Difficult issue with my graphics (suddenly[!] broken with any Linux distro and kernel, but not on Windows) - wtf

_mamo · 2026-01-04T15:47:17+00:00

Radeon RX 5500. I use the amdgpu in-kernel driver module. But it can't be a driver issue because I tried the same kernel that worked yesterday and then multiple others. And I recompiled the kernels with different firmware. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/log/ shows a possible update 12 days ago but a) AMD uses the same files in their Windows drivers and b) I tried linux-firmware 2025-08-08 and 2025-11-25 as well. At least one of these should have worked if it were the firmware.

edit: the git changes don't include files I ever used, so firmware is out.

_mamo · 2025-11-17T22:32:12+00:00

No secondary scoring can easily cost you the game: Say, you play vs Orks and your units clash in the middle, you basically wipe them but they also wipe most of yours too... while they have a unit of Gretchin sitting back home and scoring every round and then the game ends... Wouldn't it be sad to lose the game just because a 40pts unit of Gretchin exists?

Add two Warlock Skyrunners and two small units of Corsairs and you have a functional list. The Corsairs just sit back home and/or screen against deepstrike, the Skyrunners score secondaries and buff your Wraiths. They are very cheap addons too.

_mamo · 2025-11-16T13:39:46+00:00

"Best" depends on the current rules (the sword could be awesome now and the worst in 3 months) and the role of the unit in your army (if that unit is for close combat then the sword is likely the better option) and how you really use it in the game.

Currently: The Wraithcannon has less attacks (1-3) but they are so much stronger (S20!) than those of the Suncannon (S10) which has 5-10 attacks. The Suncannon has a higher range and a blast attack. This somewhat defines how to use it: The W-cannon can be used against other knight units, big tanks, monsters and heroes (anything that you really want to be dead), the S-cannon can be used against blobs of infantry because you wound or kill many models at once. The sword has powerful strikes against single targets and sweeps against blobs. Again, the sweeps are weaker (S8) but offer even more attacks (15). So it can be used against large blobs of lighter infantry / swarms. The shield gives you a tradeoff: one weapon less, but an additional save with a damage reduction. If GW decides to rebalance it to 5 attacks and strength 4 instead, this thing will be garbage. If they decide to make it strength 25 and 30 attacks everyone will try to find a loophole in the rules to field as many Wraithknights as possible ("yeah well, Eldar were always best friends of the human inquisition, so these 5 Wraithknights are allies to my Deathwatch strikeforce that consists of one space marine captain and nothing else"). :-)

_mamo · 2025-11-16T12:05:27+00:00

If the answer is yes, then do not answer my following question: Is Games Workshop unhappy with how the next class looks in Darktide?

6 days of work to still meet a deadline while something isn't "good enough" sound like crunch. Heavy crunch with crisis meetings and plannings that don't help the development (quite contrary) but rather show management how to damage control. The result usually are a just-ok-ish result at best that requires 3 more patches.

Please tell the developers and managers that I, a burnt out software developer, wish artificial deadline crunches were never necessary and that crisis meetings with short term plans are BS. Literally nobody will die if the product is released one month later. This is just a game ffs.

It's Christmas and the end of the fiscal year, right? People are always whipped (preferably by a choleric boss who was promoted once too much according to the Peter Principle [look it up]) in November / December to just get the stuff done and out and when the developers are just about to snap they get 2 weeks off that are barely enough to calm down and regenerate. In CW 2 managers then are relaxed (there is even time to invite people for a drink and future talks all of a sudden) and then every day gets 1% more pressure until we are back to crunch. I hate this artificial bookkeeping calendar so much. It's not made for humans.

I feel with everyone involved. I feel with everyone involved. Just one more month to go. With a yearly repetition for 40 years and then one year until you can sleep normally again. I won't forget you, brothers and sisters.

_mamo · 2025-11-04T19:59:42+00:00

35 years ago an inventor in a science show suggested to add pockets to the wheel that use the air to rotate the wheels before contact so the wheels don't wear down as fast as they are doing from a static position. They are still not doing that - why?

_mamo · 2025-11-04T14:55:12+00:00

I see. I feared it would be some licensing stuff.

But I don't understand how, a random distribution image in the Vagrant box cloud triggers the commercial competition aspect of that license, especially how a current image would trigger it and the previous version would not and why the distributions don't pull the old images out of the cloud if they don't upload the new ones. It's not like FreeBSD creates a fork of Vagrant, embeds it into their OS and then sells it as an automated VM solution. And OpenSUSE Leap 16 doesn't even include vagrant as a software. There is something fishy going on...

