u/etnpnys

Just picked up a used 2018 2.5i Premium for my son, and we love this car! And, dare I say: this may be the best looking year for this car…? 👍👍

Anyway, there are loads of features in this thing that we have no idea about how to make sense of… and, not being person who originally configured the vehicle, I’m not entirely sure what to expect out of most of it! Eyesight and the lane assist feature were surprise features that we weren’t expecting, and I think this is where my question comes from: randomly while driving around town, the car will just beep at us. It’s a “happy beep“ if there is such a distinction… But nothing comes up on the dash to tell us why it beeped, and we have the lane assist feature turned off as indicated by the orange indicator light on the dash.

What could this beeping be from??

Our 2.5i Premium has the CVT and about 145,000 miles. It has suddenly started doing something new to us… When decelerating towards a stop light, whether on the brakes or not, there’s a point in the deceleration where it feels like the transmission downshifts and starts engine braking really hard. The speed at which this occurs doesn’t seem to be consistent, and this seems like new behavior… It seems harsh and abrupt, like somebody driving a manual that shifts into first gear too soon or doesn’t know how to properly operate the clutch.

What should I look into? Is this normal?

FWIW I just replaced the radiator, thermostat, ECT sensor, and upper radiator hose. Cleaned the throttle body, did the idle relearn, and no codes are triggered. Aside from the two little CVT coolant lines going in and out of the bottom of the radiator, nothing was touched that relates to the transmission.

Top radiator hose on our 2.5i Premium has been popping off at the most inopportune times, dumping all of my coolant all over the road. I thought that the engine was overheating, causing pressure to build up and pop the hose off -- so I have replaced the engine coolant temp (ECT) sensor, the thermostat, the top radiator hose... I plugged in my OBD scanner and I can now watch the live graph of the temperatures and I'm confident that the engine is self-regulating the temps now. I have also removed and cleaned the throttle body and was about to do the idle relearn, and the radiator hose popped off again!

Turns out, the end of the inlet on the radiator has apparently broken off and there's no nub/nipple/rib on there anymore, so the hose is just going to keep sliding off. I thought the engine was overheating and popping the hose off, but instead it looks like the hose is popping off which is leading to overheating. I had no idea but I was looking at pictures of other Outback radiators and there's definitely a raised flare to the end of the inlet on "healthy" ones.

Radiator from the dealership is about $450, and the ones at O'Reilly are half that. Any reason I should avoid the O'Reilly part? Once I get the replacement radiator in there, I'll have everything tested to verify the head gaskets are good (no characteristics of them having issues right now).

Link to the radiator replacement at O'Reilly

First post here! So, we picked up a 2018 2.5i Premium last night. I have also had a 2012 WRX and we still have a 2011 Outback 2.5i Premium. I understood this Legacy to have a CVT, but during the test drive I accelerated hard from a stop and it ... shifted? Seems like if I accelerate slowly it never shifts (as expected) but if I stomp on it, it pretends to be a sports car. Do I have that right?

Looking closer at the spec sheet, it has a "6 speed CVT"?? Can somebody explain this to me?

Hello Outback hive mind: we have a 2011 2.5i Premium and it has a strange issue that I can repeat over and over again, but it's really subtle... When you first slightly touch the gas pedal, you can hear a faint knock (or two) as the throttle engages and the vehicle starts to accelerate. It has to be the lightest touch on the throttle, and it happens cold/hot/whenever.

What could this be? I haven't been able to find anything online that quite matches what I'm experiencing, so I'm turning to everybody here. CVT issue? Torque converter thing as it engages? Maybe a pre-detonation knock?

It's going to hurt, but I'm planning to rule out pre-detonation when we fill up the tank the next time; I'll put premium fuel in it and see if it still happens. I'm also planning to clean the throttle body this Friday to see if that clears up some weird idling issues.

Disclaimer: Very long read ahead. And I know I'll probably get flamed here by all the fanboys, but I need you to know up front: I want Linux to legitimately compete as a viable solution for everybody. That's why I won't keep my opinions to myself; maybe there's something in here that the Linux community can learn from?

Every year or two for the last 20+ years, I set aside a little time to dive head first into using Linux for my everything. I guess I'm bored. It's like a wild hair that I must address, and I've never been one to listen to the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra - I intentionally break things just to fix them. I've been through all the major distros, usually whichever happens to be hottest at the time, and I throw it onto a primary hard drive and force myself to figure things out. You know: immersion therapy. :)

I've never been overly impressed with Linux. RedHat, Ubuntu, KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, FOSS in general... I've always been impressed that it was free and that you can do actual things with it, but that's usually where the fascination quickly turns to loathing, making me just appreciate Windows and MacOS all the more.

