Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux is good now

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 1001 posts

Re: Linux is good now

#481

Post by krupan »

coppsilgold wrote: post #241
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.

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…

Not a gamer, but it seems like super competitive games should be played on locked down consoles not custom-built PCs where the players have full control?

Also, for more casual play, don't players have rankings so that you play with others about your level? Cheaters would alll end up just playing with other cheaters in that case, wouldn't they?

Re: Linux is good now

#482

Post by desireco42 »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #77
desireco42 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My VR glasses work on Omarchy, to my surprise, I plugged them and they work. I have XReal, older model.

Aren't the XReals just displays in the glasses? If they work with other devices, it's no surprise linux can just use a display standard.

But they work out of the box, which is my point. You can use a device that can be inbetween which places screen into fixed space in front of you for example. While it is cool, it is kind of a hassle to have this device inbetween. I just plug them directly and they work.

Re: Linux is good now

#483

Post by amlib »

tapoxi wrote: post #366
mcv wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Correction, you can get 4K@120hz with HDMI 2.0, but you won't get full chroma 4:4:4, instead 4:2:0 will be forced.

In my case I have an htpc running linux and a radeon 6600 connected via hdmi to a 4k @ 120hz capable tv, and honestly, at the sitting distance/tv size and using 2x dpi scaling you just can't tell any chroma sub-sampling is happening. It is of course a ginormous problem when on a desktop setting and even worse if you try using 1x dpi scaling.

What you will lose however is the newer forms of VRR, and it may be unstable with lots of dropouts.

Re: Linux is good now

#484

Post by philajan »

willis936 wrote: post #464
Daunk wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They started with Hyprland, GNOME or KDE Plasma. Most of them have ended up using Cinnamon, and the rest use XFCE.

hyprland is a fun spectacle, but takes insane effort to make remotely livable. Also any apparent shortcut (dotfiles) will do nasty damage to your install. Anyone hypr-curious should sandbox in an install they don't mind wiping.

I’m really curious about your experience, what distro you used hyprland on, what dotfiles did damage to your install etc.

I just installed hyprland yesterday and outside of having to switch back to i3 once to install what they had set for a terminal in their default config(kitty), I haven’t had to leave again.

Re: Linux is good now

#485

Post by devnullbrain »

SonnyTark wrote: post #249

A long time ago when I was in University, I was a volunteer in the Ubuntu group. In addition to evangelizing Linux/OSS, We were trying to convince our University to switch to opensource software for at least some engineering education with only a little bit of success. After a particularly busy OSS event a non-programmer friend of mine asked me, why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make…

When you (try to) use libre software, the problems you run into tend not to be related to insufficient engineering, but more societal and economic, where they would be less likely to appear if there were more people in your cohort.

Examples:

- An important document is sent to me in a proprietary format

- A streaming service uses a DRM service owned by a tech giant that refuses to let it work with open source projects

- A video game developer thinks making games work on Linux isn't worth getting rid of rootkit anticheat

The downside is Windows users would have to live in a world without subscription-based office suites, locked down media, and letting the CCP into your ring 0.

Re: Linux is good now

#486

Post by chii »

marcyb5st wrote: post #477
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.

I always wondered. Isn't exactly what eBPF would allow you to do? Assuming that cheats work by reading (and modifying) the memory of the game process you can you can attach a kprobe to the sys_ptrace system call. Every time any process uses it, your eBPF program triggers. You can then capture the PID and UID of the requester and compare it against a whitelist (eg only the game engine can mess with the memory of that…

> your eBPF program triggers

but how does the anti-cheat know that the kernel is not modified such that it disables certain eBPF programs (or misreports cheats/spoofs data etc)?

This is the problem with anti-cheat in general (and the same exists with DRM) - the machine is (supposedly) under the user's total control and therefore, unless your anti-cheat is running at the lowest level, outside of the control of the user's tampering, it is not trustworthy. This leads to TPM requirements and other anti-user measures that are dressed as pro-user in windows.

There's no such thing in linux, which makes it inoperable as one of these anti-cheat platforms imho.

Re: Linux is good now

#487

Post by eru »

nine_k wrote: post #450
eru wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely. I doubt it's a large reason. I'd put more weight on eg Linus being a great project lead and he happens to work on Linux. And a lot of other historical contingencies.

BSD does a few things right, hence it's used by Netflix (who share back some of their work), userland of macOS (because Apple don't like GPL, I assume), PS4 and PS5 (IDK if anything seeps back upstream from there).

There's also plenty of software available on Linux and other operating systems that uses the BSD license.

Re: Linux is good now

#488

Post by oreally »

dashim wrote: post #68

I use a Linux PC every day but I wouldn't recommend it to normal people. They're not going to feel any renewed sense of ownership from it, just annoyance at having to think about technical gibberish when they just want to get on with using the computer.

Thanks for the counterbalancing post. Linux isn't quite there yet.

Re: Linux is good now

#489

Post by chii »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #367
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

the bloggers/journalists calling it malware is doing the conversation a disservice. The problem is only really the risk of bugs or problems with kernel level anti-cheat, which _could_ be exploited in the worst case, and in the best case, cause outages.

The classic example recently is the crowdstrike triggered outtage of computers worldwide due to kernel level antivirus/malware scanning. Anti-cheat could potentially have the exact same outcome (but perhaps smaller in scale as only gamers would have it).

If windows created a better framework, it is feasible that such errors are recoverable from and fixable without outages.

Re: Linux is good now

#490

Post by oreally »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #438

>3.2% of overall Steam users. The success measurements are quite strange. How am I supposed to think Linux is finally good when 96.8% of users do not care to adopt it. I can't think of anything else with that high of a rejection rate. The vast majority do not consider it good enough to use over Windows.

From what I've heard most of that 3% is steam decks, so the growth isn't exactly people switching their daily OS driver.
Post reply on HN