Updated: April 29, 2026
My Titan is a Linux-only system designed for serious work and gaming. I bought it with the clear purpose of moving away from Windows, a task that I've largely accomplished, with good success. But this journey has not been very easy, with lots of early problems, subsequent firmware-induced power management problems, and then some. By and large, I'm happy with the system. Sort of.
Now, since I last reported on this laptop, a lot has happened. I spent an earnest amount of time playing, fiddling, testing, and I discovered a whole new range of problems and regressions, as well as amazing new things. Indeed, of all the different long-term reports I've written on this machine, I think you will find today's piece most significant. Without a further ado, let's dig in.
New kernel, system freezes are gone
As you may recall, I had to implement an IRQ masking (as part of the boot process) to avoid random system hangups. This is far from ideal, because you don't always know what you're hiding from plain sight, as I will soon demonstrate. But in between having a barely usable system and a wee GPE interrupt being silenced, I opted for the latter. More very shortly.
Now, I am happy to report that this issue is finally resolved. At least, for now. But to get there, I did have to suffer some. Let me explain:
- I powered on the Titan and did a bunch of work. I did not perform any updates. However, Kubuntu, or rather, Ubuntu being Ubuntu, it triggered its own annoying unattended upgrades mechanism and patched a bunch of things, including delivering a new kernel. This is silly, because I'm using Ubuntu pro on the system, with kernel livepatching enabled. But more than that, the automatic update system is also buggy and stupid.
- Indeed, after rebooting, my new 6.8.0-106 kernel messed up everything. No networking, no VirtualBox. Of course, because the unattended upgrades mechanism had only brought in the kernel, but not all the other goodies needed for honest work. I had to reboot into an older kernel and run a full system update. This brought in a slightly newer -107 kernel. Here, everything works fine.
Broken by unattended upgrades ...
- Most importantly, I tested what happens without the interrupt masking option in GRUB, and yes, no more system freezes. Great. But the way there could have been done more elegantly. Indeed ...
Gaming uncertainties
Every time I use the Titan, I also open Steam to see if Proton now supports any of the remaining titles I still haven't gotten to run. Most notably, Assetto Corsa does not run yet. But I had a lot of updates, including 100GB worth of game patches, plus half a dozen Steam redistributables and frameworks and such. I tried launching ArmA 3, and it simply would not run. W00t.
This is a regression, in my book at least, and an alarming one at that ...
- From what I know, Valve does its utmost best to make sure that if a game runs once, it runs always, and this also applies to the ever-growing list of Proton-supported titles. As you recall, for me, ArmA 3 worked superbly, even with tons of DLCs and addons. Without a hitch. To suddenly have it not run is really bad.
- I started debugging, and testing Proton versions, more or less one by one. Bohemia Studio mentions the 6.X branch, and skipping the Launcher, and yes, this works, but the game thinks you're offline, and consequently, you can't do any multiplayer, even on your LAN. The same happens with Proton 7.X.
With version 6.X and 7.X ... the game thinks it's offline.
- I did succeed with version 9.X, and this one correctly shows Steam online and all that. Finally.
The Launcher actually works quite all right.
Then, I noticed something weird. I had pretty good performance using the laptop on battery, and this delivered a rather steady 45-50 FPS in the game on Ultra settings, similar if not identical to Windows results. Very nice. But with the charger plugged in, the performance was far worse, contrary to the expected, with the FPS fluctuating from low 10-15 to about 35-40, with an occasional spike to 60 and quickly back down. The game would lag every 3-4 seconds, nonstop.
Power, performance and broken charger
It took me a lot of testing to figure out the cause of this glitch. First, I tried all sorts of Nvidia PRIME options, but none made any difference, nor should they, to be fair. Second, I tried various CPU governor options and boot parameters, but none yielded any improvements. Third, I tried WINE DLL overrides, game launch options, to no avail. Of course.
Then, I also did the above system freeze check, and removed the acpi_mask_gpe=0x03 parameter from the GRUB options. This "restored" my charger-in charger-out sound. With the masking in place, connecting the charger, or disconnecting it for that matter, would not result in the usual KDE sound notification, at least not right away, nor would the charging status icon change. It would, but sometimes minutes later. I guess this is the consequence of playing with interrupts.
Now, with the sound and correct charging state properly done, I realized my charger was misbehaving. It would "ping" every few seconds. Connected, disconnected. Charging, not charging. Soon, I realized this was correlated to system activity. Any sort of elevated CPU or GPU usage, anything that would cause a power spike, would trip the charger and stop the charging process. The only guarantee of getting the device fully charged is to leave the desktop utterly idle or turn the machine off.
