💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~stack › gemlog › 2023-05-29.linux.pains.gmi captured on 2023-06-14 at 14:13:16. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Just when I start thinking that Linux is getting close to perfect, I get a dose of reality. But somehow I always think it will be different this time.
I had to switch to another machine, largely because I didn't feel like lugging my laptop to NYC yet again. I have an ancient laptop here, with an i7-3632QM, a decade-old yet totally adequate processor. I was planning to give it to my father-in-law, and loaded Zorin OS because it looks close enough to Windows. But then I didn't, because he would just have his friend load pirated Windows on it and accumulate viruses, games, and porn and complain that it doesn't work right all the time.
So I plugged it into my 2560x1440 monitor, and it didn't like it. Rather than screwing around with Zorin, I put my go-to Xubuntu on it (losing a bunch of important files in the process) and it still didn't like my monitor. Screwing around with modelines and X I managed to get it to work, albeit at 30Hz. The graphics subsystem on this machine is pretty inferior.
Next: install dwm, as I am now a total convert -- I don't ever want to see a 'desktop' again, for however long I have left to live. But now dwm doesn't set the proper resolution and looks nice and fuzzy in what looks like 1/4 of the native monitor rez, maybe 1280x720... And there is no good way to set it, because if I force the proper resolution with xrandr' before starting dwm, the resolution is correct, but now dwm still thinks the screen bounds are 1280x720, and limits itself to the upper-left quadrant.
Torturous attempts to fix it follow. I found the place where it gets the screen width and height, and forced it to 2560 and 1440, but still no luck. Eventually I tracked it down to Xinerama, which ArchWiki describes as 'the old way of doing genuine multihead X'. Sigh. Undefining XINERAMA makes my setup work. Good enough for now.
Well, Linux works fine if you have a day to waste to solve a problem that is not a problem on another machine.
Notably, I almost gave up on Ubuntu and installed Arch, as it seems more aligned with my current brainus orientation -- that is, I am spending more time dicking around than doing anything useful. I don't even remember what it was that I was trying to do anyway. Oh, well, I think my vim config needs some tweaking.