People used to use alsa directly (he’ll, I used to use oss directly).

When pulseaudio came along it broke a bunch of stuff and had a lot of problems but there was massive institutional pressure to adopt it because everyone wanted a unified framework.

Pipewire provides that framework and doesn’t break like pulse did. Admittedly pulse has gotten better but still sucks to interact with.

I made that statement right after suggesting the op stick with the x11 plasma branch until a maintained fork appears.

It’s not exactly a one to one comparison.

Idk how long you’ve been around linux. Theres another old timer itt who brings up some of the things i will.

People get popular support for saying Linus is a jerk. I never met the guy so idk. When I look back on decades of using the operating system with many components failing to be maintained because their creators couldn’t keep going, their lives changed or they simply lost interest, soulless grifters like poettering ruining the experience for the rest of us and the community in general struggling to stay afloat in the waves and eddies created by the motion of massive multinationals and governments swimming beneath our feet, I understand his behavior.

Wayland is another in a long line of rushed rollouts that don’t consider your use case because it’s not for you.

I truly hope someone picks up maintaining and patching plasma, but if it’s anything like past times, consider sticking with the old branch. If that seems like a dead end, maybe switch to a distribution with lts versioning.

Remember how many people stuck with alsa until pipewire came along.

The year of the linux desktop is gonna be a rough one.

The reason I asked that is 3.5” drives can’t operate from usb bus 5v like 2.5” ones can and you didnt specify.

Have you tried hot plugging the drive into the dock while it’s plugged into the computer? If the usb sata controller is slow on the uptake it might miss the relatively narrow chance to report to the pc what’s going on.

Don’t worry about damaging your drives doing that btw, it’s extremely unlikely that you have a disk whose firmware doesn’t support it and all sata ports support it electrically.

As an addendum: is the drive even good? Do you have a known functional disk to test with?

E: oh yeah, on the off chance that the disk is uninitialized get everything plugged up and do an lsblk to show the various block devices. Sometimes if I plug up a disk with no partition table or superblock or whatever gpt uses nothing happens but lsblk shows it and I can mess with it.

Do you have it plugged into the wall?

In the ops defense, they’re probably not accounting for their labor and calling anything in between cost+parts and sale price “profit”.

Historically speaking, the gnome devs have made “disabled by default” the first step towards removing a feature everyone uses.

Do journalctl and look at what’s happening.

The uhh a16 I think is four gpu card intended for remote working that would be a natural fit to this. Except that it has no outputs.

You can do what you’re asking about in x, but I don’t think in Wayland.

Making something not the default then removing it because it isn’t widely used (because it’s now disabled by default and users have to know it exists and then turn it on) is the gnome way.

Make no mistake, they’re trying to remove features they don’t like. There are lots of people involved in free software because they didn’t get to be in control of nonfree software.

Grimly: “year of the linux desktop”

You need an sd card adapter that lets you read and write the sd card from your pc to put an image the pi can boot onto the sd card.

You will need this anyway when you eventually run into the sd card having a bunch of of bad blocks or unreadable sectors.

It will work ”fine” for what you’re describing but consider getting one of those sata/m2 adapter boards so your root filesystem isn’t based on the media explicitly designed for temporarily holding information until the user can get back to a computer.

If you already have a computer, just set up a vm.

Since you dont know what’s happening you dont need to be fucking around with busybox. Boot back into your usb install environment (was it the live system or netinst?) and see how fstab looks. Pasting it would be silly but I bet you can take a picture with your phone and post it itt.

What you’re looking for is drives mounted by dynamic device identifiers as opposed to uuids.

Like the other user said, you never know how quick a drive will report itself to the uefi and drives with big cache like ssds can have hundreds of operations in their queue before “say hi to the nice motherboard”.

If it turns out that your fstab is all fucked up, use ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid to show you what th uuids are and fix your fstab on the system then reboot.

Perhaps it’s the misty air of memory, but I truly hope this new driver is as good as the 20 year old one we used to use…

Yeah I didn’t want to make the bold and refreshing assertion that arch isnt appropriate for situations where gracefully handling an old package is a requirement but that was my initial read on the situation.

I’m not as familiar with the aur as I am with apt and now dnf, is there a function to keep it from automatically installing something newer? That’s why I meant when I referred to pinning.

If arch doesn’t have version pinning then switch to a distribution that does.

