I'd say it's the opposite. It happens when the system is IDLE, not when it's processing something.

Doesn’t look super special, so I’m not sure why the scroll wheel would behave differently per application.

Did you ever need software to configure mouse profiles for it on Windows?

There’s Piper, an application specifically for configuring gaming mice, including Steelseries mice.

What mouse are you using? Generic? Logitech? Or Razer?

Maybe this will help you?

Idk about xinput, but my first assumption is that the reason it doesn't work in some apps is because of Xorg vs Wayland. An evdev based solution should work universally.

Coil whine can come from your power supply, and it's a fairly common phenomenon with low quality ones. I don't think it has anything to do with your OS, unless maybe some background process is increasing power consumption and triggering the issue.

Use top or some other process monitoring tool to see if there's anything running in the background while you hear it making the noise.

The solution would be to replace the part making the noise, whether that's the PSU or something else. It's ultimately a hardware defect.

Or, it could be the new disk(s), too.

I've never heard of an NVME with coil whine, but maybe they increase power consumption enough to trigger the issue? Or having extra disks in the system triggers some periodic background tasks that increase power usage. If you're on Suse, that likely means you're using Btrfs, which tends to do that.

But it doesn't do that in Windows nor in BIOS. I'm pretty sure it's not the fans.

I didn't list it, but I don't have a dedicated GPU. I just use the Ryzen iGPU. This is a work machine, it's all I need.

It's the power draw, i set 94% power limit and coil whine disappears, 95-100% gets increasingly louder

A messed up bearing can make a whining sound even with limits set on your fan speeds. I’d open the case and unplug them one at a time (while powered up) just to be sure.

In my case, the GPU was responsible for some coil whine, but only when playing games or running LLMs. Try booting from a live USB with a different desktop environment (kde or gnome) or one that doesn't use GPU acceleration (like xfce, lxde or mate).

If the issue disappears in another environment, it's likely related to the GPU and how the DE uses it.

It might also be other components, so it would be very helpful if you can run the pc while it's open and hear where it's coming from.

Same for me. Nvidia GPU has some coil whine that is dependent on the framerate in some games (I can "hear" the framerate...)

Grab a paper towel tube, press one side against your ear and use the other side to locate the source of the sound.

No, it's not the fan. I have fan curves set up in BIOS and they're running below 700rpm when the system is idle.

Maybe try a live USB of a different distro? If this ends up being a distro-specific issue, the easiest and simplest way to solve it may be to just use a different distro.

I get coil whine too but only when playing with local llms and it's actually producing output. Games that also use lots of gpu, no whine. I haven't really looked into fixing it but I'm not sure how one would even go about it

Thanks for the post!

One thing to try may be switching your CPU power profile from power saving to performance (or visa-versa) as this may have an effect on your CPU frequency and therefore the whine.

(I don't know exactly what the power profile is called on openSUSE or how it's managed so I offer it only as a general suggestion to try)

Can it be a fan? I had one of mine making a high pitched noise when running above 90% and I think I fixed that with https://coolercontrol.org/

That's why I chose openSUSE for my n00b distro (I'm currently switching from Windows). If either I fuck up or an update fucks up, I launch a previous snapshot from systemd-boot and roll back. It's newbie friendly and gives me peace of mind.

I hadn't heard of waypipe so I decided to give this a try, been meaning to reply to this after I got it working, but I didn't have as much time to test as I thought. I installed waypipe on 2 of my existing ubuntu machines and tested running Mozilla PPA version of firefox (so, not the snap version), watching stuff from YouTube and my jellyfin server, and it wasn't fully smooth, it was a little slow and choppy. I also didn't have audio, just video. Maybe you can get it working if you tune it for either hardware acceleration or compression, but I haven't had much time to test that.

My thoughts would be, if thats a path you wanna go down and you don't have the machines set up yet, run a ubuntu Live install on both machines from usb sticks,

sudo apt-get install waypipe

On each machine, make sure sshd is running on the "server" ubuntu machine, and test it out and see if it works for your use cases.

From the client machine, I had just run

waypipe ssh user@server program-name

I installed ZorinOS recently. For a basic user its a great distro. It is preinstalled with Brave and LibreOffice. Easy to use DE.  There would be no need to touch the terminal.

I am running Adguard Home and I was able to set that up via the App Manager. Not bad.

I needed a terminal for Docker, but most everyday users won't require that.

Well, Windows 7 and 10 were pretty good, but Windows 11...

My girlfriend bought a brand new laptop. Everything except Nvidia drivers worked out of the box. Nvidia also installed just fine. But on Windows 11 keyboard lights just refused to work and she never figured out how to solve that... Also vpns just randomly break on Windows while working perfectly fine with Fedora.

I myself have had a different experience with Linux. I've always loved tinkering around so I used to constantly break stuff. That's why I was quite shocked to find out Linux worked out so well for my non tech-savvy gf. But apparently for normal everyday use Linux has become a solid, or even a better alternative to Windows.

Thank you!

1. I can understand why the random long load-times for apps is very frustrating. I don't recall other Bazzite users complaining about it. So I don't know how widespread the problem is.
2. I've effectively been on GNOME ever since I made the jump to Linux. So I can't comment on Dolphin.
3. I can 100℅ relate to windows not restoring their prior states. I've used a tiling window manager extension on GNOME just because it handled that more gracefully; I like them maximized anyways.
4. The audio sink thingy should have been available as a toggle by now. It's unfortunate that it seemingly hasn't. Though, I do wonder if pavucontrol would have been sufficient. There seems to be a flatpak for it if you're interested.
5. The developer experience on Flatpak leaves a lot to be desired 😅. FWIW, I prefer that within a distrobox.
6. For GameMaker, installing it within a Ubuntu distrobox would probably have been sufficient.

FWIW, I don't think any of these are directly related to "immutability"; i.e. in the case of Bazzite, some subfolders of / being read-only at runtime.

I've posted and commented about it a few times, so I can just link you those:

https://midwest.social/comment/22303985

https://midwest.social/post/42063982