A month later and I’m still using it instead of my physical screens. It must be okay.
I’ve switched back to Linux and am using a combination of dummy HDMI dongles and a USB-C dock to give me three screens. It works okay, but is annoying. There’s some work going on to make virtual screens work better but it’s spread throughout the display stack so don’t expect it to happen any time soon (unless you’re on Intel hardware, in which case you can create virtual screens fairly easily).
The annoyances with Windows were mainly Windows annoyances. The ones that really got to me were:
The WiFi Direct thing in Immersed is only available if your laptop is connected to a WiFi network. I used a wired connection most of the time so this was a considerable annoyance. It was usually easier to just open settings and start the Windows hotspot (which is what Immersed was doing under the covers anyway).
The Windows WiFi hotspot occasionally just… switches off. Not that occasionally, actually. This happened at least once per day.
To make my workflow work well, I switched to Windows 11 to get WSLg. Windows 11 is… buggy (or was—big update released this week but I haven’t tried it). Didn’t wake from sleep reliably, numerous lockups/freezes, the WSLg display server would occasionally freeze or crash with no very good way to recover it.
Windows makes an utter dogs breakfast of remembering what screens are open and where they should be placed. Several times a day I had to rearrange all the screens.
My Linux setup is pretty stable. I still need to figure out how to start the agent as part of the display manager startup, so that I can put the headset on before I log in. I don’t think this is possible without making the agent a command-line process, though.
As a fellow Linux user who can’t bear the thought of returning to Windows and feels claustrophobic in the thought of being constrained by Apple, thanks for the comments on your Linux-Immersed-Q2 experience.
I hace a couple questions. First, are you using X system rather than Wayland, given your first comment? Are you using i3wm or Gnome (or something else). If i3wm, have you noticed any issues (bugs, friction etc.) specific to it?
Second, give you have three virtual screens, does this mean you have three physical monitors lying around that you plug the dummy dongles into? I don’t understand what the USB-C dock is for?
Update:
A month later and I’m still using it instead of my physical screens. It must be okay.
I’ve switched back to Linux and am using a combination of dummy HDMI dongles and a USB-C dock to give me three screens. It works okay, but is annoying. There’s some work going on to make virtual screens work better but it’s spread throughout the display stack so don’t expect it to happen any time soon (unless you’re on Intel hardware, in which case you can create virtual screens fairly easily).
The annoyances with Windows were mainly Windows annoyances. The ones that really got to me were:
The WiFi Direct thing in Immersed is only available if your laptop is connected to a WiFi network. I used a wired connection most of the time so this was a considerable annoyance. It was usually easier to just open settings and start the Windows hotspot (which is what Immersed was doing under the covers anyway).
The Windows WiFi hotspot occasionally just… switches off. Not that occasionally, actually. This happened at least once per day.
To make my workflow work well, I switched to Windows 11 to get WSLg. Windows 11 is… buggy (or was—big update released this week but I haven’t tried it). Didn’t wake from sleep reliably, numerous lockups/freezes, the WSLg display server would occasionally freeze or crash with no very good way to recover it.
Windows makes an utter dogs breakfast of remembering what screens are open and where they should be placed. Several times a day I had to rearrange all the screens.
My Linux setup is pretty stable. I still need to figure out how to start the agent as part of the display manager startup, so that I can put the headset on before I log in. I don’t think this is possible without making the agent a command-line process, though.
As a fellow Linux user who can’t bear the thought of returning to Windows and feels claustrophobic in the thought of being constrained by Apple, thanks for the comments on your Linux-Immersed-Q2 experience.
I hace a couple questions. First, are you using X system rather than Wayland, given your first comment? Are you using i3wm or Gnome (or something else). If i3wm, have you noticed any issues (bugs, friction etc.) specific to it?
Second, give you have three virtual screens, does this mean you have three physical monitors lying around that you plug the dummy dongles into? I don’t understand what the USB-C dock is for?
Thanks!