), 24GB RAM, and the 3090 passed through to the gaming VM. Also had a USB controller passed through. For storage I used a vdisk on an NVMe drive. Intended to pass through an NVMe drive but never got around to it.


  • I’d say I still spend more time on Reddit just because there’s some niche communities there that haven’t (and probably won’t) moved to Lemmy. I have been using Lemmy more often though. I stopped using it for a couple weeks after the initial push when the blackouts started on Reddit just because of the lack of content and good mobile apps. This week I’ve used it a lot more after being pleasantly surprised at how much more activity and content there was after just a couple of weeks and now there’s a lot of great mobile apps to choose from. Went from Voyager to Memmy. Both are trying to capture the magic Apollo had (and both are doing a really good job I have to say) but it’s hard to beat the native app experience which Memmy gives. It is really cool that I can self-host Voyager though.




  • I was kinda shocked to realize this month I haven’t been shopping for headphones at all. I finally have gear that I’m really happy with and it’s stopped the little nagging voice in my head telling me there could be something better out there. Now, I’m sure there is something better out there but still I’m satisfied.

    For me it was the U12t and Diana V2 (it was half price in Abyss’ “found in warehouse” sale). Both of those couldn’t possibly sound more different to each other. But they both sound great for just about everything I listen to. The U12t is luxurious sounding, warm-leaning, detailed, stages well (for an iem) and excellent imaging. The Diana V2 is astoundingly clear and detailed, in your face vocals, energetic, fantastic imaging, not super wide sounding overall but still manages to somehow throw sounds way out into the room when a song calls for it (to the point that it’s startling sometimes). Overall very happy with what I have. About to sell off some of my other stuff I no longer use.


  • Yeah that style of harsh vocals took me a few songs to get into when I first found the band. I like that vocal style in shorter stints for like emphasis on a phrase or to add emotional weight to lyrics and such, but when it’s sustained for long periods without a lot of variance it looses some of that effect. If they threw in some lower tones it’d be cool, but overall I don’t dislike it at all. And everything else is fantastic.




  • I’m hesitant to call anything endgame, lest upgraditis bite me in the ass. But the U12t has definitely earned it’s place on my “keep forever” list and it’s the IEM I’ve been using the most. It is as I’ve seen others describe it: Excellent at almost everything but not exactly the “best” at anything. I think it has the least compromises of any IEM I’ve used thus far.

    As for LDAC vs AAC on the 5K, I actually haven’t tested that yet but I plan to. I have an Android DAP that can do LDAP but I’ve been pretty happy with AAC off my phone, which is much more easily pocketable than my DAP. When I do get around to doing a side by side comparison I’ll definitely post about it here.



  • I think this comment convinced me. Because you’re right, on Reddit there were always offshoot communities that were essentially the same exact thing just of different sizes and run by different people. There’ll probably always be the “most popular” one, and then several offshoots for the same topic but perhaps a better sense of community because it’s hundreds or thousands of users vs millions or tens of millions of users.

    Remembering the exact instance and community name combinations will take a little extra effort, but not significantly and subscribing negates that mostly.