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Linux is good now

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Re: Linux is good now

#251

Post by orbital-decay »

epistasis wrote: post #179
mort96 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My primary issue is that a system that did an OK job at dealing with low memory situations has been replaced with a completely inadequate system. If your solution is "don't ever run out of memory" my solution is "I won't ever use your OS unless forced to." Every other OS handles this better, and my work literally requires pushing the bounds of memory on the box, whether it's 64GB or 1TB of RAM. Killing an entire cgro…

As far as I know, Windows just grinds to a halt entirely, system processes start crashing, or you get a BSOD, and mobile OSes kill the app without any trace. I never had an OOM situation on Macs so I don't know about macOS.

Windows is unstable even if you have more than enough memory but your swap is disabled, due to how its virtual memory works. It generally behaves much worse than others under heavy load and when various system resources are nearly exhausted.

There are several advanced and very flexible OOM killers available for Linux, you can use them if it really bothers you (honestly you're the first I've seen complaining about it). Some gaming/realtime distros are using them by default.

Re: Linux is good now

#252

Post by tombert »

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,…

I don't have your other games, but I do have a few Worms games and they worked out of the box for me with GE Proton on NixOS.

I'm not saying "you're doing it wrong", because obviously if you're having trouble then that is, if nothing else, bad UX design, but I actually am kind of curious as to what you're doing different than me. I have an extremely vanilla NixOS setup that boots into GameScope + Tenfoot and I drive everything with a gamepad and it works about as easily as a console does for me.

Re: Linux is good now

#253

Post by znpy »

tapoxi wrote: post #147
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.

The interesting solution here is secure boot, only allow users to play from a set of trusted kernels.

I wonder if you could use check-point and restore in userspace (https://criu.org/Main_Page) so that after the game boots and passes the checks on a valid system you can move it to an "invalid" system (where you have all the mods and all the tools to tamper with it).

I don't really care about games, but i do care about messing up people and companies that do such heinous crimes against humanity (kernel-level anti-cheat).

Re: Linux is good now

#254

Post by weaksauce »

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

cachyos is a good os that is also performant. arch though so there are quirks around the rolling update model but you always have the newestish packages and if you update regularly there seems to be less headache.

Re: Linux is good now

#255

Post by k12sosse »

dontlaugh wrote: post #210
voidfunc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don’t care, they’re defunding Xbox and even the Windows team is hollowed out.

When the rumour was Windows 10 will be the last windows! I don't think people thought it would because of win11 would be so unbearable it would finally drive users to Linux.. but here we are. RIP.

Re: Linux is good now

#256

Post by kentonv »

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,…

These games are all rated gold or platinum on protondb, indicating that they work perfectly for most people.

Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video driver. Maybe you have an nvidia card and the OS has installed the nouveau drivers by default? Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. This is indeed a sore spot for Linux gaming, though to be fair graphics driver problems are not exactly unheard of on Windows either.

Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house) which have proven to be much more stable running Linux than they were with Windows. I think this is because the particular NIC in these machines just has terrible Windows drivers, but decent Linux drivers (and I am netbooting, so network driver stability is pretty critical to the whole system).

Re: Linux is good now

#257

Post by hparadiz »

swinglock wrote: post #238
hparadiz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The bpf api isn't the only telemetry source for an anti cheat module. There's a lot of other things you can look at. A bpf api showing blanks for known pid descendent trees would be a big red flag. You're right that it's very complicated but the toolchain is there if someone wanted to do the hard work of making an attempt. It's really telemetry forensics and what can you do if the cheat is external to the system.

Re: Linux is good now

#258

Post by keyringlight »

dontlaugh wrote: post #209
dfxm12 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Personally I'd be interested to see what would happen if Sony/MS did what they could to make keyboard/mouse experience as good as possible on their consoles (I'm writing from a position of ignorance on the state of mouse/keys with current consoles) and encouraged developers to offer a choice in inputs, so that the locked-down machines can become the place for highest confidence in no/low cheaters. If other people want to pay through the nose to go beyond what consoles offer on the detail/resolution/framerate trifecta then I'm sure they could do so, but I really don't see how you lock down an open platform. That challenge has been going for decades.

Re: Linux is good now

#259

Post by net01 »

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,…

Arch is nice if you want to tinker. Based on your reasoning, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you still want arch-based, I would recommend EndevourOS, and for even a simpler/better distro, Bazzite.
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