And here I was this year, CachyOS is all the rage. Wayland has replaced X. Lighter on system resources. Aesthetically amazing. FOSS has had more time to mature with more well-rounded offerings.

So I fire up the live distro from a thumb drive and... I'm honestly impressed! Wayland and KDE have made the UI actually look ... polished! I poke around a little bit and decide to install. But over the ensuing two weeks, here are the things that I find that I'm still frustrated by that I think are pretty normal things. Obviously everybody's setup is different, but I spent hours on each of these trying to get them to work well enough that I could just stay in Linux and never look back:

• Email: My work's email accounts are all Office365 accounts. We all have our own account/email, and we all share access to another shared calendar. I didn't think this would be the hangup that it is, but I tried getting by with web-based outlook.com and it wasn't enough. I tried until I was blue in the face to configure Thunderbird (got close) and Evolution, but Office365 account support is super spotty and complicated to configure. Then, once you get it to accept your credentials you need unsupported plugins to be able to also get calendar and contacts. I never was able to get all of this in one place.
• PDF editing: I'm a project manager for a housing developer. We spend all day inside architectural and engineering plan sets on 36"x24" PDF pages. It's critical to be able to open these plans and work inside the files. I need to mark things up, measure distances, rearrange and cut and paste pages between files... I do all of this in BlueBeam Revu Extreme in Windows, and there doesn't seem to be a Linux alternative that comes even close in usability. Granted, there's not much else in Windows that matches BlueBeam's productivity, but I was willing to stumble through something that got close enough. LibreOffice's Draw program was the closest I got, but it doesn't deal in PDFs natively and there are no measurement tools to speak of.
• Printing: I'm sure local printing works great. But in my office, we all print to a SHARP multifunction printer with inner finishers and duplexers and user account control... I discovered that the user control wasn't configurable in CUPS, so I tried for hours to edit the ppd to include the necessary lines for user control... to no avail.
• Video conferencing: MS Teams (PWA) seemed to work great - until I tried to talk. My webcam (Logitech C920 Pro) was detected and video was great, but the mic on it requires all kinds of command-line changes, and I never was able to get the mic to work.
• Video editing: I was pleased to find that DaVinci Resolve is available for Linux! ...But H.264/5 support isn't there? That's a deal-breaker.

That said, here are some things that I was pleasantly surprised about:

• The visual POLISH! FINALLY, KDE Plasma on Wayland looks so good. It's consistent, functional, professional... Configuring things to my liking was easy and I had plenty of options to tweak, and none of the tweaks ever rendered something else unusable.
• Hardware detection: so much to say here. It knew right away that my mouse was low on battery. Keyboard shortcut control keys (like Volume) worked out-of-the-box. Speakers, sound card, hardware video acceleration, dual monitors... Super impressive.
• MS Office alternatives: I felt right at home with Libre Office, as soon as I set the default formats to the monopolistic standards set by Microsoft's offering: .docx, .xlsx, etc.
• Network server access: Was able to set up my user account access to our server with no issues at all. Pinned the location to the sidebar in Dolphin and it worked exactly how I had hoped it would.
• Browser-based stuff: I ditched Firefox for Brave, and it worked exactly as I had hoped it would. I was able to install MS Teams (PWA) to the desktop with no issues, and I never encountered any rendering issues or other issues that would encroach on usability or productivity.

But in the end, I'm typing this up from Windows again. The things that I couldn't get to work were all deal-breakers in and of themselves. I must be able to do these things to be able to work, and I don't think that those things are asking too much... It looks like we've come a long way, but it still looks like we have a long ways to go. Browser-based stuff all worked great, but I need my work PC to be so much more than just a Chromebook. And I gave up (again) before I even got to the more niche things like 3d printing or serious gaming.

Thanks for taking the time to read! If you can provide meaningful conversation I'd love to hear about your thoughts or suggestions, but I'm not interested in engaging in any conversation that seems condescending, bigoted, or smug.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Flip doesn't let you do 60fps with some of the more advanced and niche features, right? Or am I missing it somewhere?

Here's what I mean:

• All of the controller-free features max at 30fps: tracking, rocket, follow...
• All of the "smarter" features with a controller like object tracking and stuff

Is this a limitation of the processing power or sensors or something?