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[666JTK666]

Howdy I have downloaded deb 12 and am planing to see if it will play nice with my external monitor if it does I plan to test MC with it 2nd thing.
are there any suggestions for max compatibility with MC ?

[Awesome Donkey]

Actually, even though Debian is the only distro JRiver officially supports I would actually recommend using Ubuntu instead of Debian, it's a little easier and it allows easy use of the proprietary Nvidia drivers.

[mwillems]

Howdy I have downloaded deb 12 and am planing to see if it will play nice with my external monitor if it does I plan to test MC with it 2nd thing.
are there any suggestions for max compatibility with MC ?

I think bob uses debian with xfce as his test setup, so if you wanted to go with Debian it might be worth trying xfce as the desktop.  As A.D. says, ubuntu is a bit easier to get started with especially if you use an nvidia card, but vanilla debian does work very well too in my own experience.

[bob]

I develop with debian and xfce as the base system on all platforms.
That said I have used ubuntu for testing on old Macbooks I have laying around. There are a few oddities that I don't like on ubuntu's default WM like being unable to move the MC standard window partially offscreen but I imagine that's tweakable.

[avid]

I abandoned stock Ubuntu, as MC did not like Wayland. None of the MCC or MCWS mechanisms to control the window would work (minimize, maximize, restore, change view). I think Wayland required UI (mouse) interaction to do this - presumably for security reasons. So using the display with only MCWS control was a no-no.

The first and only alternative I tried was Kubuntu (which uses KDE), and that works well enough. Although black-screen hangs meant that I eventually had to take out my Nvidia card and use motherboard graphics instead. I am sure that there are other, more mainstream, options. But that is my experience.

[bob]

I abandoned stock Ubuntu, as MC did not like Wayland. None of the MCC or MCWS mechanisms to control the window would work (minimize, maximize, restore, change view). I think Wayland required UI (mouse) interaction to do this - presumably for security reasons. So using the display with only MCWS control was a no-no.

The first and only alternative I tried was Kubuntu (which uses KDE), and that works well enough. Although black-screen hangs meant that I eventually had to take out my Nvidia card and use motherboard graphics instead. I am sure that there are other, more mainstream, options. But that is my experience.

On my old Macbook Pro (5,5) that I run ubuntu on, I need to use the proprietary NVidia driver to get proper behavior.

[Awesome Donkey]

I abandoned stock Ubuntu, as MC did not like Wayland. None of the MCC or MCWS mechanisms to control the window would work (minimize, maximize, restore, change view). I think Wayland required UI (mouse) interaction to do this - presumably for security reasons. So using the display with only MCWS control was a no-no.

You can log out when logged into Ubuntu and switch the GNOME session to X instead of Wayland.

[avid]

You can log out when logged into Ubuntu and switch the GNOME session to X instead of Wayland.

You can indeed. And while it may still be possible, it's tricker on a machine with no mouse or keyboard! In my case it was simply easier to pick a different distro.

[666JTK666]

Well I am happy to report Deb-12 is working mostly biggest issue I had was switching from wayland to X11 once done the system is running much smoother.
My external monitor is again working but it's startup and initialization is sorta janky there's stuff that I have to do every time the os boots to make it work.
When it comes to external monitors pop-os is the clear winner of the "just work's no fuss no muss" award.
On deb-12 I am using exclusively KDE Plasma.
MC has been working with zero issues so far.

[666JTK666]

Well debian is not going to work for me, issues with my ext monitor on my laptop and only oss built in graphic drivers means gameing is crap with this distro. back to pop os.

[bob]

Well debian is not going to work for me, issues with my ext monitor on my laptop and only oss built in graphic drivers means gameing is crap with this distro. back to pop os.

Well you could try ubuntu. It supports the vendor supported video card drivers.

[Awesome Donkey]

Yep, Ubuntu is the way to go. Following method number 1 here is how to enable the proprietary Nvidia driver after installing the OS: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/ubuntu-linux-install-nvidia-driver-latest-proprietary-driver/

You can even install it in Debian, but it's a more hands on process.

[666JTK666]

Well I have switched to Ubuntu , MC has the same issue here as with pop os. haven't messed with gaming yet .

[666JTK666]

Well I am impressed, I have only installed one game so far and I really did not expect it to run a smoothly as a windows install, but I swear This game is running better smoother here on linux really well. It was kinda a pain getting steam properly installed. I do not recommend just installing the snap from the store not a single game would run at all with that. there is a cli guide for a manual install that I used to great results.
I really wish there was a way to figure out what is causing mc to crash with Thunderstorm.

