Splendid! I have a laptop running Arch, and while I did set that one up manually, it was a lot of work. Next time, when I do it on my gaming PC, I’m definitely using Endeavour

I hate that feeling of bouncing between things, or of just staring at my screen so much. So much. But when it happens, I am rarely able to snap out of it in the moment. It usually takes a few days and a mood change to fix it.

well, good news is: it works. Bad news is, it borks my window manager. After so many attempts, I am forced to admit defeat. So, at least a few of my different methods that I tried did work, but with that comes a problem that my window manager does not want to run on my discrete GPU and then I get a bare desktop with no panels or proper windows.

Quake does launch correctly at that point but I rather have the rest of my DE actually function, and I did figure out how to set individual applications to launch on the second GPU. I’ll consider this solved for my use case… This combo of intel onboard graphics and AMD GPU was always my headache with this machine even in the times of windows.

I tried certain iterations of those, and the usual result is that my session fails to initiate. I’m probably doing that wrong.

I was trying to figure this out until like 3AM last night. How do I set environment variables to be loaded into my X session when XFCE loads? I’m on Arch btw. I want to set DRI_PRIME=1 so that applications started from the launcher actually use the discrete graphics card by default. Right now it only works like that if I launch from the terminal.

I tried multiple potential config files to put it at, and the one time it actually worked, I lost my window manager… The other times, the desktop environment didnt even load or start the session. Undid everything and decided to come back later.

Ah that’s great, I’m literally setting up my own XFCE today after a couple of adventures trying out other potential interfaces and ripping out all the traces of the original KDE Plasma that I had before on my Arch setup. That took quite a bit of work and now I have to re-theme everything, including SDDM!

I am absolutely stealing a few things from your config, like the themes and icons.

Yeah I checked it out, it was extremely lightweight, but I didn’t really like how it looked. I know it could be customized but if I was going to take that effort I might as well do it on an Openbox setup.

I’m on XFCE now, really enjoying it, as I should have done from the beginning.

Wait. Should you really do pacman -Sy for all of those? Won’t that cause problems? Shouldn’t it just be pacman -S <packages> or go -Syu?

Alright, thanks for that. I’ll take a closer look later today when I’m at the PC, but the plan today is to try out different minimal environments to see what I like. And this time I actually remembered to make a Timeshift snapshot ahead of time (my latest one was like a couple of weeks ago)

I’ve been hearing good things about it, makes me wanna try it.

This laptop does have a dedicated GPU and was quite decent for the time. It was my only gaming machine for quite some years. Now I want to keep it alive with Linux for other general uses or work. Said dedicated GPU has been the source of many issues even when it still was under issues. The setup of Intel i5 with integrated graphics + an AMD Radeon GPU is uh… shaky under most driver circumstances and applications never know which of the two to use (usually defaulting to the wrong one)

I’ve been running Wayland to “get used to” the newer technology, and I don’t think that in itself has much impact on performance… Even if I do turn off the effects on KDE, I still feel like it’s doing way way more than I need or want it to do, and it does have a very noticeable impact on the speed things happen. Slightly slower than Cinnamon was, although both are also still way faster than it’s last Windows install… lol

Right now the main “problem” I have is that KDE is handling a few things I want it to handle, and that there’s a lot of applications I installed alongside it that I’d have to remove to swap fully to another DE. Almost makes me think it’d be easier to do another clean Arch install, but that took me almost a week to fully set up. (as I’d start to find the things that I hadn’t yet configured or installed gradually)

I did like the Openbox part of LXQt. Might re-install that.

You sure it isn’t the finance and management guys leaving at 4pm and earlier while developers are expected to work past hours and even at home?