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Comment by croutonwagon | Hacker News Reader

Similarly I have a monitor at home that, for whatever reason, will stutter on a game in fullscreen UNTIL i go and manually set its refresh rate.

I have to flip it between 59.95Hz and 60 Hz in the windows advanced settings, changing that setting basically makes the monitor re-initialize and then everything is fine. It happens every time I wake the monitor from sleep (ie: my computer rarely, if ever goes to sleep, but the monitors will turn off after 10 minutes of inactivity)

This only really happens with games. DirectX or Vulcan doesnt matter. Doesnt affect things like youtube, plex etc.

But any game in fullscreen or borderless windows on that screen, i have to basically just change that setting back and forth to keep my sanity.

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This reminds me of a sound card I bought way back when (22 years ago or so); it was a wavetable-supporting, Soundblaster Pro-compatible card that I got on sale for 50% off without making any effort at all to look it up online or even check the kernel for Linux support.

It worked and sounded great in Windows; it also worked and sounded great in Linux, with one exception: the card supported ISA PNP, which was great, but the kernel module for the sound card wouldn't load unless I did `cat /proc/isapnp` first.

I had no idea why, and it took a few reboots and trial-and-error to narrow it down to this janky workaround, but it worked so I just configured modprobe to run `cat /proc/isapnp > /dev/null` before trying to load the module and I never had to worry about it again.

Technology sure is weird sometimes.

Many years ago, I had an Athlon 64 workstation paired with some type of 3Ware SATA RAID controller (a 9650SE, I think).

Every other boot, the BIOS would fail to initialize the controller, leaving the computer stuck at a "non-bootable device" error until I could manually reboot it.

My solution? A perpetually plugged-in USB flash drive with a small boot loader that would simply reboot the machine again, set to a lower boot priority than the SATA RAID controller.

It was pretty stupid, but if it's stupid and it works...

I had something similar and just used the USB to hold ... LILO at the time? Can't recall.

My ThinkPad has something similar with the microSD card slot. You have to type "lspci" for it to notice there's an SD card inserted. I don't use the slot much so it's not a big deal but it's literally the only thing that doesn't play nice with Linux.

If there's a udev event generated when you insert the SD card, you could write a udev rule to exec `lspci` when it happens.

I keep a hacks file in my home directory so that when a random thing breaks after an upgrade or a new system, I can quickly review the fixes that I needed three years ago but that upstream couldn't be bothered to fix.

Open-source is the best worst-thing ever.

How are you able to pick between 59.95Hz and 60Hz? From what I've seen in Windows, it is keeping track of refresh rates as big rational numbers with full precision, but then when it's time to actually switch to a video mode, everything gets rounded to an integer, and it just picks whatever mode is closest to that integer value.

Would probably need to use Custom Resolution Utility to define a refresh rate that you really want.

In windows its just

right click on desktop>Display Settings>scroll to bottom>Advanced Display Settings

Then select your monitor in the drop down and the refresh rate. Which is negotiated by the monitor and the video card. I suppose unplugging and pluggin the cable back in may help. But ive changed cables, bought new ones, tried adapters to change the type (ie: hdmi to DP etc).

Its just something with the display. And Im too lazy to bend over and unplug/plug it in, so i just do the refresh rate trick.

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