First Hardware Casualty
An excerpt from my my diary, from the 16th of February, 2024.
You know, it’s been a few days since I’ve installed this system, and I only just now realized something: hibernation actually works on my device perfectly. I always, and I mean always, have issues with hibernation on my desktop Windows systems. Clearly it works for a lot of people— because I don’t hear about this being an issue—but for me, across multiple versions and computers, hibernation breaks. I’ve always opted to either leave my stuff running, or turn it off entirely, because I will basically have to restart the device anyway if I try to use hibernation mode. On Pop!_OS though? Oh wow, it works flawlessly, boots back up in a few seconds, and everything is just excellent; I am honestly stunned.
I figured I’d have to disable it, but it’s worked properly a few times already, and it’s just everything I could ever hope for. Also, can I talk to you about my lord and savior: integrated dark mode? Holy hell, everything is dark, and it is amazing. I was waiting for literally over a decade just for partial integration of dark mode into native Windows apps. I cannot stress enough how much I love this. Everything integrated is dark, everything I download is dark—I am in heaven.
Alright, so I downloaded OBS a couple days ago, right? There’s another bit of hardware I need to set up: my AVerMedia capture card. Let’s plug that bad boy in and set up a scene. Oh wait, nothing is detected; I suppose I need some drivers or something. Let’s do some digging! Several minutes of digging later and...well, shit. This hardware company gives no fucks about GNU/Linux systems, and also has some proprietary nonsense going on I guess. Only lead I have is a GitHub project which is years out of production, that modifies a specific no longer hosted driver, that is related, but not actually for the 4k card I purchased. Okay, let’s check the repository—oh, no releases. I guess I could follow the compilation instructions, it says it should just work. Shocker to no one, the years out of date un-compiled code failed to build, seemingly citing several unaccounted for variables (not missing dependencies).
It did say if it fails to try the Fedora branch. Alright, I’m on Ubuntu, but what the heck, ./build.sh go ahead and make my day. Oh, never mind, it already broke. I’m not in a position to resolve whatever issues these are, and a slightly less out of date fork mentioning kernel changes, makes me even more wary. I’m in way over my head here. For completion sake, I download the fork and see if it compiles, though alas, it also fails. But hey, I tried dang it, that accounts for something right? Man, this card was like $150, I guess I’ll just have to look for something that actually respects my freedom in the future. Considering it was plug and play with Windows though, I’m honestly surprised this was my first hardware casualty. More unconventional stuff I literally had to download drivers for works out of the box, but this was a bridge too far. Honestly, much better this than my audio gear; I’m happy, all things considered.
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