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Linux is good now

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Re: Linux is good now

#881

Post by HumblyTossed »

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…

I thought it was just my bubble, but I guess you're right, it does appear Linux is being talked about more in the mainstream.

Re: Linux is good now

#882

Post by HumblyTossed »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #10
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…

Gaming now works better on Linux than it does on Windows. This must be upsetting for Microsoft, but it was their game to lose.

They asked AI and it told them they needed to focus more on AI instead.

Re: Linux is good now

#883

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)

If every PC gamer would finally just hop into Linux for a year, no Windows, don't buy games that don't work. Just hard boycott, we could actually do a drastic change for PC gaming as a result. As they say "vote with your wallet" well I've been using Linux as my main OS with all my Steam games for about 3 years now? I only use Windows on work computers, but I'm increasingly only going to apply to work at places that either let me use Linux or will give me a Mac to work. I'm voting with my wallet full force. Windows has been turning into a steaming pile of trash.

I've repeatedly said, if Microsoft would release "Windows for Gamers" without all the bloated BS on it, I would consider using it.

I spent 2 grand or more on a prebuilt gaming system and it came with Windows Home which didn't let me add new users, so I was stuck with a Microsoft account user. Jokes on Microsoft, that and their AntiVirus sending files to their servers without any audit log was the last straw for me. I'm not supporting Microsoft, I say this as someone who is a "fanboy" for Microsoft (.NET is the only good thing they have going, but they can't even stick to one GUI stack they have to reinvent it 1000 more times).

Re: Linux is good now

#884

Post by MegaDeKay »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #602
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…

This is the first I learned of this since personally I have no need of anything over 4k@60 (that already borders on absurd in my mind). I'm curious if this is something that's likely to get reverse engineered by the community at large? Outrageous that a ubiquitous connection protocol is allowed to be encumbered in this way.

For the particular use case I mentioned in my earlier post (Visual Pinball), 4k@120 is actually a pretty big deal. We often play on screens 42" and up so the 4k detail is put to good use and makes things like the instruction cards in the corners legible. But the bigger difference is the smoothness in gameplay that 120Hz gets you. The ball travels really fast so 120 Hz helps gameplay a lot while reducing lag at the same time. And because a large chunk of the playfield is static at any one time, you don't need something like a 5090 to hit 120 Hz at that resolution like you might with a triple-A shooter.

Re: Linux is good now

#885

Post by simoncion »

cogman10 wrote: post #708
mcv wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't TVs support displayport? If HDMI 2.1 support is limited, a TV with displayport sounds like an obvious choice. I thought audio might be the reason, for as far as I can tell, displayport supports that too.

Legacy is a bitch. It took a long time to move from the old component input over to HDMI. The main thing that drove it was the SD to HD change. You needed HDMI to do 1080p (I believe, IDK that component ever supported that high of a resolution). Moving from HDMI to display port is going to be the same issue. People already have all their favorite HDMI devices plugged in and setup for their TVs. You need a feature tha…

> For example, perhaps display port could offer something like power delivery.

It already does. A guaranteed minimum of 1.65W at 3.3V is to be provided. Until very recently, HDMI only provided a guaranteed minimum of something like 0.25W at 5V.

Re: Linux is good now

#886

Post by epistasis »

digiown wrote: post #377
mort96 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your primary issue is that you have a severe RAM deficiency for what you're trying to use your machine for. Any OOM killer, be it the kernel's per-process one or systemd-oomd's per-service one, only exists to try to recover from an out-of-memory scenario where the alternative is to kernel panic (in the case of the kernel's oom killer) or for the system to completely lock up (in the case of systemd-oomd…

> getting more memory A bit hard to do now :(

Hah, I actually got a new personal 64GB box just for some experiments I was doing where I needed a 33GB dataset in RAM at a time. Fortunately EBay makes this sort of bearable, especially using last generation's tech.