I wasn't sure if the actual 230W charger was dying or if the charging port was iffy. I was dearly hoping it wouldn't be the latter, because replacing those is more difficult, and in some cases, very hard to do, if not quite impossible. Luckily, I had a spare 180W charger at hand, and tried that one. With this new gadget in place, the Titan began charging majestically, with a steady power draw and no disconnects, regardless of the system stress. And lo and behold, in ArmA 3 now, I had beautiful steady 60 FPS with the charger plugged in!
I contacted the Slimbook team to hear what they have to say, and they were quite helpful. I purchased a new charger, and within days, it had arrived. 'Tis the charger all right. Now, my system properly draw power even under load, and even the fans behave more correctly. I guess the broken charger was also causing all sorts of other odd behaviors, which might be attributed to the weird noises under the hood. Hopefully, no lasting damage.
Back to ArmA 3, I even checked that LAN and Internet gaming works, and that the game ports are accessible over the network. Ubuntu has no firewall in place per se, so there should be no issues, but I wanted to triple-check, to make sure everything is as it ought to be. A small detail, but hey!
udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:2302
0.0.0.0:* 20896/wineserver
udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:2304
0.0.0.0:* 20896/wineserver
nc -v -u -z 192.168.5.103 2302
Connection to 192.168.5.103 2302 port [udp/*] succeeded!
And everything was indeed spiffy. I played a bunch of multiplayer games over the Internet, even hosted the server for my buddies. No problem. The only "downside" is that occasionally, roughly 1.5-2 hours into an intense gaming session, the fans might go really wild, and the CPU may throttle down a little, causing some stuttering. But you really have to work the Titan hard to get into that state.
We're back in the game, literally and figuratively.
More stuff
The Ubuntu update process can sometimes be quite messy. As I've mentioned a couple of times before, apt got confused with the WINE packages, and I had to fix the "broken" install to resolve the dependencies. This is so infuriating. It's 2026, and we still, still have this kind of nonsense as part of the Linux desktop experience. Seriously?
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt --fix-broken install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
wine-stable : Depends: wine-stable-i386 (= 10.0.0.0~jammy-1)
Depends: wine-stable-amd64 (= 10.0.0.0~jammy-1) but 11.0.0.0~jammy-1 is installed
winehq-stable : Depends: wine-stable (= 11.0.0.0~jammy-1)
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt --fix-broken install' with no packages (or specify a
solution).
Then, there's this pointless gem from the system log:
systemd[1]: Configuration file /run/systemd/system/netplan-ovs-cleanup.service is
marked world-inaccessible. This has no effect as configuration data is accessible via APIs without
restrictions. Proceeding anyway.
systemd[1]: /lib/systemd/system/snapd.service:23: Unknown key name 'RestartMode' in section
'Service', ignoring.
Much as I've told you about my Executive, for whatever reason, newer kernels auto-load the KVM module, which conflicts with VirtualBox, so if you use the latter, you will need to blacklist it. Quite annoying, because this is another unwarranted change to my baseline.
Kate, the text editor, which I had to tweak to remember my sessions, doesn't have the sidebar anymore. This seems to be the consequence of the manual change, for some reason. But you can re-enable the Documents plugin, and that should restore the missing functionality.
Notepad++ also needed a new Mono package for some reason. What bugs me the most is the extra one or two spaces in the hyperlink below. But once this was sorted, the program launched fine.
On the hardware side of things, the keyboard is still a bit "'stiff" and needs somewhat harder presses to register all the keys. This is something I've observed a while back, and still holds true in this report. Perhaps I need to use it more vigorously, hammer down a few 100K characters to soften the springs. Or something.
And I guess we can stop here.
Conclusion
There were way too many problems for my peaceful Titan setup this time around. Gaming snags, repo issues, broken networking and unattended upgrades complications, KVM module nonsense. In a way, the charger going a-wonk is the least of my woes, because such things can happen. The software side of things is less excusable. Remember, I'm using an LTS. And it's not even 24.04, it's the older 22.04. Effectively, four years down the road, we still have tons of unnecessary issues that shouldn't affect the supposedly stable long-term release. I mean, seriously.
That said, I was happy to be able to resolve all of these, most of all, my Steam Proton and much needed ArmA 3 compatibility. For some reason, this calmed me down, and made the whole endeavor easier to cope with. Yes, I did somewhat complicate my own life with the IRQ masking, then again, I wouldn't be doing it if not for the silly system freezes as a pointless consequence of various firmware and kernel patches. Also, having charger issues isn't quite something you would expect. But here we are. All in all, I'm cautiously happy.
And with that, I'd like to conclude my ninth report. Stay tuned for the updates. Hopefully, one day, I will also be able to get Assetto Corsa running. Because, other than that, in between the glitches and the regressions, my Titan setup is quite cushty. Complicated but nice. An eventful article, as promised. Anyway, see ya. Bye bye for now, me hearties.
Cheers.