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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • My kids use Linux. They are 5 and 7. They do just fine. They are “normal”… as in just beginner users.

    The 5 year old only cares where Steam is, and where the games are in the menu.

    The 7 year old is a master at it all already. He’s installing Minecraft mods all the time… downloading, unzipping the mods… running java -jar XYZ from the terminal… yeah I had to show him the first time, but TBH, I didn’t show it all to him. He read up on how it works and watched YouTube videos on it.

    It’s all about what you’re used to and if you’re actually interested in learning the bits. Normal is what? Someone who treats the computer as an appliance? Yeah… with those users as long as the machine actually works… they don’t care what the underlying OS is… OSX? Windows 11? some Linux distro? It’s all the same to them. The computer is a magic machine that does things and they have no clue how or why.







  • Double-check that you have Nvidia Prime configured/selected. It’s been a while since I’ve used Mint, but… try this…

    1. Open the App menu (bottom left, same as in Windows)
    2. Type "nvidia’ and this should show you the NVIDIA X Server Settings app. Click on it to launch.
    3. Double-check that you see all the drive info, including the driver version. Close out the app of all looks “right”.
    4. In the Mint system tray (lower right), click on the Nvidia icon (if you don’t see it, open the app menu, type “startup” and make sure “Support for NVIDIA Prime” is enabled) 5. Set the profile to “Active profile” (it’s hard on battery life in this mode). This forces everything to run on the Nvidia card only…
    5. Test your games. Do they work better? If yes, you’ve found the root cause of the performance issue… if not… Hmmm, I’m not sure, then it’s time to try other things.

    My experience with this is that Nvidia Prime was not being enabled/selected when I was trying to game. If this (forcing everything to launch on Prime) works and your games are working at a more acceptable performance level, you can leave it in “Active profile” at the expense of battery life… or you can set up the On-Demand profile… or explicitly switch between Intel and Nvidia, using Intel for all non-gaming things and pop it into Nvidia when you want to game… lots of possibilities depending on how you want to use the computer. :-)

    BTW, an alternative to the systray method is simply setting the profiles right within the NVIDIA X Server Settings app (the last menu item on the left nav menu within the NVIDIA app). I just find that the systray icon is a quick/easy way, and it’s worth knowing about.



  • It’s really a YMMV thing with Nvidia on Linux. I’m running 3 computers in the house on openSUSE Tumbleweed (mine and my 2 boy’s computers). The computers all have various Nvidia cards and they all work just fine for gaming.

    The “iffy” part for Nvidia is mainly focused on the troublesome issues some people run into with kernel updates and the drivers not keeping up. This is mostly a historical thing. It’s been several years since I’ve ran into any Nvidia driver update related issues in Linux. The other major complaint about Nvidia is screen tearing… it’s occasionally ugly. It’s hard to resolve or fix,a nd in many cases it just is what it is.

    The issue you’re encountering with games running poorly on Linux Mint will probably not be resolved by distro hopping - I’m not trying to discourage some experimentation… that’s a fun/good thing :-) … but the Mvidia drivers on Mint will be the same ones you will install on Fedora, and openSUSE and and and. The very first place I’d look is at the drivers. Are you 100% certain that the proprietary Nvidia drivers are actually installed vs the default Nouveau Nvidia drivers? You’re running on a laptop… so that’s the hybrid video card thing. Are you 100% certain that the games are launching on Nvidia vs running on the default Intel? If the games run terribly… they are very very likely not using the full capability of the 2060… either because the full drivers are not installed or you’re running on the Intel by default even though the drivers were installed.


  • Generally, you use the radio network from mobile phone to cell tower, and then fibre optic to the switches. Sometimes they use microwave line of sight for surface-to-surface connections where fibre doesn’t make sense, or is unviable (terrain, distance, cost, difficulty of laying fibre, etc.). It’s possible that there could be a satellite connection in the process, but unlikely unless you’re on an airplane, a ship, etc.

    The GPS on the mobile phone definitely does use satellite (receive only though, no transmit).


  • Personal experience on my part. I deleted 13 years of contributions on Reddit. They are ALL back. My account was deleted… but every single comment (that I checked anyway) is still there. I checked after I deleted them… and they were not visible for almost 2 months after I did the pass to delete… now they’re all back.