There have been a few updates to the software I'm running on my personal machines over the last few months that I thought I should cover. I realized the last time I wrote about my DEs and stuff I said I was testing Hyprland.

Portable PC

I finally replaced my 2016 Dell XPS laptop with a Surface Pro 7 that was laying around in my partner's house. So yay, from 2016 tech to 2019 tech for my portable PC.

I immediately installed CachyOS on it, which had my XPS running smooth as butter. I switched to the surface anyways because the XPS does not have USB-C and has a proprietary charging port that is just one more power brick to travel with.

CachyOS on the Surface has been... fine. The touch screen does not work. I tried installing the Surface Kernel but ran into an apparently common issue where MOK Manager simply never appears during reboot so that the kernel secure boot keys can be signed. The forum solutions suggest booting from a Linux Mint ISO but those don't work because I'd have to turn off secure boot to use the Mint ISO anyways. Weird and frustrating, so I left it.

I run Niri WM on it, which if you ask me is really really well suited to laptops, since there's not a lot of real estate for a typical tiling manager, and it doesn't chug GPU memory like Hyrpland does.

I've had other annoying issues with Hyprland on my main Desktop PC actually...

Desktop Workstation

I fully switched back to Gnome on my Fedora workstation PC. I was fairly happy with Hyprland for a few weeks until one day I tried to set OBS back up and my logitech webcam for video capture.

Holy fuck is it completely broken. Maybe on Arch, with the ability to reference the wiki steps, I'd have solved the issue. Alas, on Fedora I did not manage to. Gnome is old reliable in this case, and I'd rather spend my time editing my footage than hacking up a solution to simply be able to capture my own screen.

As soon as I logged back into Gnome and removed Hypr packages, OBS booted right up in an XWayland session, showed me my screens, and my webcam was in full resolution and FPS without the weird FPS mismatch I seemed to permanently have on Hyprland.

/shrug IDFK but I am just sticking to what works

Using Arch

Arch (CachyOS in my case) has honestly been nice to work with despite the fucked issues with the Surface Kernel.

Having well-written and explicit guides for almost everything has been really nice and now I'm less pissed when I get threads that end in "RTFM" with a documentation link attached. No real complaints about Arch, but my use case - a laptop that plays youtube and writes blog posts - is so low stakes I'm unlikely to get tilted when something isn't working perfectly and takes some tinkering.

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