Mint 21

[Yamelesswrench]

Backed up my files and wiped my 2 year old LM install last night to pave the way for 21.

A tip: don't have a panic attack when you go to your backed up home folder on another drive in your shinny new install and you find most of your files are missing. The ones you verified on your old install just 15 min ago before you formatted your OS drive. But are suddemly gone. Calmly remember that "show hidden files" is turned off on fresh install and your game save files are hidden files.

I was hoping 21 might fix the intermittent garbled/echo audio in Firefox but alas it is still here, I think it is a driver issue for my crap onboard audio. With sone Firefox updates it goes away only to return a few updates later. Rinse repeat.

Initial impressions are good, perfectly reliable and no new issues. But this is mainly a media consumption/web/light gaming machine. Nothing technical or strenuous.

Appearance is another mater, I have spent a good bit of time on that and going back to stock is a bit jarring. But it was time. I am ready for a fresh start.

I had installed and modified a lot over the last 2 years, much of it abandoned and It is always a question when troubleshooting( rare event but it happens), is this a stock problem or something I changed? I am going to try to take better notes this time so it is easier to reverse course should I need to in the future.

[spamegg]

I was hoping 21 might fix the intermittent garbled/echo audio in Firefox but alas it is still here, I think it is a driver issue for my crap onboard audio. With sone Firefox updates it goes away only to return a few updates later. Rinse repeat.

Almost everyone has this, including myself. I believe it's not a driver issue, I think it's related to speech-dispatcher which is an accessibility thing. Since I disabled/removed it, I stopped having the garbled audio issue. Take a look here: viewtopic.php?f=250&p=2202948#p2202948

[BwingBob]

I was hoping 21 might fix the intermittent garbled/echo audio in Firefox but alas it is still here, I think it is a driver issue for my crap onboard audio. With sone Firefox updates it goes away only to return a few updates later. Rinse repeat.

Almost everyone has this, including myself. I believe it's not a driver issue, I think it's related to speech-dispatcher which is an accessibility thing. Since I disabled/removed it, I stopped having the garbled audio issue. Take a look here: viewtopic.php?f=250&p=2202948#p2202948

+1 on removing speach-dispatcher . Fixed audio issues for me.

Bob

[Yamelesswrench]

Oh! that would be a great will try that out! and you nailed it, I have a realtek HD audio chip that came with my lower middle class Asus motherboard.

Cant wait to get home and apply that. that's been plaguing me for at least a year or more!

[Yamelesswrench]

Almost everyone has this, including myself. I believe it's not a driver issue, I think it's related to speech-dispatcher which is an accessibility thing. Since I disabled/removed it, I stopped having the garbled audio issue. Take a look here: viewtopic.php?f=250&p=2202948#p2202948

+1 on removing speach-dispatcher . Fixed audio issues for me.

Bob

I applied this fix, went for the purge route, I have no need for an on-screen reader anyway. so far it has been a win, I even tried browsing on other tabs while a Youtube video was running in another which in the past had a high chance of kicking in the garbled audio.

Audio was perfect. Thank you both!

[spamegg]

Keep in mind that when you get an update to some other packages (I can't remember which) then speech-dispatcher might get reinstalled. It happened to me once. So definitely do the /etc/default/speech-dispatcher disable trick mentioned in that thread.

[MurphCID]

So far so really good on all the laptops I have installed Mint 21 on, and things are looking good. I am very impressed with this release.

[MurphCID]

Good solid release, did an inplace re-install rather than an upgrade as I have been wont to do, and so far I have no issues on any laptop I have put Mint 21 on at this time. Going from cold to fully installed and configured takes me about 30 minutes. On the Darter Pro, I have to manually install numlockx, but I also manually install htop and tlp as well. That includes the complete removal of firefox (I never use it and it is slow to install), installation of Chrome, and the flatpak versions of Libreoffice and Thunderbird.

[Dan-cer]

That includes the complete removal of firefox (I never use it and it is slow to install)

Consider install Vivaldi Browser too, that is based on Chromium but has good privacy policy and comes with 3 main options - thin / basic till fully loaded with integrated email-client and much more.

[MurphCID]

Found the first bug, on the Darter Pro gen 2. When I plug in any thunderbolt 3 or 4 drive (Samsung T7 SSD) the laptop either crashes, or refuses to see the drive on a USB-C port. It does see it if I change cables and plug it into a USB-A port. It does not do this on either the Lemur Pro, or the HP Dev One. Such an odd issue, I suspect it is something to do with System 76 rather than Mint since 21 works on all other laptops. It crashed 3 times in a row when plugging in the USB-C cable to the thunderbolt port.

UPDATE:

It now works on the first USB-C/Thunderbolt port but not the second. It has always done this, so I am not concerned. I have NO IDEA what the issue was or is in regards to this. It is odd.

[Yamelesswrench]

Found the first bug, on the Darter Pro gen 2. When I plug in any thunderbolt 3 or 4 drive (Samsung T7 SSD) the laptop either crashes, or refuses to see the drive on a USB-C port. It does see it if I change cables and plug it into a USB-A port. It does not do this on either the Lemur Pro, or the HP Dev One. Such an odd issue, I suspect it is something to do with System 76 rather than Mint since 21 works on all other laptops. It crashed 3 times in a row when plugging in the USB-C cable to the thunderbolt port.

UPDATE:

It now works on the first USB-C/Thunderbolt port but not the second. It has always done this, so I am not concerned. I have NO IDEA what the issue was or is in regards to this. It is odd.

Do you have another cable to try? cables have cost me untold hours of troubleshooting, it is worth checking the low hanging fruit first.

