Linux is good now • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux is good now

#161

Post by EnPissant » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:13 PM UTC

bitanarch wrote: post #115

EnPissant wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is true. I can go into my display settings in kde plasma and enable HDR and configure the brightness. I have a nvidia blackwell card.

You can enable, yes. But (assuming you're on an LCD display and not an OLED), you're likely still on XRGB8888 - i.e. 8-bit per channel. Check `drm_info`. Also, go to YouTube and play this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onVhbeY7nLM Do it once on "HDR" on Linux, and then on Windows. The "HDR" in nVidia/Linux is fake. The brightness you see on Plasma or Mutter is indeed related to the HDR support in the driver.…

I asked claude to investigate:

  Your Display Configuration

  Both monitors are outputting 10-bit color using the ABGR2101010 pixel format.

  | Monitor                | Connector | Format      | Color Depth | HDR          | Colorspace |
  |------------------------|-----------|-------------|-------------|--------------|------------|
  | Dell U2725QE (XXXXXXX) | HDMI-A-1  | ABGR2101010 | 10-bit      | Enabled (PQ) | BT2020_RGB |
  | Dell U2725QE (XXXXXXX) | HDMI-A-2  | ABGR2101010 | 10-bit      | Disabled     | Default    |

* Changed the serial numbers to XXXXXXX

I am on Wayland and outputting via HDMI 2.1 if that helps.

EDIT: Claude explained how it determined this with drm_info, and manually verified it:

> Planes 0 and 3 are the primary planes (type=1) for CRTCs 62 and 81 respectively - these are what actually display your desktop content. The Format: field shows the pixel format of the currently attached framebuffer.

EDIT: Also note that I am slowbanned on this site, so may not be able to respond for a bit.

EDIT: You should try connecting with HDMI 2.1 (you will need a 8k HDMI cable or it will fall back to older standards instead of FRL).

EDIT: HDR on youtube appears to work for me. Youtube correctly indentifies HDR on only 1 of my monitors and I can see a big difference in the flames between them on this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjJWvAhNq34

Re: Linux is good now

#162

Post by saghm » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:14 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #157

Honestly I loved it a lot more pre-2022, when Ubuntu added a super aggressive OOM killer that only operates on the level of an entire systemd run unit. Meaning that if you are running computation in, say, a shell and one for your subprocesses running computation takes too much memory, it takes out the entire shell and terminal window, leaving no trace of what happened, including all the terminal logs. And if you are…

I have to wonder if Ubuntu's prescriptive stance on things like this is becoming increasingly outdated in an age where there's actually a decent experience out of the box for a lot more stuff on Linux. I've long since moved on from using it personally for my devices, but I'm fairly certain my tolerance for spending effort tinkering to get things working like I want is a lot higher than even most Linux users, so it's hard for me to gauge if the window have moved significantly in that regard for the average Linux user.

Re: Linux is good now

#163

Post by riffic » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:16 PM UTC

pjb88 wrote: post #53

Any recommendations for a distro? I've used Mint in the past, loved it until I spent a day trying to get scanner drivers to work. Don't know if that's changed now, was 4 years ago

the Universal Blue project has got a great suite of distributions:

https://universal-blue.org/

Re: Linux is good now

#164

Post by pjerem » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:16 PM UTC

necessary wrote: post #25

PaulKeeble wrote: post #2

I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well and plenty of reports of "it just works", which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. For me its still controllers and equipment incompatibility due to my VR headset and sim wheel/pedals setup, I use Linux everywh…

This is a big reason I’m excited for Steam Frame - high quality VR on the Linux desktop.

AND high quality Linux desktop on the VR :)

Re: Linux is good now

#165

Post by QuadrupleA » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:16 PM UTC

Been so happy with my switch to Linux about 8 months ago. The nvidia gremlins that stopped me in prior years are all smoothed out.

One big plus with Linux, it's more amenable to AI assistance - just copy & paste shell commands, rather than follow GUI step-by-steps. And Linux has been in the world long enough to be deeply in the LLM training corpuses.

Re: Linux is good now

#166

Post by dfxm12 » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:17 PM UTC

fooker wrote: post #111

PaulKeeble wrote: post #2

I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well and plenty of reports of "it just works", which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. For me its still controllers and equipment incompatibility due to my VR headset and sim wheel/pedals setup, I use Linux everywh…

The last remaining roadblock is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks. Pretty horrible technology, and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.

You don't have to play these specific games though. I mean, what's your privacy, what's not being bombarded by ads in your OS worth to you? Have you taken an honest thought about this?

Re: Linux is good now

#167

Post by howdyhowdy123 » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:17 PM UTC

voidfunc wrote: post #120

howdyhowdy123 wrote: post #72

Can I run Solidworks on Linux yet? Excel? Labview? Vivado? Adobe products? Altium Designer? (Matlab is mostly yes) Not everybody is just writing Javascript and PHP. Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet? Not that long ago the answer to these questions was mostly no (or sort of yes... but very painfully) On Windows all of this just works.

These are all pretty niche products at this point. For the true professionals that need these tools they're stuck but most people can find reasonable alternatives for their hobby or side hustle.

Or... they can use Windows and not have to bend over backwards. I know this because I keep trying and giving up believe me.

Re: Linux is good now

#168

Post by mort96 » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:18 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #157

Honestly I loved it a lot more pre-2022, when Ubuntu added a super aggressive OOM killer that only operates on the level of an entire systemd run unit. Meaning that if you are running computation in, say, a shell and one for your subprocesses running computation takes too much memory, it takes out the entire shell and terminal window, leaving no trace of what happened, including all the terminal logs. And if you are…

It sounds like your primary issue is that you have a severe RAM deficiency for what you're trying to use your machine for. Any OOM killer, be it the kernel's per-process one or systemd-oomd's per-service one, only exists to try to recover from an out-of-memory scenario where the alternative is to kernel panic (in the case of the kernel's oom killer) or for the system to completely lock up (in the case of systemd-oomd).

Try doing less at once, or getting more memory.

Re: Linux is good now

#169

Post by zamalek » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC

jetbalsa wrote: post #114

zamalek wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't comparing Linux to anything here. Windows has recently been a complete shitshow - so even if Linux hasn't gotten any better (it has) it is now likely better than fiddling around with unfucking Windows, and Windows doing things like deleting all your files.

You can put some work into windows to slim it down some, a unattended generator to turn most of the crap off on install, then Shutup OO goes a long way

> You can put some work into windows

That's exactly my point.

There's an ever growing list of things to do in order to fix Windows, and that list is likely longer than Linux. This whole "your time is free" argument hinges on Windows not having exactly the same issue, or worse.

Re: Linux is good now

#170

Post by duttish » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC

I've been on Linux desktop for ages, but it's not quite stable enough that I can recommend it to anyone. Space Marine 2 was the first game in quite a while than didn't just work out of the box, but...

E.g three weeks ago nvidia pushed bad drivers which broke my desktop after a reboot and I had to swap display (ctrl-alt-f3 etc), I never got into gnome at all, and roll back to an earlier version. Automatic rollback of bad drivers would have saved this.

Are Radeon drivers less shit?