If you read the article, it is indeed full Linux because the 4004 is running a MIPS emulator that provides the necessary memory management features. Pretty much all of the “run Linux on some old chip incapable of running Linux” projects achieve it via emulating a more featured architecture that Linux supports, not by somehow compiling Linux to natively run on a 4 bit, MMU-less architecture.

Linux on phones and tablets is a thing. Typing from my Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro running postmarketOS and LibreWolf.

How is the external display connected? I have never seen Freesync over HDMI work. The early implementations were AMD proprietary and the new ones require HDMI 2.1 which has some ridiculous bullshit about not being implemented by open source drivers. HDMI sucks, use DisplayPort if possible. If your laptop doesn’t have a DisplayPort connector, try a USB-C to DisplayPort cable, as usually the type C ports on laptops support DisplayPort alt mode.

The only instance I can see this is if a game requires a new Vulkan extension, which wouldn’t need a new kernel but would need a new Mesa version to provide that extension. For the most part, games use established and standardized APIs (OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D) to utilize the GPU and as long as the driver implements the APIs used by the game, the driver doesn’t need to continuously update in order to support game updates. On Linux, the driver doesn’t handle Direct3D anyways and an intermediate layer (DXVK or VKD3D) is used to translate Direct3D API calls into the Vulkan API. Vulkan does support extensions which are added every so often to provide new interfaces and the userspace portion of the driver (which is responsible for compiling/translating Vulkan API calls into raw GPU instructions) needs to be updated to support these, but also sometimes these extensions are optional and games can use less optimized code paths to work around missing extensions.

Pretty much all ext4 except for a few Windows installs on NTFS.

The kernel driver is a rather small piece of the overall puzzle though, itps just the pipe that GPU commands are passed through. The bulk of the GPU driver code (and the majority of its impact on performance) is in the userspace components like the shader compiler and the OpenGL/Vulkan libraries. These are closed source.

The exception to this rule is that the kernel driver is responsible for power management and controls the GPU clocks, but as part of opening up the kernel driver NVIDIA made reclocking available for the fully open driver (nouveau/nvk) to use as well which means the performance differences between the two driver stacks are now down to optimizations.

Yeah, NVIDIA will do that to you. That still sounds too low though, are you using the NVIDIA proprietary drivers? I’m not sure Fedora ships NVK yet as it is rather new, I think became mostly usable around Mesa 24.0 earlier this year.

I got a Radeon 7800XT in March and have had no significant issues with it on Arch Linux. The issues I have had were from running the bleeding-edge mesa-tkg-git drivers which are the pre-release development builds, and sometimes things break there (I had a weird issue where red and green got swapped in X11 apps). You have to go out of your way to run those drivers though, stick with the released version in your distro’s repository and you’ll be fine. I can play most games above 100Hz at decent resolution and quality. I have a 4K 144Hz monitor with Freesync but for more demanding games usually need to turn down settings a bit or use resolution upscaling like FSR. I upgraded from an Intel Arc A770 and it was a big performance increase.

AMD (or anything that uses Mesa drivers really) just works out of the box. That pain is unique to NVIDIA.

What are you running it on? I haven’t touched Apex in a while but last time I tried on Linux it was playable (this was probably on my Intel Arc A770). I’ve played BeamNG on my Steam Deck (AMD GPU) and it runs decently too.

Did you wait at all? Slow performance when you first open a game is sort of normal because of shader compilation. It’s a side effect of the translation layer used to run Direct3D games on Vulkan. Once shaders are all compiled the slowdown should go away.

The key thing to note about NVIDIA “open sourcing their driver” is that they only open sourced the kernel portion. I see no intention of opening the userspace portion. GPU drivers have multiple parts. The kernel driver is the low level interface that passes data to and from the hardware while the userspace is what actually handles converting OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, CUDA, etc. calls into GPU commands and that part is where most of the performance impact happens. NVIDIA is not open sourcing the userspace.

