TeaEarlGrayHot
I’m using the Surface Laptop Studio with EndeavourOS (basically arch, so I have all the latest packages)–the performance issues stem from Nvidia’s drivers, so AMD should not suffer from the same problems, although I don’t have any AMD cards to test if hotplug with monitors is functional
I have extensively used an eGPU (Razer Core X) with an Nvidia RTX 3050 for gaming under Wayland. Using X11 gave me nothing but problems, but Wayland allows for full hotplug capabilities (as long as no monitors are ever connected to the GPU).
Of course, performance is fairly bad with the official Nvidia drivers + Wayland, but it’s good enough to play The Outer Worlds and a few other single player games, which is good enough for me! I have been entirely unable to get external monitors to work with the Nvidia driver (any help would be much appreciated), although they did work (coldplug) with the Nouveau driver.
When I was using Windows, I was able to hotplug/unplug the eGPU with monitors attached, effectively turning the GPU into an external docking station–I am closely following driver improvements, as this would be great to have on Linux to get around the 2-monitor limitation of the Intel iGPU.
:3
One program that comes to mind is Protonmail Bridge. I first tried installing the RPM via Discover, and it silently failed every time. Next, installed it from the terminal and got an error about missing DejaVu fonts–no problem, I’ll just install them from here, but unfortunately I was getting the same error. I tried to “install anyway” ignoring dependencies–failed again!
Another issue trying to install the linux-surface kernel. The GUI package failed to install (again, silently), and command line packages kept failing since the linux-surface kernel was on 6.6.6 and the rolling release kernel was on 6.6.7–eventually I chrooted in from a live USB, removed the kernel, and replaced it with the linux-surface kernel, but the fact that it kept failing with a “success” message was confusing! Then I had to compile iptsd–on Arch I’d ‘pacman -S git meson ninja gcc etc.’, and searching and selecting package groups via YAST (and hoping my compilation worked) just felt clunky.
I did manage to get everything up and running eventually (save Protonmail), but at that point I’d messed up my installation to the point where I had to start over, and I just loaded up EndeavourOS instead.
I’m sure a lot of these issues stem from a lack of understanding of Tumbleweed itself, and when I get another desktop I’ll be happy to try again. I did love the setup process though–super polished KDE Plasma, and everything that was possible with the stock kernel (even autorotate!) worked out of the box!
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed–coming from Arch, it just felt so refined and ready to go right out of the box. Then I started installing programs and ran into dependency hell–now on EndeavourOS with the AUR which is great
Additionally, the combination of terminal + GUI to do things just felt wrong
Is it a test instance with fake users or something?
A test instance yes! I think the users are real people posting test stuff t
especially flickering and performance
If my experience is any indicator, your GPU is fine :(. Any chance you’re using mixed display scalings? I’ve got an RTX 3050 eGPU for my Plasma/Wayland laptop, and for the most part it actually works fairly smoothly (albeit more slowly compared to windows), but if I try to run a game at a higher resolution than my monitor (used by Plasma for mixed scaling) I get constant flashing/frame shifting, but when I drop it down to the native 1080p it starts working again
As a side note, X and eGPUs do not play well together, but Wayland is literally plug and play after installing the drivers–I can even hot plug/unplug as long as nothing’s using the GPU!
I use a Kindle Paperwhite which works well for me–colour shifting screen, USB-C charging, and incredible battery life. That being said, I have never connected it to wifi, and instead prefer to sideload books so my reading history/money are not sent to Amazon