New laptop and Silverblue update

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Figured I'd post an update on how things are going with the new laptop (HP Omnibook Ultra 14, AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 "Strix Point", for the searchers) and with Silverblue.

I managed to work around the hub issue by swapping out the fancy $300 Thunderbolt hub for a $40 USB-C hub off Amazon. This comes with limitations - you're only going to get a single 4k 60Hz external display, and limited bandwidth for anything else - but it's sufficient for my needs, and makes me regret buying the fancy hub in the first place. It seems to work 100% reliably on startup, reboot and across suspend/resume. There's still clearly something wrong with Thunderbolt handling in the kernel, but it's not my problem any more.

The poor performance of some sites in Firefox turned out to be tied to the hanging problem - I'd disabled graphics acceleration in Firefox, which helped with the hanging, but was causing the appalling performance on Google sites and others. I've now cargo-culted a set of kernel args - amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x800 amdgpu.lockup_timeout=100000 drm.vblankoffdelay=0 - which seem to be helping; I turned graphics acceleration back on in Firefox and it hasn't started hanging again. At least, I haven't had random hangs for the last few days, and this morning I played a video on youtube and the system has not hung since then. I've no idea how bad they are for battery life, but hey, they seem to be keeping things stable. So, the system is pretty workable at this point. I've been using it full-time, haven't had to go back to the old one.

I'm also feeling better about Silverblue as a main OS this time. A lot of things seem to have got better. The toolbox container experience is pretty smooth now. I managed to get adb working inside a container by putting these udev rules in /etc/udev/rules.d. It seems like I have to kill and re-start the adb server any time the phone disconnects or reboots - usually adb would keep seeing the phone just fine across those events - but it's a minor inconvenience. I had to print something yesterday, was worried for a moment that I'd have to figure out how to get hp-setup to do its thing, but then...Silverblue saw my ancient HP printer on the network, let me print to it, and it worked, all without any manual setup at all. It seems to be working over IPP, but I'm a bit surprised, as the printer is from 2010 or 2011 and I don't think it worked before. But I'm not complaining!

I haven't had any real issues with app availability so far. All the desktop apps I need to use are available as flatpaks, and the toolbox container handles CLI stuff. I'm running Firefox (baked-in version), Evolution, gedit, ptyxis (built-in), liferea, nheko, slack and vesktop (for discord) without any trouble. LibreOffice and GIMP flatpaks also work fine. Everything's really been pretty smooth.

I do have a couple of tweaks in my bashrc (I put them in a file in ~/.bashrc.d, which is a neat invention) that other Atomic users might find useful...

if [ -n "$container" ]
then
  alias gedit="flatpak-spawn --host /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.gnome.gedit"
  alias xdg-open=flatpak-xdg-open
else
  alias gedit=/var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.gnome.gedit
fi

the gedit aliases let me do gedit somefile either inside or outside a container, and the file just opens in my existing gedit instance. Can't really live without that. You can adapt it for anything that's a flatpak app on the host. The xdg-open alias within containers similar makes xdg-open somefile within the container do the same as it would outside the container.

So it's still early days, but I'm optimistic I'll keep this setup this time. I might try rebasing to the bootc build soon.

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