It’s the end of a weekend from hell. I’ve been posting about crappy systems and it’s just not getting any better. This weekend I discovered that my problem with my real POPOS desktop is likely a bug in the AMDGPU driver that may or may not ever get fixed partly because the hardware is a cutting edge AMD Ryzen 9 and because video drivers on Linux are historically terrible and not opensource.

I did find a potential patch for my kernel that might make the problem go away. It worked for a little while until I started exercising Firefox and Chrome… then the desktop froze. One of the many times I saw this happen I happened to have an open terminal session and discovered Xorg was at over 100% CPU.

reminded me of a fork bomb

In the meantime I tried to get an OpenBSD desktop configuration working only to fail on many levels. One thing that is starting to make sense is that a simple window manager like CWM might actually make sense… I can add the features I need as I go along. There is no need for an all in one desktop experience OOTB.

• plugging my dual monitors into my ZX1 failed to drive the monitors
• even thought the ZX1 takes it’s power via USB-C connector it’s not standard and needs POWER
• finally got a working display
• CWM kinda works but there are plenty of legacy X artifacts and behaviours
• DWM kinda works but I never got an app to launch… probably missing sample configs
• played with XFCE4-mixer but it’s a pig.
• I did try to fallback to ssh -Y on my ChromeOS but that failed.

… next day

I had not finished this post but after sleeping on it overnight I decided that since I had an identical POPOS installation on an identical device I would try to move the backup to the primary. Sadly that was a fail. When I installed the Chrome browser the desktop hung and with the same errors.

SHIT !!!