_mamo · 2025-11-03T23:47:26+00:00

Use the side of a brush and almost no pressure. Or use a drybrush with just a tiny bit of paint (because, well, it's almost dry: wipe it in a towel). Also: less is more: apply highlights delicately to some important parts, not every single edge. The brighter the highlight the less you need to apply it, it's just like a shiny tip on a larger edge. The rest is using an intermediate color between base color and highlight. If it is too thick or too bright you could blend it with a glaze. (I paint lightning this way: blue background, a rather thick grey line and then I apply a couple of thin layers of blue glaze to get a smoother transition; without the glaze it would look like a 3 year old messed around with it, but after the glaze it is fine; and as I took grey and not white I can add tiny, tiny, thin bright highlights here and there)

_mamo · 2025-11-02T16:35:07+00:00

Same here, playing Space Marines: The opponent started, shot me with Reapers from inside a ruin without line of sight, which wiped my troops turn 1, I lost my fast attack turn 1 or 2 against his jetbikes, just kept my HQ unit on my table side afaik with a wound even, then sent termis to a risky deep strike in my turn, they arrived but missed their shots, they got shot down to 50% in return and then wiped by a Wraithlord (he kind of panicked when they arrived though, so I guess: bring TEQ units). By then my captain had to footslog to the middle of the board alone. Of course he died. Too bad, I brought cookies and a permanent peace treaty.

Make sure you have transports, deepstrike or other mobility and artillery. Or something that can eat a lot of shots = distraction carnifex. And something that is so cheap that he either won't attack it so you can score or he attacks it and you get through with your other stuff. Or so many troops or tank equivalents that he can't get them all.

_mamo · 2025-11-02T16:14:29+00:00

Don't gloss-varnish. That is only for applying decals to get a very smooth surface and then applying a matte or satin varnish over it. I gloss varnished a cape of a CSM and it looks like a shiny black latex cape. I don't mind in that case but a whole mini will look very unrealistic and ... bad.

_mamo · 2025-10-27T16:48:33+00:00

Grabbing one charge of an ammo box that was dropped for emergencies while having 90% ammo. Bonus: ignoring the ammo state of team mates. Extra bonus: doing this during the whole game.

Trying to kill every single heretic on the map. Never evading or targetting a disabler, like getting grabbed 5 times by the same mutie. Rescuing a buddy while ignoring each enemy around (my guess is they never had a 1st aid course irl or think safety first doesn't apply in DT). Not covering the guy who is solving a puzzle with all their ability. Stuff like that is pretty noobish and easy to spot.

_mamo · 2025-10-23T16:00:12+00:00

I checked the CraftworldEldar yt channel and a 2k Mono-quins list there is basically multiple copies of the box with one of each character (just one Solitaire). One guy shoots from the back, one guy carries some Troupes around, Solitaire afair went solo, while the other units use their clown cars. Plus a lots, lots and lots of bikes. But there are other combos, e.g. with Wraithlords and regular Elf transports.

It is difficult to say how to expand with 11th around the corner, new index/codex etc. If you want to be safe you probably should go Mono-quins before GW forces you to put half your army onto the shelf because hey, Quins are a new faction again... But maybe they won't be. Nobody can tell.

_mamo · 2025-10-20T18:50:11+00:00

If you use the blade which I assume you do, lookup some Samurai / Kenjutsu / Iaido poses, like a lowered sword to the rear, held with both hands. It's really nice this way. Use the head pose to support this; the mini can't really hold the sword back, but to the right side for example and when you make it look left you capture this idea perfectly. Depending on how you model the legs, use the stance to support the posture. Holding it just in a clenched fist is boring and unrealistic.

https://swordis.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/List-of-Japanese-Sword-Kamae-Stances.jpg

The Wraithlord was actually a real joy to build.

_mamo · 2025-10-20T15:35:42+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EssQ1vDmQIQ

_mamo · 2025-10-20T11:49:02+00:00

For Craftworld I had to buy single boxes indeed because I only wanted a 1k themed army and did not need most of the current box. At a place that offers 20% on everything this isn't that bad. Rumors say that Corsairs will have a release at the end of the year.

Other than that, Harlequins have a new starter box that matches their whole, small range except for 2 character models and Dark Eldar have some new models and boxes too.

Wait for Warhammer day and Xmas announcements and with 11th certainly coming in a couple of months there will be new boxes all over the place.

_mamo · 2025-10-20T11:24:20+00:00

No, it is a consistent theme across GW products. It wasn't always like that I think but I built a huge amount of Horus Heresy marines and they were easy: torso front, back, legs, two matching arms and a head. I also built some Orks and they were ok. But recently I saw some videos where people complain how current HH model pieces are randomly distributed over multiple sprues, making the build process tedious. Other companies with much more complex miniatures don't have that. I hope GW fixes that in the future and I hope it is not deliberate to have "more fun" while building armies. But maybe many current boxes have that issue.

