pipewire was the smoothest transition ive ever experienced in linux, and fixed most of my grief with the audio subsystem. mint always takes its sweet time and i feel like this should have happened much sooner, but better late than never.
Nice! The outdated kernel was one of the main reasons why I never recommended using Mint. Now, if they can do something about their other outdated packages like Mesa - and switch to Wayland - I’d be happy to recommend Mint.
Running recent AMD hardware and gaming. I have a ThinkPad Z13 with a Zen 3+ APU, a performance-oriented homelab machine with a recent Zen 4 APU, and a Zen 2 gaming desktop with a recent AMD GPU.
For the laptop, my main concerns are battery life, desktop responsiveness and gaming performance. As you may or may not be aware, the AMD space has seen a flurry of development activity these past couple of years thanks to Valve and the Steam Deck. There have been several improvements in the power management aspect in recent kernels, specifically the AMD p-state EPP driver. For desktop responsiveness, the new EEVDF scheduler has been a groundbreaking improvement over the old CFS scheduler. Finally, for gaming, there have been tons of performance improvements and bug fixes in the Mesa and Vulkan drivers, and as a laptop gamer I always aim to squeeze every bit of FPS I can get out of it. For some games, a recent Mesa makes a huge difference.
I also appreciate the improvements to the in-kernel NTFS3 driver since kernel 6.2 (where some important mount options were added) and most recently (tail end of 6.7) a bunch of bug fixes were also merged. I use an NTFS-formatted external drive for archival and file sharing between different machines (I also use macOS and Windows, hence why I went with NTFS), so any improvements to the NTFS3 driver is something I look forward to.
Next is my homelab setup, it’s recent bleeding edge AMD hardware which runs a ton of VMs (Openshift container platform, Docker, Postgres and a bunch of web apps). When I’m working on it, I also use it for dev stuff and some work stuff - whilst all the VMs and containers are running in the background. So once again, I’m looking for stuff like EEVDF for desktop responsiveness, but also improvements to KVM or virtualisation performance in general. I’m also really excited for the upcoming kernel 6.9, because of the KSMBD and bcachefs improvements - particularly the latter, since I intended to evaluate a tiered storage setup using bcachefs, and if it’s any good, I’ll make the switch from btrfs.
Finally, for my gaming PC - obviously I’m always after the latest Mesa and Vulkan improvements, as well as overall desktop responsiveness and performance. In addition, I also care about things like VRR and HDR support, and all the Wayland-related improvements across the spectrum. All of which have seen vast improvements in recent times.
I mainly run Arch (with Cachy repos), which allows me to use optimised x86-64-v3/v4 packages for the best performance, as well as special AMD-GPU optimised Mesa/vulkan/vdpau/vaapi drivers which is available only for Arch (as far as I’m aware; but maybe there’s a PPA for *buntu as well?). In any case, with Arch I’m able to easily fine-tune and get the most out of my systems.
So there you go, this is why I chase after recent packages and why Mint isn’t suitable for me. I know if you wanted to, Mint users could subscribe to PPAs like Oibaf or something, or manually install recent kernels, but then you’d break the system and that defeats the whole point of Mint’s focus on stability. On the other hand, I don’t mind recommending it for someone who’s main use case is primarily home-office/web browsing etc and they have an older system. But for power users, gamers, or those who have recent hardware, I definitely cannot recommend Mint in good faith.
I’ll start using Mint… heck, any version of Linux… as soon as they introduce a proper UI for a plethora of system settings. If I ever have to use a command line for anything but THE most esoteric, potentially system-damaging scenarios, the O/s has failed in my book. (Windows user since 3.1, never lasted more than a day with Linux)
If I ever have to use a command line for anything but THE most esoteric, potentially system-damaging scenarios
But you don’t have to though, at least if you’re running a sensible distro and have Linux-friendly hardware. My elderly parents for instance have been running Linux for over a decade now (Xubuntu first, now Zorin) - on bog standard Dell machines - and never once had to touch the command-line. I think I intervened a couple of times a maybe 4 or 5+ years ago, but haven’t had to any major tech support or CLI intervention in the few years.
Linux has come a long way. If you’ve got compatible hardware and don’t have any specific proprietary sofeare requirements (like Adobe etc), then I’d recommend giving it a try. If you’re open-minded that is.
