Linux Madness

My sound card died this week. I didn't mind. A year ago I assumed the inteference coming from my speakers was from my motherboard's on-board sound so I bought a PCI one, avoiding an external one so that I don't have to deal with more cabling.

When I switched from Windows to Linux as my main operating system, the main issue I had was with drivers. Sound (Asus), Wi-Fi (Broadcom) and Video (Nvidia). They're all propertietory and Linux support is abysmal thanks to various free versus proprietary conflicts in interest.

I use CentOS on my servers, so I thought I'd try Fedora. But since Fedora has a Free Software policy, most of the drivers weren't officially supported. The sound didn't work at all. So I chose Linux Mint which came with everything out of the box.

After a few months, I noticed my speakers were still picking up random radio stations every now and then so I bought new ones. Problem solved. I didn't notice a difference in sound quality either with the sound card. So it was all a waste of time.

It seems since then Fedora 30 has greatly improved its support. After the sound card died and with the issues I've been having since last week, I gave Fedora another chance. This time, everything worked -- except the WiFi, so I switched over to my old PowerLAN, which now works because I relocated my router to a different room. Though, I'm not sure if the PowerLAN or Fedora is the cause of the random lag I've getting on my network. What a mess.

On the bright side, I actually like using GNOME now. I've always been an Xfce fanboy, but I've had do deal with a ton of caveats over the last year. Firefox flickers randomly and gives me a headache. The panels go out of sync with my multi-monitor setup. Music stops playing when I lock the screen. Screen tearing everywhere with Nouveau drivers. Broken resolutions with Nvidia drivers. The list is endless.

I wonder what new issues I'll run into over the next year with Fedora...

Still better than Windows 10.

Thanks for reading.