The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Paul Revere Pantry Raider]

Linux Mint is the best starter distro out there

I want to disagree, but I can't. It was the only one I didn't have to fingerfuck to get running on my 2023-era laptop (other than Void). I installed PipeWire to get rid of the shitty PulseAudio crap and everything else has just been smooth sailing since. No effort required. Sleeps correctly, runs well, has that familiar nearly-Debian flavor, and minimal effort to keep running.

If I wanted to spend my waking hours on a running distribution, it would have been Void before they kicked Juan out, and after that? Dunno, because I disagree with Alpine's politics.

Mint is just great when you want Linux, but you don't want to spend time obsessing over USE flags.

 

[Dread First]

I want to disagree, but I can't. It was the only one I didn't have to fingerfuck to get running on my 2023-era laptop (other than Void). I installed PipeWire to get rid of the shitty PulseAudio crap and everything else has just been smooth sailing since. No effort required. Sleeps correctly, runs well, has that familiar nearly-Debian flavor, and minimal effort to keep running.

If I wanted to spend my waking hours on a running distribution, it would have been Void before they kicked Juan out, and after that? Dunno, because I disagree with Alpine's politics.

Mint is just great when you want Linux, but you don't want to spend time obsessing over USE flags.

I've personally had the best results using Linux Mint MATE over the Cinnamon version. There's less QOL OOTB and slightly less intuitive GUI tools, but Mint MATE feels more "authentic" than Mint Cinnamon. There's something kinda crap and unrelaxed about how Cinnamon to this day is still categorically incomplete considering how regardless of how the Mint team, Fedora developers, or any other distro maintainers package Cinnamon, you still need to rely on GNOME applications on some measure. MATE is wholly complete unto itself by sheer virtue of forking off GNOME 2.32. Cinnamon was never a hard fork from the get-go; it was a wrapper around GNOME Shell that eventually became independent.

 

[Akerman]

I was poking around in the SteamOS source/customization files and found an interesting little sysctl tweak Valve ships:

# Prevents intentional slowdowns in case games experience split locks
# This is valid for kernels v6.0+
kernel.split_lock_mitigate = 0

From my understanding, some Windows programs love to abuse "split locks", and the kernel on Linux intentionally slow them down to protect the rest of the system. That makes sense for general computing, servers, multi-user systems, etc but for gaming, especially Windows games through Proton, the practical result can be that the game just runs terribly. Turning off mitigation does not necessarily mean split lock detection is completely gone, it just means the intentional performance punishment is disabled. Phoronix actually wrote about this a while back when God of War on Linux had insanely bad performance because of split lock mitigation: Linux Adding New Control Since Its Splitlock Detector Is Wrecking Some Steam Play Games

I have also seen reports around Street Fighter 6, and some people mention other games too. For Cyberpunk 2077, I have seen user reports claiming that this helped a lot, while for others its around the same so YMMV.

Run this to check if you have it on or off on your distro by default:

cat /proc/sys/kernel/split_lock_mitigate

If it prints 1 then mitigation is enabled. You can disable it by default like on SteamOS or manually.

 

[SchizoDaemon]

I was poking around in the SteamOS source/customization files and found an interesting little sysctl tweak Valve ships:

# Prevents intentional slowdowns in case games experience split locks
# This is valid for kernels v6.0+
kernel.split_lock_mitigate = 0

From my understanding, some Windows programs love to abuse "split locks", and the kernel on Linux intentionally slow them down to protect the rest of the system. That makes sense for general computing, servers, multi-user systems, etc but for gaming, especially Windows games through Proton, the practical result can be that the game just runs terribly. Turning off mitigation does not necessarily mean split lock detection is completely gone, it just means the intentional performance punishment is disabled. Phoronix actually wrote about this a while back when God of War on Linux had insanely bad performance because of split lock mitigation: Linux Adding New Control Since Its Splitlock Detector Is Wrecking Some Steam Play Games

I have also seen reports around Street Fighter 6, and some people mention other games too. For Cyberpunk 2077, I have seen user reports claiming that this helped a lot, while for others its around the same so YMMV.

Run this to check if you have it on or off on your distro by default:

cat /proc/sys/kernel/split_lock_mitigate

If it prints 1 then mitigation is enabled. You can disable it by default like on SteamOS or manually.

There are a lot of these small tweaks that aren't documented in one place.

The CoreCTRL stuff I mentioned a while back went from having HellDivers 2 being unplayable to being smooth as silk.

 

[Curry Teafag]

According to a bunch of redditors, only Intel 11th gen and higher are affected while 10th gen and lower, and anything AMD, are unaffected.

 

[Tap Water Enjoyer]

Speaking of system issues I've updated "org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra" (to a version from 2026-06-20) and it started crashing my PC. It would start crashing everything into read only mode after viewing a video in Brave and got me scared about potential hardware issues. I reverted to the previous version and it's fine again. If you're experiencing similar issues then this package is likely the cause.