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Linux is good now

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Re: Linux is good now

#741

Post by 7373737373 »

Animats wrote: post #431

If only. Ubuntu seems to be slowly getting worse. - Firefox seems to be able to freeze both itself and, sometimes, the whole system. Usually while typing text into a large text box. - Recently, printing didn't work for two days. Some pushed update installed a version of the CUPS daemon which reported a syntax error on the cupsd.conf file. A few days later, the problem went away, after much discussion on forums about…

The Gnome desktop environment usability degradation in recent releases (stuff like drag and dropping files and folders between the desktop and the file explorer not working anymore, or not being able to create new empty files with a right click by default without having to create custom templates, being unable to pin apps to the launcher without messing with files, and more) was so horrendous that it felt like actual sabotage was being committed. Who in their right mind would decide to make the UI actively worse?!

Re: Linux is good now

#742

Post by SirMaster »

For me like for many others anti-cheat support is what is still keeping me away. The vast majority of the games I play are incompatible because of this.

I think it will probably change at some point, but until then I just can't use it.

Re: Linux is good now

#743

Post by gf000 »

Biganon wrote: post #727
arcfour wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ . This sounds like you are rejecting help because you have made up your mind in frustration already. Because you are doing it wrong. If you want an OS that just works , you should use Ubuntu or Fedora. Why is SteamOS based on Arch then? Because Valve wants to tweak things in it and tinker with it themselves to get it how they li…

I've been using Arch for 15 years, it's not like I'm suddenly discovering the concept of the distro. But when something crashes with no error message whatsoever, it makes it a tiny bit harder to troubleshoot. Especially when so many people answer, just like I had predicted, "works on my machine". Which would only be a gotcha if I had implied it worked on no machine whatsoever. Which I didn't. I'll tinker some more an…

Well then look at the logs? Sure it's not as in-your-face, but steam/proton does log and I'm fairly sure that a combination of at most setting a command invocation parameter, looking at the game logs and system logs will show you the exact problem and given that these games run just fine for a lot of people, the fix is probably trivial.

Re: Linux is good now

#744

Post by kombine »

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…

Don't go for Ubuntu LTS. There are many choices that would work equally well for you. I'd go for Fedora KDE edition (but could easily be EndeavorOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

Re: Linux is good now

#745

Post by amlib »

mrheosuper wrote: post #509
amlib wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best you can do is build a high end desktop at home and access it remotely with any laptop you desire. The laptop performance then becomes mostly irrelevant (even the OS is less relevant) and by using modern game streaming protocols you can actually get great image quality, low latency and 60+ fps. Though, optimizing it for low bandwidth is still a chore. Have that desktop be reachable with SSH for all your CLI and s…

Bandwidth is not really a problem if you live in decent city. The problem is latency and data usage. 1 Hour streaming consumes GBs of data, that's a big problem if you use cellular network. Latency is another problem, recently LTT video show that even as low as 5-10ms added latency can negatively impact your gaming performance, even if you don't notice. You begin to notice at around 20ms.

How is bandwidth not a problem if data usage on a cellular network is? You can dramatically lower your data usage by constraining bandwidth to say, ~2mbps, but doing so while keeping a decent image requires many sacrifices, like lowering resolution or using a software encoder that can squeeze out as much quality as possible out of 2mbps at a penalty for your latencies (won't matter much since you are already incurring latencies from your internet connection). You may also switch to a wi-fi hotspot once that's an option, and then even lift the bandwidth restrictions.

Regarding latency, this solution is meant as a way to use your notebook for any task, not just gaming. You can still play and enjoy most fps games with a mouse even at 20ms of extra latency, and you can tolerate much more when playing games with a gamepad. If you need to perform your best on a competitive match of cs2 you obviously should be on a wired connection, in front of a nice desktop pc (the very same you were using to stream to your notebook perhaps) and with a nice high refresh rate monitor. Notebooks are usually garbage for that anyways.

