Real question: Is it not possible to install KDE, even though they do not provide an ISO with it?

I’ve mostly been very satisfied with my InfinityBook 14 Gen7 that I got about 1.5 years ago. There have been some hardware issues (something wrong with the audio subboard that causes the sound from the speakers to go out once in a while, but they sent a new one that I haven’t installed yet…). The mic is also not very good (some background noise), and the speakers when they work (which is most of the time) are also quite weak. I decided to spec it out as much as possible, and it does get hot under high loads, like gaming. The case is sleek, but perhaps a little flimsy?

But mostly it works perfectly fine, and it is such a great upgrade over my old MacBook that I finally get to do stuff on my computer now, and run into very few limitations (running newer games and other GPU-intensive tasks requiring more than 4 GB VRAM are the only things). Not to mention that I’ve had very good experience with their customer service when I n00b out and can’t troubleshoot my way back.

An alternative is to keep your eggs somewhat separated so that you don’t end up in a locked in situation if their services deteriorate over the years, giving you an easier escape in that scenario.

What I really mean is: can I keep a backup of the game that I can play later without having to use their launcher?

I recently deleted my Meta-account, and I hope they will be a thing of the past in the not too distant future. Zuck can get fucked.

Brilliant list! Starred this to go through it in detail later.

EDIT: A good deal of overlap with me on the type of applications I already use, so looking forward to discovering other hidden gems I haven’t yet found.

Nice! Just switched to Wayland, and planning on playing around with Godot again this Summer :)

I got a laptop from Tuxedo 1.5 years ago when I made the switch to Linux. I have been happy with it, despite some minor issues. In my experience, they have provided great technical support when something goes wrong as well that I am unable to troubleshoot myself. I am running Tuxedo OS, and have not tried to use any other distros on this machine yet (but have done so on other).

More so I am very happy with the switch to Linux (coming from about a decade on macOS, with Windows before that).

Can you download the installers for these games?

I’ve deleted my DE a couple of times from not reading the “The following packages will be REMOVED”-list.

Hm, yeah, I am connected on 5 GHz on all my devices and it is working fine. My main VLAN runs a combination of 2.4+5 GHz.

I have some light bulbs that use Zigbee which would be the only other things running on 2.4 GHz in my home. Could it be a source of congestion, and if so, why did this not happen with the previous computer?

I checked out WiFi Analyzer. What exactly would I be looking for here?

Are there any types you could recommend? I managed to dig up one among some older stuff (my guess is that it is maybe 5-7 years old), but it performed significantly worse. It is a small dongle (like a USB Receiver) and I am sure it was quite cheap.

It’s a Minisforum UM690S. Currently I’ve turned off WiFi, and there are no other devices nearby with Bluetooth turned on. I have a laptop and phone nearby that are on WiFi.

I just tried to have a gaming session a bit closer to where I would typically sit. It would sometimes work flawlessly for a long time, but then it would enter a period of lag and missed button presses. I can’t think of whether there would’ve been anything that started interfering at the times it started lagging. The keyboard can be pretty unresponsive very close to the computer as well. This keyboard has worked perfectly with another mini-PC at my desired distance that this computer meant to replace.

I’d like to keep it neat without anything sticking out and being visible from the cupboard. None of these devices had any issue with my previous computer that was placed in the exact same manner, so I imagine it must be possible to get it working here. But could it be that the network card is simply trash and can’t output any stronger? In that case the same kind of USB BT adapter could simply be placed in the cupboard. I think that would be an acceptable backup solution if I can’t resolve it with existing hardware.

EDIT: I should add, keeping the door open does not improve anything. The cupboard is wooden.

Konsole. Never had the need to explore alternatives.

I’ve already done that after having had very slow speeds in a room far away from the WiFi hotspot. But another thing I’ve noticed is that the TxPower-setting is very low (3 dBm), which I believe was the real culprit for the slow speeds. I think the max allowed value of this is 20 (according to a line in the dmesg output), so I’ve been wondering if I could just change this to a higher value. It is now placed close to the router, so I am thinking of connecting it by cable (I just don’t have one at the moment) - maybe that could solve my other problem as well.

This is yet another problem, but do you know if the TxPower-setting could affect the Bluetooth-capabilities? I use a keyboard connected by Bluetooth. When I run the Dolphin Emulator, where I’ve set it to emulate a Bluetooth-adapter and search continuously for my Wii-remotes, it seems to interfere with the keyboard-signals.

Cheers, that’s pretty cool! I’ve looked into scrcpy before, but never got around to testing it. The way you present it is super easy, so I will definitely give this a shot!

Regarding my problem, it seems it wasn’t as fixed as I thought :p The connection issue described in the original post still comes once in a while, not sure what triggers it, but it usually resolves if I ping the device and run iptraf to monitor the traffic. Probably superstitious, seems weird to me that it should fix it. It also happened once between my laptop and my new machine, so it was not isolated to the phone after all.

I’ll look closer into this when I’m back at the computer in about an hour. In the post on the KDE forum, they seem to get an error complaining about the version though, while in my case they don’t show up at all when I attempt to pair. I’ve checked the things listed on the KDE Connect wiki, but those checks pass.

EDIT: UDP discovery was turned off on my phone, and turning it on allowed connection. All is good now!

Hehe yeah, this persisted over several days and through several reboots and on two different phones. No clue what changed as I understood iptraf to simply help me diagnose. But a run directly before and after running iptraf for the first time had different results, and now I am reproducing it every time.

Very strange - I just installed it, and as soon as I ran it, the output in Termux went from “Destionation Host Unreachable” to responses from my machine. Outbound pings from my machine also now get a response. I assume this was only supposed to help diagnose and not fix the issue? :p

KDE Connect is still acting up though, but at least they can talk to each other now! Thanks :)