Manjaro, PinePhone, and all the "Rage 2" about Stadia

This entry will cover three things I have been playing around with over the last month: dual booting Manjaro Linux, the arrival of my PinePhone Postmarket OS edition, and some thoughts on Stadia after playing through Rage 2.

Dual booting Manjaro:

First off will be my move to dual booting Manjaro Linux. Back when I was working at IBM, Linux Mint was my daily driver on my work laptop. With Mint, my laptop felt as snappy as a brand new machine, and I was able to do the entirety of my job without any major hiccups. Mint is really user friendly, and I really had a great experience with it. So naturally I decided to ditch Mint for my new dual boot configuration and go with Manjaro. I wanted to try a rolling-release this time around, and I had read that Manjaro was a good, beginner friendly, rolling-release distribution.

So off I went, and set up Manjaro. No real issues off the hop, and I didn’t wreck my Windows installation along the way. Good stuff… until things went a little sideways. For some reason, and I am not sure what I did, but my kernel disappeared after applying some updates. Since this was a brand new install, I simply just reinstalled and reapplied the updates. Same thing happened. I was however able to fix it using the recovery image and manjaro-chroot.

So we are able to boot again… but after those updates my headphones stopped working. Apparently this is an issue that seems to happen with B450 motherboards. Again, the internet came to my rescue and running ‘pulseaudio -k && pactl load-module module-detect’ brings back most of the audio output devices. My Valve Index headset is detected, but there still seems to be some issues there.

This has been quite the sobering experience and an excellent reminder that I really have a lot to learn when it comes to running Linux.

There is a lot of good that has come from using Manjaro as my daily driver though. Firstly, working with my work PC remotely is a much better experience. Previously Windows would flicker and hang for a few seconds before I could control the PC every time I refocused the window. This does not happen on my Manjaro install, and is a huge quality of life improvement. Another advantage is ease of development. Even though I am forced to use Windows at work, I have been able to make use of Cygwin or more recently WSL. I never got used to Command Prompt, and any time I have to use either Command Prompt or Powershell I pine for Bash.

I have also been able to give Proton a try. It comes with Steam, and allows you to play Windows games. It pretty much works as advertised. With the exception of a couple hiccups related to the Steam Controller, I was able to play Kingdoms of Amalur with just a few button clicks.

The PinePhone:

I bought a PinePhone. Specifically, the PostmarketOS community edition. It is a reasonably priced device and has the potential to be a fun thing to play around with.

I haven’t done much tinkering yet, but I can certainly tell you that PostmarketOS is a ways off from primetime. The setup experience is great, but there are still a lot of bugs and performance issues that need to be resolved. As a warning, enabling full disk encryption on your install makes for a very annoying experience. The keyboard just isn’t good enough, and often you have to enter your password very slowly and carefully just to get it to boot.

Just today I tried installing a few other operating systems that are available:

• Manjaro Plasma Alpha 17, which did not boot when installed on eMMC
• Mobian, which almost booted on eMMC
• Ubuntu Touch, which booted on eMMC and seems to run quite well

After installing Ubuntu Touch, I poked around a little bit. At this point in time, UBTouch is in much better shape than PostmarketOS, but still a ways off of being good enough to use.

It is more just for tinkering and hopefully will act as a good learning opportunity.

All the “Rage 2” about Stadia:

Lastly I want to talk about Stadia. I am a huge fan of technology and I don’t have a bandwidth cap with my ISP. I think that makes me Stadia’s target audience. Jokes aside, the proposition of Stadia is an interesting one: no console, no updates. As long as you have an internet connection, just click and you’re in the game. From that perspective, it delivers. You click a few buttons on either your smartphone or web browser, and you are tossed into the game within a few seconds. It really can be magical.

Stadia is not for everyone though. If you’re looking to play your games at the highest quality settings, or if you want to have physical copies of your games, you’re going to want to play elsewhere. Stadia gets interesting when you look at the barriers of entry. You just need a controller and an internet connection, and you can jump in. The Android app even has touch controls, so you can omit the controller if you’re willing to test your patience.

The other obvious downside is the ecosystem. Stadia isn’t quite a year old at this time, and the library and overall console experience is still lacking. The library is slowly growing, but most big releases are still coming to the platform later than others. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 will not be coming day and date to Stadia, but will be coming later in 2020. Some companies, like Square Enix and Ubisoft, have thrown their weight behind Stadia, but others seem to be taking a wait and see approach. If the platform can garner more players, I am sure we see this problem go away. The other issue I mentioned is what I call the console experience. By this I mean features that we have come to expect from consoles like the Xbox, or platforms like Steam. Stadia again has slowly improved over the year, but things like text chat to your friends is still absent.

Enough about Stadia as a platform though. I recently completed a play through of Rage 2. I can’t really say anything bad about the experience playing on Stadia. Sure, it looked more fuzzy and ran at a lower framerate than my gaming computer, but the experience was good. Being able to play on a range of devices is seriously underrated. Want to move from the couch to the bedroom? Just swap to your bedroom tv. That was what really sold it for me.

Rage 2 played well on the system, but did require some tweaking to get the controls to feel just right. I had no crashes or issues over the twenty hour campaign, and I did enjoy the game for what it was: dumb fun.

I will likely continue to support the platform as long as it continues to get the games I want to play. The streaming wars are starting to heat up though with XCloud being included with Gamepass, and GeForce Now moving out of beta earlier in the year. I got to try both of those platforms during their beta period, and both work very, very well. Each platform has its own set of advantages, and hopefully each will continue to push the gaming industry to new and interesting places.