Re: Linux is good now

#746

Post by sgc »

ruszki wrote: post #696
Cort3z wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been working professionally on Linux for many years. But about once a year I have to reinstall the os because it craps out for various reasons. The same story goes for most of my team, but for some reason they seem ok with this. My issue with Linux is this: I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this. Yes you can do whatever you want, but I don’t want to do those things. I want to write code…

> janitor Perfect analogy. I'm using Debian for a few months now on my main laptop, and everything is flawed. Seriously, everything. - Hybrid graphics simply doesn't work. The exception is when it works. Don't even try Wayland with it. - Graphics card handling is still full with race conditions. It's random when everything works as intended without manual intervention. - Switching monitors is pain. Sometimes works, s…

I recently installed Debian instead of Ubuntu on my laptop. Although I recognize many of your problems as "you need to know the right way to configure that or it's super annoying" - which sucks but is not impossible to overcome -, I also find that Debian is much more bug filled as a laptop OS than Ubuntu. I was actually extremely surprised by this. I didn't think Ubuntu was doing much of anything.

That said I am running Debian Trixie using wayland / kde / cups / nvidia / etc and do not have any of your problems my graphics work, my printers work, my bluetooth works, sleep works. They all required a lot more configuration than the last several versions of Ubuntu had required (which shouldn't be the case if there is better example just right next door), but none are persistent.

Re: Linux is good now

#747

Post by rasmus-kirk »

fiyec30375 wrote: post #692
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…

> On occasion you have to compile apps from source That's fine for people on hn, but it instantly wipes out any chance of non technical users on Windows and Mac. It's a total deal breaker.

I use Nix (the package manager), works on pretty much any distro and has the largest package set of any package manager.

Re: Linux is good now

#748

Post by raegis »

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.

I don't game, but all my computers run Debian Stable, and my oldest child wastes considerable time gaming on Steam. I had to tweak one or two things for him early on, but it all seems to work fine.

People who don't use Debian misunderstand Stable. It's released every two years, and a subset of the software is kept up to date in Backports. For anything not included in Backports, its trivial to run Debian Testing or Unstable in a chroot on your Stable machine.

I moved to Debian Stable ~20 years ago because constant updates in other distros always screwed up CUPS printing (among other things). Curiously, I was using Ubuntu earlier this year and the same thing happened. Never going back.

Re: Linux is good now

#749

Post by ahartmetz »

joe200 wrote: post #709
ahartmetz wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is from like 20 years ago, but I remember Debian Testing as the one where updates broke the system most frequently, or maybe the longest without fixes: Stable was stable, Sid / unstable was what most Debian developers were using... and Testing was the weird thing that was neither a release nor tested and fixed "live" by developers. What changed?

This is how the flow happens: [upstream] -> [Debian Sid] -> [Debian Testing] -> [Debian stable] The testing happens in Debian Sid.

But who actually tests Testing? If it's not the Debian developers themselves, fixes could take a while. I seem to recall Testing breaking because of package version combinations that never existed, so were never tested, in Sid.

Re: Linux is good now

#750

Post by kentonv »

EMM_386 wrote: post #710
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…

"And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore." I don't understand this - and I'm not being a Windows defender here, I use Linux when I can (and promote its use). But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads and zero "crapware". And it's a Dell! Everything that I didn't want on the machine was removed when I purchased it (two years ago). I see no ads. If I did, this can be fixed easily…

The UI is full of Bing and Copilot tie-ins that I consider to be essentially ads. Recommended content in the start menu. The weather widget that shows you news headlines. The lock-screen-of-the-day with the text description that if you accidentally click on it, you open some Bing page. The Edge default home page. Everything is trying to push me towards engaging with Microsoft's online services, which I have never used and have no desire to use. These are ads.

It's probably the case that I could turn all of these off by hunting down the right config options, and if I used Windows as my primary desktop I'm sure I would. But it's just on my game machines which I don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining, and new crap keeps popping up in updates. It's exhausting.

A Debian Linux desktop, in comparison, is not trying to push you to anything. It's a breath of fresh air (not a term I use often but really fits here).

Note: I never made it to Windows 11, only Windows 10. But my understanding is that these things are getting worse, not better. And while not exactly the same thing, there has been a lot of talk lately about how the file explorer has become so bloated and slow that they have to preload it into memory at startup so that it can respond quickly when you click it... omg, I do not want that.

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