Misc

Various stuff that doesn't (yet) deserve an own article but might be useful.

Edit System files as root (with elevated permissions)

You can either use the terminal, or use a file manager like Nemo.

Watching the temperature

You can use lm_sensors. Before running it for the first time, run sudo sensors-detect.

After that, type sensors to see your temperatures. If you want to monitor them for a longer time, type watch sensors.

Changing Mouse settings (DPI, lift of distance, etc)

Settings are usually stored in the mouse, so it is sufficient to boot Windows once, and change stuff there. You can also boot a VM (with KVM) and pass through the mouse. After that, the settings should be kept in Linux.

Audio stuff

Noise Cancelling

You can use EasyEffects or NoiseTorch.

Equalizer and more

EasyEffects also has various other audio processing options, like crystalizer, noise gate, equalizer, filter, and much more. NoiseTorch can only cancel noise, but also has the option to tweak how aggressive it cancels noise.

A convolver can give better results than an equalizer as it can regulate every frequency individually. If you want your headphones to have a very specific characteristic, you can use https://autoeq.app/ to download a file that can be imported by a convolver. You can use EasyEffects or JamesDSP.

Patching Audio

If you want to have a patchbay to route your audio to various destinations, qpwgraph or Helvum might be what you're looking for.

If you want to do patching and add different effects, you can use Carla or RaySession. For noise cancelling you can use rnnoise. Use KlangFalter for convolution (on Arch it's part of the distrho-ports packages).

With the right combination of plugins, you can do lots of things. For example, you can do noise cancelling on your microphone and on the microphones of your team-mates, level the loudness of your team-mates to be the same, while at the same time making steps louder, and changing the characteristics of your headphones to your liking.

Make the game look good

Downsampling

You can use Gamescope.

Post Processing

You can use vkBasalt for additional rendering like anti aliasing or reshade (you might want to use reshade instead)

Using GitHub/GitLab

You might find yourself in the situation where you want to download something from GitHub or GitLab. Don't do it, as long as it's not absolutely necessary. This is usually a bad idea. Try again to find a better solution, for example, read the description about how to install it, there might be a package for your distribution, a ppa (for Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, etc), an AUR package (for Garuda, Manjaro, Arch, etc.), or something similar for your distribution. Or post in a forum, and try to get help there. But here is how to do it:

1. Install git. If you're on Pop!_OS or other Ubuntu/Debian-based distributions: sudo apt install git
2. On GitLab there is a button called "Clone", on GitHub it's called "Code". Click it. You will see an URL like this: https://gitlab.com/some/stuff. Copy it (for example by clicking the button right next to it).
3. Open a terminal, and navigate to the folder where you want your stuff. For example, by typing cd repos if you have a folder repos in your home folder.
4. Type git clone (and type a space). Then paste the URL by pressing ctrl + shift + v. Then press Enter.
5. Follow the instructions in the readme.

Using Checksums

When downloading a file, you might have seen something like sha512: 497907d020870e564b814bb6c4f7eef2f3abdf5d0159ccbd96501a26cef155a8d771a420a16c9348525fa4ce7de3c137ad5ff15a013c84f327edbdea6495d86b easyanticheat_x64.so

This is a checksum, or more precise: An sha512 checksum for the file easyanticheat_x64.so. This number is for verifying that you have the correct file, and not something that is manipulated or inaccurately transmitted.

Usage: Download file, open terminal, and cd Downloads.

Then you execute sha512sum easyanticheat_x64.so. The number you see there, should be exactly the same.

Btw: sha512 is better than sha256, and especially better than md5. md5 is trash, don't use it.

Game Streaming

You can use sunshine to stream games from your computer to a client running moonlight

RGB

You can use OpenRGB.

Razer control driver

For razer hardware, you can use this driver: https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer

Logitech control software

Solaar is a Linux device manager for Logitech devices. You can do stuff like changing DPI, or button mappings, etc. https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar

Suspend/resume of applications (games, an others)

You can use nyrna. Unortunately it doesn't (yet) "survive" reboots.

Test whether you use X11 or Wayland

Open a terminal and input echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE. If it says x11, then you use X11. If it says wayland, you use wayland.

Disable swapping for a game

You can do it like this.

Simultaneously play two different games on the same device

https://www.reddit.com/r/tuxedocomputers/comments/ucdvj7/finally_did_it_two_different_users_playing/

Merge two monitors into one (to have one wide screen that spans both monitors)

Type xrandr into the terminal. You will see a list of your monitors. Pick the monitors that you want to merge.

Assuming that you want to merge DisplayPort-1 and HDMI-A-0, type xrandr --setmonitor BigScreen auto "DisplayPort-1","HDMI-A-0". The order of the monitors in the command determines the order of how they are arranged. In this example, the monitor DisplayPort-1 would be left, and HDMI-A-0 would be right.

To undo the changes, type xrandr --delmonitor BigScreen.

This works only on X11, and not on Wayland. It also doesn't work with every desktop environment, for example, it does not work with KDE Plasma. Generally speaking, it works better if the desktop environment is less sophisticated.

Screen Capturing

• OBS
• gpu-screen-recorder (Nvidia)
• ReplaySorcery (AMD)
• Goverlay

Use any camera (even a phone) as webcam

Use any camera as a webcam—DSLR, mirrorless, camcorder, point-and-shoot, or even your smartphone/tablet! https://github.com/weebney/webcamize

Fixing desktop entry icon and name on GNOME

On GNOME, windows names and icons might not match the properties set in their desktop entry file. To fix that, add StartupWMClass at the end of the file and set the value to the output of xprop, lg or wlprop.

Mount/unmount a disc image

If you need to mount a disc image, you can use CDEmu. It supports different formats like .iso, .mds, .bin, .cue and more. To mount a disc image, run cdemu load 0 path/to/image.iso in terminal emulator and cdemu unload 0 when you're done to unmount it.

Force borderless fullscreen windowed mode

Applications can run in a borderless fullscreen window on most popular Linux desktop environments (GNOME, Plasma, etc.). Go into your system settings, bind "Toggle fullscreen mode" to a keyboard shortcut, run your game in windowed mode and use the shortcut you just set.

Play on ARM/RISC-V

Box64, Box86 and felix86 can run x86 and x86_64 Linux games on ARM/RISC-V architectures. Box64 and Box86 support Wine so you can run Windows games too.

MIDI playback support

Install Timidity++, download a SoundFont like "GeneralUser GS" or convert "GM.dls" from a Windows installation to the SoundFont 2 format. Edit /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg to use the SoundFont. Then, add timidity -iA -B2,8 -EFreverb=0 & %command%; pkill -f timidity in the command prefix field on launchers like Lutris or Bottles and change the audio settings in-game.