Linux is good now • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux is good now

#231

Post by diabllicseagull » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:46 PM UTC

voidfunc wrote: post #51

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming now works better on Linux than it does on Windows. This must be upsetting for Microsoft, but it was their game to lose.

I dont get the feeling they care. Microsoft is so lost under Satya at this point. Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth. At some point they're going to realize all the ground they've lost and it's going to be a real problem. They're repeating a lot of the same mistakes that cost them the browser and mobile market.

Yeah. MS must have been so hurt about losing to the iPhone, they really jumped the gun on AI as if to avoid a similar mistake. It's Satya's major play and I think they are already paying for that decision. xbox is hollowed out so that AI can be funded, while the pc/console hybrid project is doomed to fail because "windows everywhere" doesn't work if windows is crap. indeed, they might be left with just the cloud business in the end.

Re: Linux is good now

#232

Post by dontlaugh » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:48 PM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #230

dontlaugh wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to play games with friends, you have to play whatever the group plays. This is especially problematic as the group tries out new games, increasing the chance you can’t join because you’re not on Windows.

This really depends on the friends you have. I've never encountered this limitation because no one in my friend group plays competitive ranked games. Basically anything with private sessions doesn't require anticheat, so Valheim, RV There Yet, Deep Rock Galactic, etc. all work fine.

Sure, that helps.

But even then, when everyone is trying out a new indie game there’s a chance it won’t work on non-Windows. It’s happened to me.

Re: Linux is good now

#233

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:48 PM UTC

Biganon wrote: post #228

I'm tired of people saying Steam on Linux just works. It doesn't. Tried running Worms: instant crash, no error message. Tried running Among Us: instant crash, had to add cryptic arguments to the command line to get it to run. Tried running Parkitect: crashes after 5 minutes. These three games are extremely simple, graphically speaking. They don't use any complicated anti-cheat measure. This shouldn't be complicated,…

[deleted]

Re: Linux is good now

#234

Post by mixmastamyk » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:49 PM UTC

system2 wrote: post #47

Linux is not suitable for the average user. I use Xubuntu on all my old computers, but I am 100% sure a normie would not tolerate the tedium of it. People want shiny icons with animations and a bunch of garbage on their computers to make them feel they are doing something. Linux is too static for that. If I have an issue with an application or if I want an application, I must use the terminal. I can't imagine a Mac u…

Outdated view. Regular people ask for help at the genius bar or IT poindexter all the time. And pretty icons are plentiful.

Re: Linux is good now

#235

Post by orbital-decay » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:49 PM UTC

MerrimanInd wrote: post #176

I love this. I spent my holidays hearing non-technical family members complain about their ever deteriorating Windows experiences, issues that make me righteously angry at Microsoft. IMO the next important unblocker for Linux adoption is the Adobe suite. In a post-mobile world one can use a tablet or phone for almost any media consumption. But production is still in the realm of the desktop UX and photo/video/creativ…

Photoshop (for example) largely works in Wine, although it's not stable enough for production usage. The problem is the CC itself and the installer, which is unimaginably bloated and glued to the Internet Exp... I mean Edge Web View and many other Windows-only things.

Re: Linux is good now

#236

Post by sirjaz » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

If Microsoft could get their heads out of their rears, they could potentially get back to a better OS for gaming. The hybrid kernel Dave Cutler designed is in many ways still better than the Linux kernel. It's the userland that is the issue with Windows 11. Look just by enabling true nvme support you close the gap between Linux and Windows performance wise.

Re: Linux is good now

#237

Post by bitanarch » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

EnPissant wrote: post #161

bitanarch wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Ok. I've been using DisplayPort 1.4a with my 4090 at the moment. Maybe I'll try HDMI 2.1 and see what happens.

I'm actually surprised that YouTube HDR works on your side - perhaps it's tied to the ABGR2101010 output mode being available.

Re: Linux is good now

#238

Post by swinglock » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

hparadiz wrote: post #213

hackyhacky wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it. Sure, except that anyone can just compile a Linux kernel that doesn't allow that. Anti-cheat systems on Windows work because Windows is hard(er) to tamper with.

Well yeah but then eBPF would not work and then the anti cheat could just show that it's not working and lock you out. This isn't complicated. Even the Crowdstrike falcon agent has switched to bpf because it lowers the risk that a kernel driver will brick downstream like what happened with windows that one time. I recently configured a corporate single sign on to simply not work if the bpf component was disabled.

Well but then attackers just compile a kernel with a rootkit that hides the hack and itself from the APIs of the BPF program, so it has to deal with that too or it's trivially bypassed.

Anticheat and antivirus are two similar but different games. It's very complicated.

Re: Linux is good now

#239

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

pityJuke wrote: post #203

jsheard wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After all, the most played competitive shooter is CS and Valve has does not use kernel-level AC. Valve doesn't employ kernel AC but in practice others have taken that into their own hands - the prevalence of cheating on the official CS servers has driven the adoption of third-party matchmaking providers like FACEIT, which layer their own kernel AC on top of the game. The bulk of casual play happens on the former, b…

The best description I've been able to give of the dichotomy of CS is this: there is no way for a person to become good enough to get their signature into the game, without using kernel-level ACs.

[deleted]

Re: Linux is good now

#240

Post by mrkeen » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 10:53 PM UTC

duttish wrote: post #170

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…

I've had mixed experiences with AMD. Back in the day - a bit after Linus told Nvidia to fuck off - I tried to get my Radeon 5850HD (i think?) working on Ubuntu. It was one of those things I spent the whole weekend (OS reinstalls really add up) trying to make work, to no avail. Relative to that nonsense, the equivalent proprietary Nvidia driver just worked after being installed.

A couple of months ago I bought a second hand RX 7800 XT, and prepared myself for a painful experience, but I think it just worked. Like I got frustrated trying to find out how to download and install the driver, when I think it just came with Linux Mint already.