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Linux is good now

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Re: Linux is good now

#281

Post by panny »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #38
babl-yc wrote: post #33

I switched my desktop from macOS (10+ years) to Ubuntu 25 last year and I'm not going back. The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors. I'd say it pretty much "just works" except less popular apps are a bit more work to install. On occasion you have to compile apps from source, but it's usually relatively straightforward and on the upside you get the latest…

But what about laptops? I don’t use desktop machines anymore (last time was in 2012). Apple laptops are top notch. I use ubuntu as vm (headless) for software development tho

>Apple laptops are top notch.

Not working with Linux is a function of Apple, not Linux. There is a crew who have wasted the last half decade trying to make Asahi Linux, a distro to run on ARM macbooks. The result is after all that time, getting an almost reasonably working OS on old hardware, Apple released the M4 and crippled the whole effort. There's been a lot of drama around the core team who have tried to cast blame, but it's clear they are frustrated by the fact that the OEM would rather Asahi didn't exist.

I can't personally consider a laptop which can't run linux "top notch." But I gave up on macbooks around 10 years ago. You can call me biased.

Re: Linux is good now

#282

Post by keyringlight »

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…

It might depend on the distro, but were you running a 10 series or earlier? They dropped Pascal and earlier CPUs with the v590 driver, I know Arch migrated what the nvidia package installed in such a way that could leave someone without an appropriate driver unless they manually moved to a different source.

Then again Arch is one of those distros that has the attitude that you need to be a little engaged/responsible for ongoing maintenance of your system, which is why I'm against blind "just use (distro)" recommendations unless it's very basic and low assumptions about the user.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1prm8rl/archanno...

Re: Linux is good now

#283

Post by braiamp »

jsheard wrote: post #146
fooker wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another unresolved roadblock is Nvidia cards seriously underperforming in DX12 games under Proton compared to Windows. Implementing DX12 semantics on top of Vulkan runs into some nasty performance cliffs on their hardware, so Khronos is working on amending the Vulkan spec to smooth that over.

That's being addressed:

    - https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/directx12-performance-is-terrible-on-linux/303207/432
    - https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/10/contributions/402/attachments/243/327/2025-09-29%20-%20XDC%202025%20-%20Descriptors%20are%20Hard.pdf
    - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpwjJdkg2RE
The problem is on multiple levels, so everything has to work in conjunction to be fixed properly.

Re: Linux is good now

#284

Post by 3A2D50 »

bitanarch wrote: post #91

HDR still doesn't really work on Linux w/ nVidia GPUs. 1. 10bpp color depth is not supported on RGB monitors, which are the majority of LCD displays on the market. Concretely, ARGB2101010 and XRGB2101010 modes are not supported by current nVidia Linux drivers - the drivers only offer ABGR2101010 and XBGR2101010 (See: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/blob/main/... ). 2. Common browsers like Chrome and…

I have Interstellar on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray that features HDR on the cover, Sony 4K Blu-ray player (UBP-X700) and a LG G4 OLED television. I also have an AVR (Denon AVR-S760H 7.2 Ch) connecting both the Blu-ray and a PC running Linux with a RTX 3060 12GB graphic card to the television. I've been meaning to compare HDR on Linux with the Blu-ray. I guess now better than never. I'll reply back to my post after I am done.

Re: Linux is good now

#285

Post by tombert »

keyringlight wrote: post #271
tombert wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If anything this is the challenge with PC as a platform being so varied, any random software/hardware/config variation could bring a whole load of quirks. That probably includes anything that isn't a PC in a time-capsule from when the game originally released, so any OS/driver changes since then, and I don't think we've reached the point where we can emulate specific hardware models to plug into a VM. One of the reas…

Yeah, I think Linus himself pointed out that the desktop is the hardest platform to support because it's unbelievably diverse and varied.

With regards to Linux I generally just focus on hardware from brands that have historically had good Linux support, but that's just a rule of thumb, certainly not perfect.

Re: Linux is good now

#286

Post by casey2 »

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,…

The games don't fail to run because they are so "graphically powerful" they fail to run because you chose to set up your system without the necessary runtime.

There are people who make stripped-down versions of windows. Is it fair to say that because these releases exist that windows isn't "just works" either?

Re: Linux is good now

#287

Post by shadowdev1 »

(cue arrogance) People on HackerNews complaining about Linux Desktop is pretty disappointing. You guys are supposed to be the real enthusiasts... you can make it work.

(cue superiority complex) I've been using Linux Desktop for over 10 years. It's great for literally everything. Gaming admittedly is like 8/10 for compatibility, but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows or use CAD, etc. Seriously, ez.

Never had issues with NVIDIA GFX with any of the desktop cards. Laptops... sure they glitch out.

Originally Wine, then Proton, now Bazzite make it super easy to game natively. The only issues I ever had with games were from the Kernel level anti-cheats bundled. The anti-cheats just weren't available for Linux, so the games didn't start. Anyone familiar with those knows its not a linux thing, it's a publisher/anti-cheat mechanism thing. Just lazy devs really.

(cue opinionated anti-corporate ideology) I like to keep microsoft chained up in a VM where it belongs so can't do it's shady crap. Also with a VM you can do shared folders and clipboard. Super handy actually.

Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pita, and doesn't work well.

Re: Linux is good now

#288

Post by MegaDeKay »

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.

I'd say there are two remaining roadblocks. First and biggest is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks as you point out. But there's also no open source HDMI 2.1 implementation allowed by the HDMI cartel so people like me with an AMD card max out at 4K60 even for open source games like Visual Pinball (unless you count an adapter with hacked firmware between the card and the display). NVidia and Intel get away with it because they implement the functionality in their closed source blobs.

Re: Linux is good now

#289

Post by casey2 »

net01 wrote: post #259
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.

some people want machines that do everything but don't want to do everything to maintain them or even set them up

Re: Linux is good now

#290

Post by scaramanga »

Switched in, ooh i dunno, '98 or '99. Quality is about where it was then relatively speaking. Sure things have improved, mainly just systemd, and we got ACPI and later power management stuff for laptops.

Prior to that windows was better on laptops due to having the proprietary drivers or working ACPI. But it was pretty poor quality in terms of reliability, and the main problem of the included software being incredibly bare bones, combined with the experience of finding and installing software was so awful (especially if you've not got an unlimited credit card to pay for "big professional solutions").

Every time the year of the Linux desktop arrives, I'm baffled, since not much has changed on this end.

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