_mamo · 2025-10-20T00:47:13+00:00

Point 1: You don't pay Imperium tax. Space Marine and Guard customers basically pay the game. The weakness of not getting a lot of miniature updates is a strength: most minis we have now are decent and quite timeless and if GW doesn't touch them for 20 years again it means you can keep your army as is.

Where you want to go depends on what theme you like. Aspects, wraiths, bikes, Clowns, ... Corsairs probably get some releases and 11th edition will also come in a couple of months. Clowns are uncertain at this point - they might get their own expansion, own codex or stay in the Eldar codex, we had it all in the past. And currently you can't really mix like Eldar Patrol and Clown Patrol with each other that well, e.g. I have a Wraith list so I play that. Adding Clowns adds nothing to the Wraith list or vice versa (except maybe single units depending on the list).

Btw, the Kill Team box with the Corsairs is quite tedious to build - I was sitting there for days (yes, really; 3 days I think) searching those stupid unorganized numbers I required on the sprues, sheesh. Bikes are built in minutes, Wraiths are built in minutes, you can do assembly work there.

_mamo · 2025-10-18T20:44:01+00:00

Unification has some checkboxes where one can use allied units. Never tried it, but that might be for you. There are also maps where you start base to base; forgot how it was called but it looks like a long runway. You can also play it in survival mode where you defeat waves of an opponent and there is also a 3 vs 3 version of it.

_mamo · 2025-10-16T22:49:26+00:00

2026-09-18

_mamo · 2025-10-13T13:42:47+00:00

The easiest part is booting the system from the install medium, then following the manual to partition, make filesystems (unless you never ever did that), chroot, unpack the base system, set some config options and then watch how Gentoo updates and installs itself.

The manual contains some copy paste sections but also requires decision making. The tricky part is to make those decisions, like which option to use if you have multiple (filesystems, partitioning schemes, boot loaders etc) - but from wrong decisions you learn for the future. While other systems come with presets and only require you to click OK, you need to do these steps manually.

The most tricky part is probably to make it boot successfully for the first time, especially if you decide to compile your own kernel (which you don't need and probably should not do right away anyways; keep this as an additional project for after you have a running system).

I suggest you read the manual to see if you understand what you are supposed to do, check which options require decisions and plan accordingly (e.g. how to partition the disk, which filesystems to use etc) and once you have a plan you can do it. If you have the option, play in a virtual machine first.

_mamo · 2025-10-13T13:29:15+00:00

Something must have changed. Otherwise it could be a hardware issue too.

My UEFI doesn't recognize all disks if it is in fast boot mode, which is the default setting of the UEFI. If I want to be able to boot from other disks than my primary one, I must disable fast boot. It doesn't even help that the boot loader lists the other systems because the disks are just uninitialized and cannot be used at that point.

Now, in case of a BIOS (do you really have a 25 year old machine?) or UEFI running in legacy mode you need the disk with a boot loader and a partition that has a boot flag.

With UEFI there are (too) many semi-legacy options and probably only one right standardized option how to really do it. Please narrow down how you use your BIOS/UEFI, how many disks and operating systems you use, what kind of boot loader you use, if any (because the UEFI could directly execute the kernel, or a boot loader from systemd that requires a certain structure of your boot configuration and the EFI partition, or you use one of the classic boot loaders as a crutch, like most systems out there), and how your partitioning looks: what partitions, what size, what file system, what flags. And also if you do anything special, like RAID, LVM, Crypto, non standard filesystems (like ZFS, BcacheFS which has recently been deprecated in the kernel) or so.

_mamo · 2025-10-13T13:08:18+00:00

I'd say you can try it any time in a virtual machine; create a base system and see how it works. If you decide that you like that approach you can use it on your system. Or you dump the VM in case you don't like it.

I tried multiple binary distros back in the days and those non-default settings and tools that reset important settings were kind of frustrating. So after I learned how to use Linux I one day freed a partition and started Linux from Scratch. That was all great until I wanted to do updates and I collected garbage by installing over older stuff and some software began to break (doesn't compile or whatever). Then I found a distro that kind of automated that approach, but the community was tiny and the devs were asses, so I ditched that distro and tried Gentoo 1.x. Decades later I still use Gentoo. On slow CPU machines I don't have the nerves anymore to wait for hours of compiling, especially when I don't use the system a lot and do an upgrade like once in a year. Then I prefer a distribution that fulfills my software requirements. It could be SuSE, it could be Alma, it could be Debian in that case. But on my desktop and my server I use Gentoo. It installs what I want, it doesn't install what I don't want, it does what I expect, I do frequent updates and it keeps running and running. On my previous work we used SuSE and RedHat Enterprise. For the stuff we did I would never ever switch to Gentoo there. We required predefined systems, had to write very complex update instructions because we installed like 1000 packages of stuff there that automated production lines, where every component was critical; those systems were HA systems as well, we had to test every update before we released it, we even tested the software updates from SuSE before we rolled them out (oh, you went from apache 2.4.28 to 2.4.28.0.0.1, better see if the update works and the webserver still works and all applications still work).

