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Linux is good now

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Re: Linux is good now

#361

Post by tapoxi »

kentonv wrote: post #349
argsnd wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that Fedora hits the right balance of stability while being up to date for anything desktop and specifically gaming focused, Debian has different priorities and packages can be a bit too old. And it’s less of a faff than Arch.

Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things, and those all have their own update schedule independent of the distro.

You're right because the games run in containers anyway, steam-runtime.

Re: Linux is good now

#362

Post by zaptheimpaler »

foresto wrote: post #324
MegaDeKay wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Is HDMI really a roadblock to gaming when DisplayPort exists?

It's a blocker if you want to use a TV, there are almost 0 TVs with DP. This HDMI licensing crap is also the reason a Steam Deck can't output HDMI > 4K@60 unless you install Windows on it.

Re: Linux is good now

#363

Post by saghm »

epistasis wrote: post #215
saghm wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to wonder if Ubuntu's prescriptive stance on things like this is becoming increasingly outdated in an age where there's actually a decent experience out of the box for a lot more stuff on Linux.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…

It's not just Ubuntu, Arch is just as bad. The primary problem is systemd, which provided an adequate OOMd for daemons, but then all the distributions seem to be using it for interactively launched processes If anybody can help me out with a better solution with a modern distribution, that's about 75% of the reason I'm posting. But it's been a major pain and all the GitHub issues I have encountered on it show a big r…

Interesting, either I haven't run into it much or I haven't recognized the source of it when it's something I have encountered.

Re: Linux is good now

#364

Post by digiown »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #307
tapoxi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd be less antianticheat if I could just select the handcuffs at boot time for the rare occasion where I need them. Although even then I'd still have qualms about paying for the creation of something that might pave the path for hardware vendors to work with authoritarian governments to restrict users to approved kernel builds. The potential harms are just not in the same league as whatever problems it might solve f…

Once a slave, always a slave. Running an explicitly anti-user proprietary kernel module that does god-knows-what is not something I'd ever be willing to do, games be damned. It might just inject exploits into all of your binaries and you'd be none the wiser. Since it wouldn't work on VMs you'd have to use a dedicated physical machine for it. Seems to high of a price to play just a few games.

Re: Linux is good now

#365

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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.

My friends are understanding that I don't play games with rootkit anti cheat (whether on Linux or Windows). There are enough games that we can play other games together still, and when they want to play the games with such anti-cheat (e.g. Helldivers 2) they simply play without me. No big deal.

Re: Linux is good now

#366

Post by tapoxi »

mcv wrote: post #357
MegaDeKay wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Does AMD not support Display Port? I'm not an expert on this, but that sounds to me like the superior technology.

TVs don't support displayport, so it makes Linux PCs like the Steam Machine inferior console replacements if you want high refresh rates. A lot of TVs now support 4K/120hz with VRR, the PS5 and Xbox Series X also support those modes.

(Some games support 120, but it's also used to present a 40hz image in a 120hz container to improve input latency for games that can't hit 60 at high graphics quality.)

Re: Linux is good now

#367

Post by zaptheimpaler »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #335
coppsilgold wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competent cheat makers don't have much difficulty in defeating in-kernel anticheats on Windows. With the amount of insight and control available on Linux anticheat makers stand little chance. The best Valve could do is offer a special locked down kernel with perhaps some anticheat capabilities and lock down the hardware with attestation. If they offer the sources and do verified builds it might even be accepted by so…

Anticheat is one of those things where I probably sound really old, but man it’s just a game. If you hate cheating, don’t play on pub servers with randoms or find a group of people you can play with, like how real life works. For competitive gaming, I think attested hardware & software actually is the right way to go. Don’t force kernel-level malware on everyone.

Sorry but you're just old IMO :) PUBG or Arc Raiders have over 100 players in a game. Even Valorant or League have 10 players in a match. It's definitely not easy to find 9 friends to play the same game at the same time as you. And playing any of these games with a cheater can completely wreck the match. If the cheaters go unchecked, over time they start to dominate games where like 30% might be cheaters who can see through walls and insta headshot you and the entire multiplayer mode of the game is ruined. Even worse some cheaters are sneaky, they might have a wallhack or a map showing all players but use it cautiously and it can be quite hard to prove they're cheating but they build up a huge advantage nonetheless. Most of us are happy to have effective anti-cheat, and it's not forced upon us. I understand the tradeoff to having mostly cheater-free games is having to trust the game maker more and am fine with that. Riot for example is quite transparent about what their anti-cheat does, how it works and I don't consider it "malware" anymore than I consider a driver for my graphics card to be "malware" even if they do operate in kernel mode.

Re: Linux is good now

#368

Post by foresto »

jimmar wrote: post #250

I'm slowly de-Microsofting my computing. I've traded OneDrive for Syncthing. I ditched one PC for a Mac. I have the technical skills to run Linux effectively, but the biggest obstacle for my Linux adoption is distro fatigue. Run Ubuntu? Debian? Fedora? PopOS? Kubuntu? Arch? The article introduced yet another one to consider--Bazzite. The Linux world is amazing for its experimentation and collaboration. But the fragme…

Pick a popular distro, and during installation, put your /home directory on its own partition. This way, you won't have much to reconfigure if you ever have a reason to switch distros. (You might not ever have a reason; they're all pretty capable.)

If using Ubuntu LTS for gaming, you might want to add a newer kernel: https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle

Linux Mint would also be a reasonable pick.

Re: Linux is good now

#369

Post by bigyabai »

sroerick wrote: post #343
bigyabai wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NixOS is really a profound experience, once you embrace it. I used Arch for ~3 years and ended up reinstalling it maybe 15 times on my desktop alone. Switched to NixOS and I've used the same installation for 3 years, synced with my laptop and server, switching from x11 to Wayland to KDE to GNOME then back again with no problem. It doesn't feel real sometimes. My dotfiles are modularized, backed up in Github and versi…

I've heard of people doing this and I'm really interested in this. Can you recommend a write up on this or further reading?

I personally remember being inspired by Erase your Darlings and Paranoid NixOS Setup back in the day, less for the hardening measures and more because of how great the Nix syntax looked. Huge, monumental ass-pain setups could be scripted away in one or two lines like it was nothing. You could create wildly optimized configurations for your specific use-case, and then divide them into modules so they're portable.

It's not advisable to switch to one of these paranoid configurations outright, but they're a great introduction to the flexibility provided by the NixOS configuration system. I'd also recommend Xe's documentation of Nix Flakes, which can be used on any UNIX-like system including macOS: https://xeiaso.net/blog/nix-flakes-1-2022-02-21/

https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/

https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-2021-07-18/

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