just a couple of years… yeah…

Switch pro worked without any tweaks as well.

I use kde6+Wayland. I do like the simplicity of Cinnamon, but it runs games slower than kde, even though mangohud claims they run at the same speed. For example, in Cinnamon it’ll say 60fps when it’s clearly in the 30s-40s, and kde actually runs the same thing at 60fps. This is with every tweak i could find, and yes, including turning on the setting to turn off compositing during games.

Kde6 is still quite buggy at times, but I’m really enjoying Wayland’s smoother general behavior over x11, even with x11 stuff like wine/proton. This is on arch + AMD rx 6600 xt. I used old gnome 2, then mate, then Cinnamon for years, but if KDE can clean itself up a little bit (no judgment tho, i get it) it may be my permanent DE. Generally when i go to report a bug, it’s already reported by someone else…

I find it funny, actually. For years, I used DOS, exclusively command line-based, on a 286 and when I got a new 486 computer in the early 90s I was so excited to get Windows 3.1 on it. Decades later, I find myself hating Windows and going back to Linux and often a command line. As far as I’m concerned, the closest thing to the last usable version of Windows was 7, and it still kinda sucked.

searxng is awesome. Meta search of as many or as few engines as you want with no bullshit.

I say this a lot, but “nomacs” image viewer/editor. I take a lot of time lapse videos and I have directories of like, 50000 identically-sized images each on a smb server over gigabit ethernet and nomacs can open from a directory and quickly cycle through the photos using the arrow keys, without resetting the current pan/zoom setting (important for me), without any trouble. It takes about as long to open the directory of photos as it takes for my samba client to download the directory data.

It also has a lot of cool little quality of life features, including lots of shortcut keys for overlaying metadata and such. It has basic image editing capability as well. The only other image viewer I use is digikam, which is more for organizing personal photos. Otherwise it’s all nomacs, baby.

Less relaxing if you know that it has actual goals. There’s no actual repercussions if you fail, you just don’t get patted on the back as much. If you have that perfectionistic, completionist attitude, there’s still a tiny bit of stress. I wish the game had 0 expectations, but it’s still mostly relaxing.

Made a script/cron job to auto dl new videos from my favorite channels with ytdlp and then they are hosted through jellyfin. Archived forever, ad free, accessible to me from anywhere.

I would argue that MS Office feels like it’s from the last century as well. Even the newest versions of it feel like it was made by people who have never had to use it.

Yeah I played S&M and Full Throttle probably once every couple months when I was a kid… how else can you recite every scene from the entire game?

I mainly use kdenlive, but blender has some advanced filters and features that kdenlive doesn’t yet, so I have to use both.

Weird… yt-dlp -f “ba” url

Never need to use one of those horrible malware laden download sites again…

nomacs

Portal basically is an interface/backend for flatpaks to interface with toolkits & DEs. If you don’t use flatpak, xdg-desktop-portal and associated backends should be removable. Even if you do, try removing the gtk and gnome backends w/apt. Hopefully it won’t try to remove a ton of stuff due to dependencies. Then, reboot and see if the slow loading problem goes away. If it does, you can try re-adding one or the other and see if it comes back.

Does logging in take forever as well?

Also after some cursory research, some people have had problems with portal on Mint after updates as well, just like on Arch. So… definitely try it.

Random shot, because it’s probably not an issue on Mint like it was on Arch a few months ago, but xdg-desktop-portal problems can cause apps to take forever to load, but run fine once loaded.

edit: Try removing xdg-desktop-portal-gtk and/or xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

Also the Bip cannot spy on you unless you install the official app. It’s limited to its interactions with apps over bluetooth, and I just use Gadgetbridge.

According to the wiki, only one firmware is supported, and it’s early support with missing features. The wiki may be outdated, though.

What Android software could you use for managing it? Gadgetbridge seems to not have fully-developed support for it, even with their preferred firmware.

I’m using Gadgetbridge with a hacked Amazfit Bip and I’m pretty happy. I like the multicolor TFT LCD w/no default backlight on the Bip, which is very readable in bright light and only requires a quick button press to get the backlight on in the dark, or you can waste more battery life and have it turn on when you turn it towards yourself. It’s also got built-in GPS/workout tracking (you have to manually flash the A-GPS data occasionally…), the ability to load little open source apps, sleep tracking, heart rate tracking, notifications, custom watchfaces, etc which I’m sure the Pinetime has most of. The battery also lasts ages since it uses such a low-power LCD.

I’m not saying the Pinetime isn’t good, but decent alternatives exist. I would love a truly open-source smart watch, but maybe when the project is slightly more mature. I guess I could always get one and contribute to it… $30 is really not much. I’ll definitely try it if my Bip breaks.

Have you tried a running a different distro live f/usb or something like that? Doesn’t seem likely that it would help, but who knows…

It’s unlikely the kernel or other low-level code is the problem on 10 year old Intel hardware, though. I’ve run numerous distros on numerous different machines, many of which were Intel-based, over the last couple decades, and never had this kind of basic, low-level problem with SATA before without it being the cable or controller. Oh, I just remembered: check the PSU as well if you can. A faulty PSU could have a bad rail or wire or something that leads to these problems. If you have a known-good one lying around, depending on the motherboard, you could try temporarily hooking it up to the board and drive and see if it changes anything.

To eliminate Linux as a potential culprit, you could try to install Windows (7, 8, 10, whatever) and see if it exhibits similar problems.

Can you be more specific when you say “plays videos”?

Like in vlc, or YouTube, or something else? What videos? Like, 4k hevc videos, or literally anything?