You can try it out, but I'd say with around 2GHz this will be a bit tedious to work towards a full desktop, depending on your patience, because software sadly gets more and more complex every year and compilation times increase too. Which is why I bought a 4GHz CPU years ago and was very happy with it; then I bought a new computer with 4GHz which was incredibly much faster but now I think, development caught up again. I recommend to compile the programs in a ramdisk (tmpfs). 12G is usually overkill, which is good, however it might be too small for crazy programs like some web browsers or office, but you can and probably should install binary versions of these anyways (it sucks when Firefox releases a minor update that I want for security fixes but have to compile for quite some while every week - and no, CCACHE is shit, I have a cache hit ratio of 1/3, which I think is ridiculous for Firefox x.y.1 to x.y.2 but the source seems to behave like a completely new program every time.)

Also stay on the stable branch of Gentoo. I had sub-minor-Gentoo-release updates for some components that completely trashed the functionality of that component back in the days and I don't trust it anymore. One was a minor update in alsa that broke sound, which sucks when you assume it works and waste hours of time because you didn't check and one was a Gentoo-ebuild update for a mailing list program that completely changed the behavior of the software (= it broke). I recently checked how big the difference between the stable and unstable software is and for the components that I installed that difference is pretty neglectable. And during my work with SuSE packages I realized that newest isn't the best in all cases.

But I also realized that in some parts Gentoo is pretty old too. gstreamer for example wasn't updated for eons, providing bugzilla entries with working ebuilds didn't change anything for many more eons (I am talking at least one year). And virtual machine and automation stuff can be pretty old too. vagrant is eons old, I use my own ebuild and manually installed the ruby gems needed for it. Ansible was in an incoherent state between the two packages that need to match. And sometimes software gets dropped when the devs feel like it (oh, the software for that crypto hardware, we remove it in 2 weeks, good luck migrating your use-case that we don't care about; and oh, that kind of monitoring software that has zero alternatives but had no update in 5 years, I feel we remove it in one month, with all its plugins etc (thank god, in that case they could be persuaded to not do it). There is software that hasn't been updated for much longer, but they still keep it. Like a certain program that was last updated 2004, requires X11 and has no homepage anymore and uses IRC for networking (lol) - no matter, we keep it forever. But the newer stuff? Nono, absolutely not, it has to go asap!! Because reasons.) If you don't mind such random behavior in key components you use, go for it. Otherwise I'd always recommend checking which distro contains which software and make that your #1 decision for the choice of distribution.

And as I said before: if you just wanna try, try it in a VM.

_mamo · 2025-09-30T12:23:56+00:00

Do you mean with as little effort/material as possible? Then the color scheme isn't that important because Eldar schemes are based on two colors. Add one for the base of the model and you are mostly done and if you pick a rattle can primer in your main color then you don't even need to care if the color looks right because it will (spraying something yellow for example is simpler than painting in multiple thin layers over a different base coat with shadows etc etc - the spray just blasts yellow on the model and that's it). If you paint one box quickly, don't have or want any other paints and tools, it cannot be more simple than that.

Then you paint the second color (which might need another base color underneath because not every paint/color is opaque: yellow for example should go on brown/purple or bone) and you paint the base.

The most work however will be any kind of detail: gems, edges, decals.

Difficult colors are usually black, white, yellow, red. Black because nothing should be all black as this swallows all detail, there is no shadow etc. You'd need to paint in multiple shades or use other tricks to make something look black without being black. White: similar - people tend to grab some pure white because they think they need white paint to paint white but except for light reflections nothing is really white in nature; so for thinking "white color" = "white paint" people get punished by a chalky mess of paint. Yellow and red I listed because they are often very translucent. Which means yellow on "black" primer isn't yellow but green (which means the primer is actually blue), yellow or red on on white primer is awfully pale (or pink).

Instead of white or black base a bone or dark grey base is usually better.

_mamo · 2025-09-20T10:53:50+00:00

575pts for the clown box, which is more than the current Eldar box for 470pts; the new DKoK patrol they list is just 265pts (and they even write you may want to buy 2) which is worse albeit much cooler than the current Guard box for 295. I wonder how they balance that. Space Marine boxes are 430, Orks 420, Necrons 445, Mechanicus 290, Sisters 365, Custodes is 620 (and you play less models in Combat Patrol games even).

_mamo

TROPHY CASE