That’s why NVK/Nouveau are so important, because it is a fully open stack. It is also part of the Mesa project which encompasses all the open GPU drivers on Linux which makes it more integrated with the Linux graphics stack.

On AMD there is a pro driver that I think is proprietary but nobody uses it for desktop usage or gaming. You might use it if you were doing GPU compute servers on professional cards, but the open source radv driver has the best gaming performance for AMD.

On NVIDIA there is the proprietary driver that consists of out-of-tree module (both open and closed source variants depending on what GPU generation) and the proprietary userspace OpenGL/Vulkan/CUDA driver. Completely separately you have the open source Nouveau kernel and OpenGL driver and NVK Vulkan driver. The proprietary one has better performance in most cases but is broken for Overwatch 2 while NVK runs OW2 smoothly at low settings for me, and that’s my most played game.

And yeah, I am the creator of OpenRGB. Thanks!

AMD. Not even a question, really. AMD has by far the best drivers. Intel is in a reasonable second place in that they at least have open source drivers and those drivers work well, but due to their newness in the discrete GPU space I still occasionally see issues on my A770. It is solidly usable for the most part though. NVIDIA? Dead freakin last. Their proprietary driver is a mess to install and only recently is able to render anything without screen tearing and unplayable flicker. The situation is improving though thanks to NVK, an awesome third-party, reverse engineered, open source driver that is seeing rapid improvement. I can play Overwatch at 165fps on my RTX3070 laptop finally, but only at lowest settings and 50% resolution scaling (it can do the same at ultra on Windows at 100%). I am very confident we’ll see NVK improve performance though.

Maybe this explains why my webcam indicator is on when no applications are using it. It’s been confusing me for a while now. I’ve double checked anything that I expect to access it is not, and it doesn’t seem to be locked because opening it works, but it sometimes boots up woth the light on. I am using Arch with pipewire so I’ll check and see if this is what’s going on.

I second this, second disk is best as you can keep your old Windows drive in case you ever need to go back for any reason. Modern UEFI makes dual booting way easier than it used to be as the UEFI itself provides a boot menu so you don’t need to fiddle with dual booting using a bootloader like GRUB.

I’m not sure about FF specifically, but 99% of the time you’re connecting a microcontroller to a PC you’re doing so over a serial port (UART) of some sort. It may be a physical COM port or it may be a USB to serial adapter or even a purely virtual serial port over a USB connection, but the methodology is all the same. Unless you are running a serial terminal on that port (as in, a commandline on your PC served on the given /dev/ttyX interface, not a terminal emulator letting you read/write from the port), the microcontroller can’t just run scripts on the PC. Instead, you will want to write a script/program that opens the port and waits for a command to be sent from the microcontroller, then that listener script can execute whatever functionality you require. Note that only one application can have the port active at a time, so if your listener is a separate program from your event handler, you will have to close the port on the listener before running the handler, then reopen the port on the listener once the handler is done so it can start listening for the next event. Better to just make it all one program that is always running on the PC and does both listening for events and handling them so there’s only one program that needs access to the serial port.

It’s also a “don’t allow third party proprietary shit into your kernel” issue. If the driver was open source it would actually go through a public code review and the issue would be more likely to get caught. Even if it did slip through people would publically have a fix by now with all the eyes on the code. It also wouldn’t get pushed to everyone simultaneously under the control of a single company, it would get tested and packaged by distributions before making it to end users.

NVK is already usable, performancr isn’t 100% of the proprietary driver but I play Overwatch on NVK at 165FPS on my RTX3070 laptop a lot, low settings but very playable. This is with an Optimus configuration (VRR Freesync panel on AMD iGPU) in GNOME Wayland.

Even if so, it would likely still have proprietary blobs, just embedded into a ROM or flash chip on the card. Personally, I’d rather have firmware loaded at runtime over hard-coded, at least then the blob is able to be reverse engineered possibly.