They are confusing, but I can at least find them eventually. I can’t remember exactly what it was that the problem was with my last Linux install… I think my secondary monitor was stuck at 640x480 resolution or something, and I couldn’t find a way to fix it that didn’t involve the command line
yeah it worked for most people back then as well, not well as today, and it has been my to tool for audio before the 1.0 release they fixed a lot of issues, and part of the Linux DE Stack had to make a lot of changes as well, the core for Linux Mint is older then 2 years.
Fedora is a Developers OS after all, it would need to pull stuff like that in before most do.
I no longer use Linux Mint, but I really enjoyed the decade I spent on it. The kernel change seems like a good move considering Mint is targeted towards desktop users.
Haha Mint was my first distro! I wiped Windows 7 and installed Mint, then quickly learned that a tarball is in fact more work than an exe. Good times and a great learning experience! Back then it was the only thing not slow, ugly, or wildly unfamiliar.
In my experience, it probably will. I've learned to just leave stuff alone and let the distro people handle it all. They know their own distro way better than me.
There’s a compability layer, generally called pipewire-pulse. I think it’s not a one-for-one copy, but it works great for desktop applications that expect pulse.
Some things that previously were pulseaudio modules, like rtp and raop (airplay), have been reimplemented as native pipewire modules, I believe.
More complicated setups I can’t personally speak to, but since pipewire is also catered towards professional audio workflows (as opposed to just desktop audio), you should at least be able to replicate what you have now.
And, as others have already pointed out, pulseeffects has been long dead, and now lives on as easyeffects.
Man just when audio in Linux got decently stable and functional, now we have to switch to some new shit. I run Ubuntu 23.10 that has pipewire and mostly it works but then sometimes it starts crackling, audio turns on and off, skipping, or random muting.
I’m getting so fucking fed up with these stupid Linux desktop pre-alpha software that take a decade to stabilize and by then we’re off to the brand new thing that barely functions.
In my experience, pipewire is leagues ahead of pulseaudio and just works. All the issues I had with pulseaudio are resolved with pipewire and it sounds better as well with the default settings.
Most people have had a very smooth transition over to Pipewire. I have 4 Arch machines and Pipewire has been flawless. I am even using one machine for pro-audio usecases (REAPER, Ardour).
I switched over to pipewire for my audio nearly 2 years a go and had 0 problems migrating from pluse to pipewire in Arch btw. You’ll be running an even newer version so it will be just be a drop in replacement and the worst you’ll have to do is restart the pipewire service when you install it or just reboot.
That’s something i’ve been occasionally experiencing with my Amerano usb as well. Though it’s a kernel related problem, because switching to pulse does not solve it, booting up a 18Lts iso does.
In fact it’s a bit better on pipewire and you can also experiment with a low latency kernel.
This is why I’m no longer upgrading to non-LTS releases. They add the new stuff in those, the good souls that use them test it and by the time it gets to the LTS, things generally work fine. I think PipeWire will replace PulseAudio in 24.04. It’s had a good run while it lasted. 15 years of mainstream use. ☺️👏
LMDE is already on pipewire as far as I can tell. I have a process running by that name, as well as one called pipewire-pulse which I assume is providing some or all of the old pulseaudio functionality for whatever might be expecting it.
No problems I'm aware of. I thought I was having problems early last month, but that turned out to be hardware failure.
Sure, you still can customize the kernel, it’s just not the same default kernel for LMDE. Kernels move differently in Debian but you can always install something like the Liquorix kernel if you need the newest, and Ubuntu still uses the HWE model IIRC.
What I mean is that it’s about the easiest package for the Mint team to package a custom version of. No dependencies to worry about. Or they can pull the HWE from Ubuntu and ship it with LMDE.
I don’t think that’s a good idea. Moreover, it would defeat the purpose of using Debian Stable as the base system and their magnificent team of kernel maintainers. If you want the HWE just use plain Linux Mint, if you need a current kernel, go with a rolling release distro, and if you need Debian, try Sid.
Fuckyeah. I need it, so I had to jump through a couple of hoops to get it running on LM21, but good to know that it’s default next time I need to install.
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