[JimH]

I wonder if there's an invisible character in the skin file that's causing the problem.

Try loading it in an editor and saving it again.

[EnglishTiger]

I wonder if there's an invisible character in the skin file that's causing the problem.

Try loading it in an editor and saving it again.

Jim - I've just spent nearly and hour crawling through the images and files for that skin and could not find any invisible or illegal characters, the only oddity I have encountered is this in the Mainframe Section:-

<Data MinimumWidth="350" MinimumHeight="200" />

Which is a really odd, and a non-standard Window Size, the three other skins I checked all set up a 650 x 400 Window.

[JimH]

Make a copy and start changing it.

Sometimes loading and saving will eliminate an illegal character.

[Awesome Donkey]

How long does it take to reproduce? Because if it's as simple as switch to Thunderstorm and restart MC I'll try to reproduce it in a virtual machine here in a few.

I still think removing the part enabling scaling is worth trying too, as the skin doesn't have any 1.5x or 2x images for scaling to be effective.

[EnglishTiger]

How long does it take to reproduce? Because if it's as simple as switch to Thunderstorm and restart MC I'll try to reproduce it in a virtual machine here in a few.

I still think removing the part enabling scaling is worth trying too, as the skin doesn't have any 1.5x or 2x images for scaling to be effective.

Awesome Donkey - Don't remove the enable scaling part, there may appear to be no 1.5x or 2x images in the folder but the vast majority of the images are 4x, if you look at every statement/command in the main.xml where an image is used you will see MC is being told to use a Scale="4" .

[Awesome Donkey]

Interesting, I wonder if that could be a potential cause of the issue.

[Awesome Donkey]

Okay, I went through Thunderstorm's main.xml and did some tweaks to formatting, removed extra spaces, etc. I did leave the scaling stuff.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/z02u7t88f8o151j/Thunderstorm.zip/file

If it still doesn't work, other than trying to disable scaling, I'm honestly not sure what it could be (maybe the 4x images? *shrugs*). So far I haven't been able to reproduce in a virtual machine, but I'll keep trying.

[EnglishTiger]

Interesting, I wonder if that could be a potential cause of the issue.

If it was then a few more skins would also be problematic, especially the ones that have a pseudo 3d look, as the level of detail needed for those images requires they be created larger than MC usually expects/uses so the Skinning Engine has to be told to Scale them Down by the appropriate scaling factor.

[666JTK666]

I just downloaded the new zip of thunderstorm I will be trying that out , in deb -12 MC had no problems. every other distro I have tried  MC has this crashing issue. I wish I could help more to diagnose what is different between deb-12 and other distro's.
I would not be surprised if my laptop's hybrid graphics architecture is part of the issue. Getting linux to work correctly with my external monitor has been a real pita.
I want to thank everyone who has been working on this issue. [THANK YOU !!]

Reproducing the issue is as simple as enabling thunderstorm then closing MC when you go to start up MC again it crashes. any other skin works fine no issues.
My current distro is Ubuntu 23.04

If there is anything you would like for me to do on my system I am more than happy to try.

[666JTK666]

Ok just tried the new main.xml and MC still crashes.
I thought maybe these screen shots might be helpful. I cant seem to find a way to copy the error report to text so I could post it here.

[Awesome Donkey]

Yeah, I can't reproduce that crash at all, and I tried Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE and several Ubuntu installs. Thunderstorm always loads up fine with MC, no crashes.

I wouldn't be surprised if the hybrid graphics is related honestly, or some sort of hardware/driver thing. Hard to say in that regard.

[BryanC]

Are you using the proprietary driver or nouveau? I would swap them and retest.

[666JTK666]

proprietary is necessary for my external monitor to work properly.

[BryanC]

It may not work out of the box, but you should be able to get it set up with PRIME: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PRIME

[bob]

It may not work out of the box, but you should be able to get it set up with PRIME: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PRIME

nouveau has been problematic in the past with MC. Are you certain it's working now?

[666JTK666]

My mind is kinda blown right now, because I have a fully working system as far as I can tell.
I wiped my boot drive and installed Kubuntu and everything is working !! My external monitor flawless. MC is giving me no problems using my preferred Thunderstorm skin I can open and close mc with no issues.
The only thing I have yet to install is steam.
Steam is working great too :-) I am so happy right now!!