So, the Manhattan Project started. Manhattan Project was Microsoft’s attempt at creating a set of APIs that would make the task of writing games for their platform significantly less painful. The questionable naming decision was, sadly, fully intentional: while Microsoft had most of the PC gaming on its side, the gaming industry as a whole was mostly dominated by game consoles from Japan.
WTF Microsoft.
Since you say the thing is working fine on Windows, there’s almost certainly a bug or several. I’d say probably a driver in the kernel, but could be something else. Changing distro or kernel version does sometimes help with that sort of thing, mainly because another distro may have newer or older kernels and other software, and bugs get both introduced and fixed every release.
Freezing issues can have lots reasons, including buggy apps, RAM exhaustion due to memory leaks, bugs in the graphics drivers or graphics stack more generally, various blocking I/O things taking unexpectedly long due to network issues or faulty hardware or drivers.
If you want a chance to figure this out, you probably need to run things in the terminal, like installing software updates through the apt and snap (?) cli utilities. GUIs are notoriously shit at reporting unexpected errors, whereas all sorts of programs (including GUI apps if you start them in a terminal) do regularly print warnings and error messages to stderr, which will show up in a terminal. This is because it’s easy for the programmers to do that with just single printf() (etc.) line.
For driver issues, looking at the kernel logs can sometimes show interesting things as well. I will say that, when looking at logs or terminal output, there often are warnings that are completely unrelated and/or harmless, and that’s not necessarily obvious to the user.
If this is a software issue, framework imho shouldn’t advertise their stuff being able to run Ubuntu if they cannot stay on top of issues that are happening in this configuration.
This is actual RAM used by the desktop environments that is not available for cache. That is the number he gets from top, it doesn’t include the disk cache. The DE won’t use less RAM even when Firefox needs it, because it is not cache, it cannot be dropped if needed, you just have less RAM available for you applications (or for the actual cache, for that matter).
If we assume, for a moment, that your issue was in fact related to fluidsynth, which I kinda still think it might be, because of what fuser and the logs showed, it would be a good idea to undo your module blacklist thingy and reboot.
If your slow boot issue persists, and you try to fix that tomorrow, then try looking at the bootup messages as described here:
If you reinstall pulseaudio to get back to where you were before, uninstall pipewire, those two shouldn’t be running simultaneously.
Good luck and keep me updated if you manage to fix it somehow.
Yeah I wrote that stop command wrong, it’s supposed to be systemctl --user stop pulseaudio. The relevant errors from journalctl were the “busy” errors. Are they still there? Maybe they’re old messages? You can type G to go to the end of the log.
Also, and this is probably my last suggestion, try restarting the socket with systemctl --user restart pipewire-pulse.socket. And maybe restart all the other crap as well for good measure. My theory here is that pulseaudio overwrote that socket with it’s own socket, and anything trying to play sound would be trying to connect to the nonexistent pulseaudio, and maybe restarting pipewire doesn’t actually recreate the socket, because systemd does that, but I’m not sure that’s actually how that works.
Theoretically logging out and in again should also restart all the things pipewire I think, but it’s possible that whatever is slowing down your boot is actually slowing down the login, so do at your own risk.
Yeah not sure about that. My guess is the casper-md5check is irrelevant, not sure why udev would be affected by installing/uninstalling audio stuff, and also not sure if that actually slows down your boot, my guess would be no. vboxdrv and virtualbox are probably also irrelevant.
I think I should have included systemctl --user list-units --failed previously.
Oh good. Maybe you can try restarting pipewire w/o rebooting.
First, check if pulse is running (it might be even if uninstalled), with systemctl --user list-units (search for pulse by typing /pulse) or ps -A|grep pulse and kill it with (probably) something like systemctl --user stop pulseaudio or maybe killall pulseaudio. Not sure what’s better here, but it needs to be killed if it’s running.
Then do systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber.
Oh, I’m sorry. Can you run systemd-analyze blame (and also systemd-analyze --user blame) and look for something, near the top, that took a long time? Also systemctl list-units --failed to see if something has failed to load properly.
I’m afraid to ask, and I should have thought of that, do you remember if uninstalling fluidsynth removed anything else?
Also maybe try uninstalling pulseaudio, it’s possible it’s fighting with pipewire over the device, but that’s just a guess.
Yeah actually looks like the same issue I had. Just uninstall fluidsynth with apt remove fluidsynth and (probably) reboot, and see if that fixes it.
I mean it’s definitely weird that wireplumber and pulseaudio are running simultanously, that is probably not great (or maybe it’s harmless, idk), but it’s normal when using pipewire to have wireplumber on control0.
Anyway you should try running fuser before you apply your fix.
Also I deleted my original post, because I wasn’t super happy about it, and made new one, so now there are two versions of this post. Sorry.
I mean something must have changed three days ago, kernel update maybe? You could try running a different kernel and see if this fixes it automagically.
I recently also had an issue where I could only see a dummy device, and that got me wondering. It was caused by fluidsynth hogging the audio device. So maybe could you check something? Look at the log file for pipewire (journalctl --user -u pipewire here) and do fuser -fv /dev/snd/* when it’s still in its broken state to see if (maybe) you’re misdiagnosing the problem. Because I could possibly sort of imagine that doing the force-reload and start pulseaudio dance might actually have seemingly fixed my fluidsynth issue by inadvertently making it so that pulseaudio got a hold of the audio device.
I had an issue like this recently on Debian testing and it turns out fluidsynth was hogging the sound device and so pipewire couldn’t open it. IDK why it was doing that all of a sudden. The symptom was also just having the dummy device.
I think what I did to figure this out was look at the pipewire logs and it said something to the effect that it couldn’t open the sound device because it was busy, and according to my bash history I did fuser -fv /dev/snd/* and figured out it was fluidsynth that was using it, which I then disabled or maybe uninstalled because wtf do I need midi for anyway.
Your problem may be different, but I can imagine, theoretically, that all the stuff you’re doing makes it so pulseaudio gets first dibs on the (otherwise busy) sound device and so maybe you have misdiagnosed the problem.
It’s option caps:escape_shifted_capslock I think.
You can look through /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst for all the options.
Edit: Just looked up when this was added, this is a new option from 2024:
IDK if this will work but maybe doing exec sudo -i does the trick.
Otherwise just enable the root account and log in as root. Should be passwd -u root to unlock (passwd -l root to relock), also need to set the root password using passwd root.
The file autostart.sh file needs to be executable. This might be why it’s not working.
There’s some wrong things in this article, and a thing worth mentioning.
Half-Life (and its mods like Counter-Strike) had Linux server versions, and a lot of dedicated servers ran on Linux, which I think is worth mentioning when talking about the history.
Steam wasn’t well received at first, people didn’t like that there was now this special launcher/downloader you had to use. Mind you they moved their old games onto Steam, so it’s not like you knew about this when you bought it. Also there weren’t any games on there except Half-Life and related titles, like HL mods that got their own release.
Contrary to what the article claims, MacOS does not support some outdated version of DirectX, it does not and never has supported DirectX at all. DirectX was only ever supported on Windows and XBox.
DirectX also was not well received at first. Here’s an old article from gamedev.net (2002):
Here's a bunch of things John Carmack had to say about DirectX over the years:
First, a rant by John Carmack from 1996:
John Carmack revised his opinion later. Here he is posting in 2001 about DirectX 8:
But:
By 2011 he thought Direct3D was better than OpenGL.