• Camera: Olympus E-M1 Mark II
• Lens: Olympus 12-40 f2.8

Bear in mind that I'm not a pro and I'm a hobbyist with "entry-level" equipment that I bought more than 10 years ago, even though I started shooting birds the past year or so. I'm commenting to add the perspective of a person who just happens to casually photograph birds on weekends.

I mostly use a Nikon D3200 APS-C with a kit lens (18-200mm), but I've had a Sigma 18-300mm and a Tamron 150-600mm in the past.

First thing that might surprise you, I end up with way less keepers than a person with reliable autofocus and good low-light performance.

Second, you do need to get pretty close most of the time, regardless of reach, especially for small birds. Usually, I will take "safer" shots and approach the bird slowly, trying to achieve the frame that I want.

Here's an example of a "safer shot", straight out of camera (using the 18-200mm lens):

I could walk forward two more steps to improve framing, before I was limited by a creek in front of me,

The final shot, illustrating how much I usually crop

Using the same Barn Swallow location as an example, I know from experience that they perch there if I "come early" and wait standing still for long enough (~15 minutes). So that's what I did when I went there the other day, standing at the same spot, but using the Tamron 150-600mm instead. This time, I didn't have to crop, since I pre-framed my picture, knowing their approximate size and that they would be there sooner or later.

There are situations where you need to crop a bit more, especially for birds that are both small and fast.

It took me close to 30 minutes to take this photo (D3200 + 18-200mm), since the chipping sparrows were zipping around, so I had to patiently wait for one to be within reach. I took exactly 6 pictures, two steps, lay down on the ground, one shot, two steps, lay down on the ground, one shot, repeat. Until the bird flew away.

I would say 200mm on cropped (300mm full frame equivalent) is when you can start to get good pictures: challenging but doable. 300mm on cropped is fairly nice (450mm equivalent). I don't think there are crazy improvements from 450mm--600mm, since 450mm is already nice for larger birds like jays or blackbirds, and ~500mm may be too short to reliably capture some smaller songbirds. 800mm or so is the longest I've tried and IMO it would be very challenging to have good enough technique to pull it off beyond that.

Of course, a person with a high-resolution, low-light beast will be able to crop more aggressively than I do. Especially if they just post their pictures online, where basically anything at 2MP or so will do.

One of the reasons I really like seeing your posts is that the birds are so exotic to me!

Shout out to @[email protected] and @[email protected] too!

Thanks! It seems like the "dead link" is just telling us how to install any printer using CUPS, sadly. But the second link might help me, given that I can try to extract a ppd driver from the provided macOS drivers.

You are right, those are contradictory. I meant doing it for now and sandboxing the VM while I work on finding a solution. I'm now trying to extract the useful part of the MacOS drivers and see if I can run it natively on Linux.

Edit: I edited the original post slightly to address your point, which I fully agree with.

True! There was a time my father would get home from work and just listen to bird songs CDs. Just seeing his joy and enjoying hearing nature myself made me consider field recording too

I would suggest checking "sold items" on eBay (there's a filter for that, or add &LH_Complete=1 to your link). You'll see that body-only Canon M10 cameras are actually being sold for around USD 180 or GBP 145. Those that are more expensive usually include lenses or other accessories. Sellers can always charge how much they want, but whether listings will be successful is a different question.

Crown rock, Boulder CO. May 4th, 2024. I saw three or four of them together that day

https://bouldercolorado.gov/trail/crown-rock

You are right, I should have made this clear. I am not on Nvidia, I am using an old Thinkpad on Intel Haswell.

I'm glad to know my problem isn't completely new. I'll look into it further online. If you ever find a link to a report of a similar issue, I would be happy to see!

Edit: I found this link, the issue reported appears to be very similar to what I'm seeing here https://libreddit.tux.pizza/r/kde/comments/jhqbnz/kde_plasma_rendering_problem_black_squares/

Edit 2: I finally solved my problem! It was indeed an old problem already reported somewhere.

Yeah, I tried installing kde-full but it didn't solve my problem.

I do store regular backups of this machine, but not of /var. I can always reinstall Debian (or whatever other distro), while keeping other relevant configs intact (stored in the backups) and not lose any critical data.

I commented below that I did check /var/log/dpkg.log, but it didn't help much due to the high number of packages removed that day.

At this point I am more curious to learn more about KDE and what is causing the problem, since other desktop environments (I installed mate) seem to work fine.

Sadly I am not using BTRFS for my root directory on this specific system. If I end up deciding to reinstall, I will definitely go back to BTRFS to avoid such problems.

Debian actually has a KDE group named kde-full. I reinstalled it but the issue persists, which was honestly surprising to me.

~$ sudo apt install kde-full
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
kde-full is already the newest version (5:147).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 87 not upgraded.

The new user idea was really clever, thanks for the suggestion! I will try that now and see.

Edit: the new user also presents the same problem. Actually, it makes sense, since SDDM is affected as well (I should have mentioned that before).