Desktop Linux

Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour is not a demanding game in 2026. On the internal panel of this ASUS Vivobook Pro 15, it stays quiet. Plug the same laptop into an old 1080p HDMI monitor, launch the same Wine/Lutris game with no prime-run, and the chassis warms up. The fans come on. Unplug the monitor, and it cools down again. That is a bad mental model if you assume “old game = Intel GPU = cool laptop.” On a hybrid machine, who renders the frames and who owns the physical connector are two different questions. My native HDMI port is wired to NVIDIA. As long as that monitor is connected, the RTX 3050 has to stay in the display path — even when Mesa Intel Arc is doing all the actual drawing. ...

I’ve been using Linux for more than 15 years. I’ve administered servers, tuned kernels, experimented with filesystems, and read countless articles about swap, virtual memory, caching, and performance. I started with Ubuntu 4.x, spent years on Arch-based distributions, and today most of my work happens on Manjaro and Kubuntu. So I was surprised when I stumbled upon a feature that had apparently been helping my system for years without me realizing it: zswap. ...

I wanted an excuse to build a small real Linux app. Not a shell script. Not a giant desktop application. Not a kernel module. Just a focused program that talks to Linux through the interfaces the system already exposes, gives that data a shape, and presents it as something a normal desktop user can run. Desktop stutter turned out to be a good excuse. My own machine is not slow: modern CPU, fast NVMe storage, plenty of RAM, KDE Plasma on Wayland, and a current kernel. Most of the time it feels excellent. Then, once in a while, the pointer hesitates, a window animation misses a beat, audio gets a tiny crackle, or the browser pauses while a package update or build is running. ...

I have not switched back to Kubuntu yet. I am still daily-driving Manjaro KDE on my ASUS Vivobook Pro 15, with Plasma 6.6.5, Wayland, btrfs, and a hybrid Intel Arc + NVIDIA RTX 3050 setup. But I have been running Kubuntu 26.04 LTS in VirtualBox, comparing the two side by side, and asking a question I did not expect to ask again after several happy years on Arch-based rolling release: ...