A few months ago I almost did an EBay order for 1TB of RAM for a different project, but chickened out because of how far RAM prices had risen recently, and I thought they'd probably go down. How wrong I was!

Re: Linux is good now

#887

Post by cogman10 »

simoncion wrote: post #885
cogman10 wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legacy is a bitch. It took a long time to move from the old component input over to HDMI. The main thing that drove it was the SD to HD change. You needed HDMI to do 1080p (I believe, IDK that component ever supported that high of a resolution). Moving from HDMI to display port is going to be the same issue. People already have all their favorite HDMI devices plugged in and setup for their TVs. You need a feature tha…

> For example, perhaps display port could offer something like power delivery. It already does. A guaranteed minimum of 1.65W at 3.3V is to be provided. Until very recently, HDMI only provided a guaranteed minimum of something like 0.25W at 5V.

It's not nothing, but it's also very little to play with.

5W is what I'd think is about the minimum for doing something useful. 25W would actually be usable by a large swath of devices. The raspberry pi 4, for example, has a 10W requirement. Amazon's fire stick has ~5W requirement.

Re: Linux is good now

#888

Post by anonymousab »

neogodless wrote: post #843
TulliusCicero wrote: post #837

The thing that gets me about Windows is: when's the last time Microsoft added a major new feature to Windows I actually gave a shit about? A feature that actually felt useful to me as a consumer? Windows 7 was nice, but since then, I struggle to think of anything. Since 7, it feels like it's just been upsell after upsell, features that are about Microsoft selling me on something or annoying the crap out of me rather…

For me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux Note that it's coming up on 10 years. I think I am hard-pressed to think of a more recent example...

They deprecated the more interesting version of WSL after a short while, unfortunately. WSL2 ended up just being a bog-standard VM setup.

Re: Linux is good now

#889

Post by system2 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #874
system2 wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an Android tablet vs a linux pc is a completely separate thing. Not even close. I am talking about a user who knows Linux, uses it at home for personal PC purposes. It is non-existent.

Chromebook is a PC. The PC is passé as well, regular folks have moved on. First you said it was unsuitable. Then you said it was non-existent. Neither are true, but pick an argument.

They still don't know what Linux is, nor do they use it intentionally. Chromebook's OS is no different than an Android OS. You seem to want to argue by just throwing random things. Good luck. :)

Re: Linux is good now

#890

Post by utopiah »

Parae wrote: post #737
utopiah wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards Not at all my experience which makes me question the rest. Also https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 most people seem quite happy with it so it's not a "me" problem. Finally the "10-30% drop in average FPS across the board" might be correct, then so what? I understand a LOT of gamers want to have "the best" performance for what they paid good money for but…

> pretty much NO game becomes less fun with even a 30% FPS drop I mostly play fighting games. A 7% drop in FPS is more than enough to break the whole game experience as combo rely on frame data. For example Street Fighter 6 is locked at 60 fps. A low punch needs 4 frames to launch and leaves a 4-frames window to land another hit. If there was a 7% drop in FPS, you would miss your combo. Even the tiniest drop in FPS m…

I played competitive Quake on LAN and online. If your setup, hardware/software, can't handle your configuration you either get a better one (spending money, rollback your OS, etc) or adjust it (lower your configuration, nobody plays competitive gaming for the aesthetics, Quake in such a context is damn ugly and nobody cares).

It's not about a drop in game, it's about being prepared for the game. If you get a 7% drop, or even a .1% drop (whatever is noticeable to you) then you adjust.

To be clear I'm not saying worst performance is OK, I'm saying everybody wants 500FPS for $1 hardware but nobody gets that. Consequently we get a compromise, e.g. pay $2000 for 60FPS and so be it. If you have to pay $2000 + $600 or lower graphics settings to still get 60FPS that's what you do.

PS: FWIW competitive gaming is niche in gaming. Most people might want to compete but in practice most people are not, at least not professionally. It's still an important use case but it's not the majority. Also from my own personal experience I didn't get performance drop.

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