[MurphCID]

Found the first bug, on the Darter Pro gen 2. When I plug in any thunderbolt 3 or 4 drive (Samsung T7 SSD) the laptop either crashes, or refuses to see the drive on a USB-C port. It does see it if I change cables and plug it into a USB-A port. It does not do this on either the Lemur Pro, or the HP Dev One. Such an odd issue, I suspect it is something to do with System 76 rather than Mint since 21 works on all other laptops. It crashed 3 times in a row when plugging in the USB-C cable to the thunderbolt port.

UPDATE:

It now works on the first USB-C/Thunderbolt port but not the second. It has always done this, so I am not concerned. I have NO IDEA what the issue was or is in regards to this. It is odd.

Do you have another cable to try? cables have cost me untold hours of troubleshooting, it is worth checking the low hanging fruit first.

I did, I switched cables on both T7's and nothing, but they did work with the USB-A connector attached. Odd. It seems to have resolved whatever was the issue with a couple of reboots.

[rattkjelke]

I had occasional garbled audio problems on LM 20.3 XFCE. I did a clean install of LM 21 Cinnamon almost a week ago and so far that hasn't happened. I recently found the speech-dispatcher post and I added the "RUN=no" to the config file just in case. So far I haven't noticed any changes but I don't use any software that "talks".

I used LM 20 XFCE for the past two years on the same PC and never had any major recurrent video problems. That changed with LM 21 Cinnamon. When watching videos on Hypnotix or Celluloid in windowed mode I had very brief stuttering or jittering that happend sometimes every few seconds. It was very rapid and only for a fraction of a second and didn't affect the audio. It didn't happen in full screen. It didn't happen in web browsers.

I started looking at settings. Hypnotix and Celluloid have some optional settings.
The defaults are:
Hypnotix: MPV Options: hwdec=auto-safe
Celluloid: Extra MPV options: hwdec=yes

The Preferences tab in Hypnotix has a link to List of MPV Options (https://mpv.io/manual/master/#options)
I saw this one and tried it:

--opengl-early-flush=<yes|no|auto>

Call glFlush() after rendering a frame and before attempting to display it (default: auto). Can fix stuttering in some cases, in other cases probably causes it. The auto mode will call glFlush() only if the renderer is going to wait for a while after rendering, instead of flipping GL front and backbuffers immediately (i.e. it doesn't call it in display-sync mode).

On macOS this is always deactivated because it only causes performance problems and other regressions.

So I changed both the Hypnotix and Celluloid MPV options to:
hwdec=auto-safe opengl-early-flush=yes
and to my amazement that fixed the problem without even having to try anything else. No sutttering for about 3 days now.
This is on a AMD Ryzen 5 3400G with integrated Radeon Vega GPU. I don't know if it will work for other people.

[ivar]

Just ran Mintupdate on one of my Intel Nucs, after seeing it available on ExplainingComputers on youtube. (I've later learned that the instructions are not out yet, so would probably be wise to wait a little more

A bit time consuming as it does a lot of tests before performing the upgrade from 20.3 to 21.
1 sw package had to be removed and 1 needed to be downgraded. Looks like the update itself ran smooth, took somewhere between 30-40 minutes.

The pc is used for music playing and web tv only,, so far all good.

[Yamelesswrench]

I used LM 20 XFCE for the past two years on the same PC and never had any major recurrent video problems. That changed with LM 21 Cinnamon. When watching videos on Hypnotix or Celluloid in windowed mode I had very brief stuttering or jittering that happend sometimes every few seconds. It was very rapid and only for a fraction of a second and didn't affect the audio. It didn't happen in full screen. It didn't happen in web browsers.

<snip>

I have had this problem with celluloid for ages, under 20.3 and 21, always dumped celluloid and used VLC instead the stutter is very annoying,

Thank you for this post I will try the fix outlined.

[MurphCID]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRztNjZb-xw Joe Collins has a Mint 21 review. I used his opinions greatly when I was getting back into Linux after a 15+ year hiatus. He still has good common sense things to say about Mint.

[Infidelus]

Has anyone else noticed when using Celluloid that it always opens maximised and Alt+0, 1 or 2 don't actually work anymore to change the window scale? It also doesn't resize to fit the window (option is enabled in Preferences).

[rattkjelke]

Has anyone else noticed when using Celluloid that it always opens maximised and Alt+0, 1 or 2 don't actually work anymore to change the window scale? It also doesn't resize to fit the window (option is enabled in Preferences).

Yes. Alt+0,1,2 worked properly (for me) on 20.3 Xfce and when I installed 21 Cinnamon they quit working.
I don't know if they ever worked on Cinnamon or if this is a new "feature" in all LM 21 desktop flavors.

I have not had it open maximized all the time.

[RollyShed]

Has anyone else noticed when using Celluloid that it always opens maximised

NO.
Just opened a video and it was max size. Reduced it and then closed it. Opened another video and it opened in the same reduced size of the previous one. Rebooted computer and opened a video. It was same size as last set to, not max size.

Linux Mint Cinnamon 21 installed yesterday.

[Infidelus]

I never maximise Celluloid as I mainly use if for quickly checking my TV recordings, but every single time it opens (since doing a clean install of Mint 21) it always opens maximised and I have to un-maximise it. Doesn't matter how many times I do this though, the next video opens maximised again, and as mentioned none of the Alt keys work for adjusting the scale.

I can't find any obvious settings where this would be stored either. Dconf-editor only seems to show the setting that are in Preferences, some of which don't seem to be adhered to either - the auto-resize to fit the window being a case in point.