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

351–360 of 1001 posts

Re: Linux is good now

#351

Post by foresto »

drnick1 wrote: post #188
aborsy wrote: post #49

Linux desktop is amazing. Coming from Debian, I installed Windows and had to quickly purge it from my hardware! Super bloated, slow, constantly phoned some CC center, automatically connected to OneDrive, … Debian is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Totally quiet and snappy.

Debian (stable) is great but I wouldn't use it for a gaming PC on modern hardware. The drivers included are just too old. Bazzite or Arch (DIY option) seem better options.

Debian Stable gamer here, with modern hardware, having a great time.

> The drivers included are just too old.

This can usually be fixed by enabling Debian Backports. In some cases, it doesn't even need fixing, because userland drivers like Mesa can be included in the runtimes provided by Steam, Flatpak, etc.

Once set up, Debian is a very low-maintenance system that respects my time, and I love it for that.

Re: Linux is good now

#352

Post by kentonv »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #337
kentonv wrote: post #242

I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore. (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draco…

Did you ever get those local SSDs as copy-on-write overlays on Linux? I imagine it'd be easier with btrfs support for seeding device: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Seeding-device.html

Yes, on Linux I was able to move the copy-on-write overlays to use local disks, which is one reason it performs much better (admittedly not a reason that would affect most people).

I am just using dm-snapshot for this -- block device level, no fancy filesystems.

Re: Linux is good now

#353

Post by Spivak »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #173
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.

The irony is that gaming on linux got better but the instigator was not the OSS community. All of it was funded by closed source software competing with other close source software. The OSS community by itself did not have the conviction to climb over this bulwark.

Money and resources suddenly materialized once someone realized that there was profit in it is pretty much the expected way this goes. OpenTofu happened not because of some OSS force of will but because a group of companies needed it to exist for their business.

This flow is basically the bread and butter for the OSS community and the only way high effort projects get done.

Re: Linux is good now

#354

Post by edferda »

Recently switched to Linux Mint from Windows and it has not only been good. It has been cathartic. I enjoy computers again! I am self-hosting some services, what an absolute joy.

Re: Linux is good now

#355

Post by jimbo808 »

I quit gaming a year ago and no longer have a consumer OS installed on any machine. I can't imagine ever willingly going back after getting used to being able to set my machine up any way I want, and know it will work exactly as I've specified, and won't ever spy on me or monetize my data, and actually has an ecosystem for extending it in basically any way I can imagine, with no bloatware, an app ecosystem with no bundled spyware or adware, etc.

Re: Linux is good now

#356

Post by speff »

maccard wrote: post #125
howdyhowdy123 wrote: post #72

Can I run Solidworks on Linux yet? Excel? Labview? Vivado? Adobe products? Altium Designer? (Matlab is mostly yes) Not everybody is just writing Javascript and PHP. Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet? Not that long ago the answer to these questions was mostly no (or sort of yes... but very painfully) On Windows all of this just works.

> Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet? > on windows all of this just works Disagree on the sleep one - my work laptop doesn’t go to sleep properly. The only laptop I’ve ever used that behaves as expected with sleep is a macbook.

That's funny - my work MBP won't go to sleep properly, lol. Often come back to work after the weekend to find a dead laptop.

Re: Linux is good now

#357

Post by mcv »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #288
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'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.

Re: Linux is good now

#358

Post by tapoxi »

znpy wrote: post #253
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 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-ch…

The war is lost. The most popular game that refuses to use kernel-level anti-cheat is Valve's Counter-Strike 2, so the community implemented it themselves (FaceIT) and requires it for the competitive scene.

Re: Linux is good now

#359

Post by [deleted] »

kentonv wrote: post #256
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…

[deleted]

Re: Linux is good now

#360

Post by digiown »

tapoxi wrote: post #350
vbezhenar wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Ship computer with preinstalled Linux that you can't tamper? Sounds like Android. For ordinary computers, secure boot is fully configurable, so it won't work: I can disable it, I can install my own keys, etc. Any for any userspace way to check it I'll fool you, if I own the kernel.

No, just have the anti-cheat trust kernels signed by the major Linux vendors and use secure boot with remote attestation. Remote attestation can't be fooled from kernel space, that's the entire point of the technology. That way you could use an official kernel from Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch etc. A custom one wouldn't be supported but that's significantly better than blocking things universally.

You can't implement remote attestation without a full chain of exploits (from the perspective of the user). Remote attestation works on Android because there is dedicated hardware to directly establish communication with Google's servers that runs independent (as a backchannel). There is no such hardware in PCs. Software based attestation is easily fooled on previous Android/Linux.
Post reply on HN