This is a followup to my previous Linux post. It has been a little over two months since I last properly used Windows, and things are going reasonably well.

The biggest change since then is that I’ve now “downgraded” from openSUSE Tumbleweed to openSUSE Slowroll, which is basically monthly snapshots of Tumbleweed with minor updates and fixes in between, instead of being pure rolling release. I like it, it’s a good balance between having recent software and not downloading thousands of packages every two days.

I’ve had basically zero graphics or display issues since my last post. Wayland works fine, the RX 6700 XT is working fine, all is well. I did boot into Windows once to test one of my OpenGL projects out of curiosity - AMD’s Windows GL driver still sucks even after its recent optimisations, huh?

Filesystem hangs

It’s time for another entry in the “I had a problem, here’s how I fixed it” saga.

One issue I was having was that my system was locking up every hour, at the same time. Given it was the system locking up, dmesg felt an obvious place to check, to which there was an obvious pattern: the following line was being printed whenever my system was hanging.

BTRFS info (device nvme0n1p2): qgroup scan completed (inconsistency flag cleared)

Not only that but it was pegging a CPU core at 100% for a few seconds, causing my fan to audibly spin up, with a btrfs process showing up in the process list.

The answer is in the message, really, but it needs some background. openSUSE has a program called snapper that manages filesystem snapshots, exploiting btrfs’ subvolumes and copy-on-write properties. snapper can clean up snapshots based on their disk usage, for which it uses btrfs’s quota groups (qgroups) feature. btrfs does some sort of scan on these qgroups which is performed hourly.

The easiest solution to disable this was to just disable the qgroups for the subvolumes I had snapshots enabled for:

sudo btrfs quota disable /
sudo btrfs quota disable /home

but, naturally, now snapper can’t stop snapshots from filling up my disk. I’m not sure if there’s a method to do this without it hanging up my system every hour - perhaps somehow making the qgroup check less frequent - but I haven’t looked into that, and my snapshots are typically small enough that the count-based cleanups suffice anyway.

That audio issue

So, that audio issue I had in my previous Linux post: It either stopped, or I stopped noticing it. I tried pulling out a bunch of hardware (both internal and external) and even reinstalling the entire OS, to no avail, so it’s probably the latter. Still, it’s no longer a perceptible issue, although the error count in pw-top still goes up every now and again.

I can force Pipewire to glitch out by seeking video in Firefox and mpv. No big deal, but it’s a weird bug I guess.

I do have issues with capturing audio though, notably that it has a tendency to cut out very briefly every now and again. This is most noticeable when listening to my capture card. Occasionally it can fail to capture my mic for several seconds, but that’s rare.

The supposedly creative stuff I do every few months

I just now had an issue with OBS recording really quiet audio, even though everything sounded fine when monitoring. A reboot seems to have fixed it. OBS also seems to consistently hang upon exiting as well. This might be due to the PipeWire 1.2.0 update, I’m not sure; as of writing 1.2.1 has just been released and has some bug fixes but has not hit Slowroll yet.

I haven’t streamed since around the time I made my last post, mostly because of never feeling quite up to it. I do intend to stream tonight (the date this post goes up), but no promises… Hopefully OBS and everything else works fine if I do!

I am now confident enough in my not-touching of Windows that I cancelled my Adobe subscription.1 Kdenlive seems to be good enough for me, but it’s not without issues. Perhaps the biggest is that the effects can be slow as hell: a masked blur is horrible to do, because it’s just so slow it’s impossible to preview and edit it in anything resembling real-time. I also had an issue where an audio clip randomly switched to the wrong track from the source file after a cut. Despite that it’s good enough for most things I do, and the biggest problem I face with video editing is my laziness and lack of ideas… I’m considering doing videos on random retro tech crap though instead of/in addition to Splatoon though, but we’ll see.

I do sort of miss VEGAS Pro2 - its performance isn’t great either, but it’s better than Kdenlive, and its workflow is utterly glorious and basically engraved into the fibre of my being. It’s also available under a perpetual license, no need to subscribe, imagine that! I own VEGAS Pro 19, newer versions seem much improved but even if I was still using Windows I can’t quite justify buying them right now. Along that line I also miss using Sound Forge Pro; Audacity is decent but I miss having something that operates on audio files directly, instead of multi-track projects.

The only other thing I miss is Paint.NET - I’m making do with Krita and while it’s better in some aspects, it’s worse in the aspects I seem to use most… Krita is definitely an art-focused application with general editing features added on, which is fine, but it’s quite evident.

I could probably run all of these Windows apps in a virtual machine if I get desperate, but the lack of hardware acceleration would hurt VEGAS particularly badly.

Conclusion

Overall, there’s not a whole lot of difference between when I used Windows and now. The handful of programs I miss are tempting me back to Windows – until I remember all of Microsoft’s bullshit and then I’m deterred again. Maybe I’ll wait until the Windows 11 LTSC is released, “acquire” it, and see if I can mod the shell into being bearable… but that’s a lot of effort and I think I prefer the occasional issue I have on Linux. I also imagine Microsoft will still break shell mods with every update on LTSC, because that seems like something they’d do. Alternatively I can use 10 and pray 11 is a usable OS by the time 10 is out of support, but that’s unlikely.

  1. Also because, as you may know, Adobe sucks. Protip: you can avoid paying the Adobe cancellation fee by switching plan, then immediately cancelling your new plan. You’ll be down a few quid for a few days, but it’ll be refunded. ↩

  2. Which hasn’t been owned by Sony for eight years now. It annoys me that people still call it “Sony Vegas”… ↩