Debian has version pinning, nvidia runs a third party repository and it has a pinning package you can install to get and stay with the 580 branch.

Pardon, your replies in this comm. It’s not precise language on my part but I think the meaning should be clear.

Without knowing what games you want to run or what your budget is it would be hard to give more helpful input than “anything will work, give serious consideration to not virtualizing”.

What were you looking for, models and specs?

E: you are absolutely looking for models and specs. I assumed you were just feeling around to figure stuff out because of your other posts in this comm. My apologies.

The short answer is that it doesn’t matter for the requirements you’ve given. Just to make sure I wasn’t lying when typing that I created and ran a windows 11 vm under kvm running on Debian installed on an old thinkpad from ten years ago and it ran fine. The specs were i5-3320m 16gb ram. I was able to start and run affinity and nuclear throne. I only made a 30gb qcow device for that vm so you probably don’t need a 1tb disk…

Assuming you want to run more modern games, both the recent (<5 or so years ago) intel and amd integrated graphics perform decently on 1440 and 1080 which is what a lot of laptops have for screens.

Laptops with replaceable ram are rarer than they once were, but can still be had and any laptop with ddr4 will be less expensive than one with ddr5. You don’t seem to have any use case that needs faster ram, so that’s a cost/performance tradeoff you may be willing to make.

I would personally stay away from “gaming” oriented laptops because they’re generally optimized around performance and price with build quality, durability and longevity left by the wayside.

So for specs I’d say a recent cpu with igpu (it’s hard to find one in a lap nowadays that doesn’t have the igpu!), 16gb of ddr4 if it’s upgradable and 32gb of ddr4 if it’s not and maybe 512gb of storage if it’s soldered and 256 or whatever if it’s not.

Again, if you have specific games you want to run then that changes things.

Most games run good under wine/steam. Most of the ones that don’t are using programming techniques intended to catch a vm, hypervisor or host os like anti-cheat.

So you can probably take gaming off your vm uses list. If you can’t because you wanna run games that use anti cheat as above, skip to the bottom of this reply.

I do not use affinity, but my experience with applications that have an “output” like design, modeling or productivity is that it’s often not worth it to run the under some compatibility layer or virtualization system. Every time you start that program up you need it to run so you can blast out an idea, show someone how the project is going or open something someone sent you and it’s infinitely more frustrating to have to figure out what changed since last night to make it not work or cause the magic marker brush (and only the magic marker brush!) to cause an immediate crash. This might also be a “jump to the end” scenario. Try it first and see though!

Windows 11 has relaxed requirements for its iot versions. It both loads less into cache and requires less memory in addition to opening up to CPUs as far back as third and fourth generation Intel core chips from 14 years ago. So use that version of windows for your vm and you can easily scrape by with 16gb of ram if you see yourself needing to.

Most people like amd gpus better on linux, I tend to like nvidia better at the moment. I have a lot of experience with linux and high tolerance for troubleshooting though so your mileage may vary.

This is some counterintuitive input and I will not be answering questions about it, take it or leave it: if you plan to keep your computer for a while, buy something with a cpu manufactured on the largest “process” you can reasonably accept. As chips’ features get smaller and smaller it takes less time and energy for electromigration to fundamentally change their behavior.

If you find yourself needing to run games or even software packages that care deeply about knowing they’re on bare metal windows, just dual boot. It will only take a little time to boot back and forth and the only prerequisites are learning your distros grub repair process for if windows overwrites your bootloader and keeping backups so you don’t panic which you should be doing anyway.

You can use any distribution but will most likely have to load the Broadcom wireless modules manually.

If you’re able to use a wired network connection then this is no problem and might not even be something you’re worried about.

When you do decide to get wireless running, make sure to figure out a way that’s copacetic with your chosen distributions package management so everything “just works” on a system update. If you don’t take the time to integrate third party modules into package management then system updates can unpredictably break the functionality those modules provide. You may not remember what you did, how to reproduce its effects or even that you did it in the first place, leading to some pretty unenjoyable situations.

Consider keeping macos on there and dual booting: you will need it for any firmware updates, it’s a good fall back when something breaks and when you want to sell or give away the machine you’ll use macos to get it back to good to other people. Many Intel macs can have their macos installation loaded onto a usb device and depending on how you do the bootloader and efi situation still easily start it up.