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

961–970 of 1001 posts

Re: Linux is good now

#961

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

eldaisfish wrote: post #782
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from systemd, tell me what isn't great. The whole benefit of the ecosystem is that you can pick and choose your system components and if you don't like any of then, build your own. I am not trying to be dismissive, if I use a windows these days, it is for work and some errant vm to run windows specific app ( hr block comes to mind -- I am just not willing to spend time to run it any other way ).

i don't want to pick and choose or build my own. I want something that works.

Then, you might not be the right audience for that OS. And that is ok.

Re: Linux is good now

#962

Post by braiamp »

raegis wrote: post #762
braiamp wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? Firefox hasn't been single process since more than 10 years ago. At most, it uses 7% for the main process and I have thousands of tabs open. I can't talk about the other two, but I've had processes use 60% of the system memory without problem (everything else is slow due swapping, but that's expected).

They were talking about instability. I had an old Radeon workstation card in my desktop at home for at least a decade, but with the most recent AMD drivers, Firefox (with hardware acceleration turned on) would crash Gnome and the system when watching videos on YouTube. So I wasted money on one of those new Intel graphics cards to get the stability back (in addition to the time wasted diagnosing the problem).

That seems more of a gnome issue than otherwise. Right now my firefox process is clocking +8h of cpu time, I have 3 youtube videos on pause. My last crash was 2025-07-31, so yeah, I would ask you all what kind of system are you rocking instead.

Re: Linux is good now

#963

Post by ndriscoll »

well_ackshually wrote: post #814
ndriscoll wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competitive gaming cannot possibly be huge. Like literally it is impossible for 99% of gamers to be competitive in any meaningful sense (if you play a game with 1M players and are in the top 1%, congrats, there are 10,000 people who are better than you. You are still unremarkable). It never was huge; it was just a niche you were in. There's massively more people that are just playing the game too blow off steam.

"Competitive football cannot possibly be huge" "Competitive tennis cannot possibly be huge" "Competitive coding cannot possibly be huge" People play competition sports. They except no, or minimal amounts of cheating. Your personal feelings about it don't matter. The kid that plays basketball with 12 years olds on saturday mornings has the right to not have to deal with cheaters, and it doesn't matter if he's in the t…

The kid that plays basketball with 12 year olds on Saturday mornings has the right to just go use the court at the park without being strip searched and drug tested because it's just a game and he's there to have fun. He actually does not have some right to demand no one else cheat, or even that they use the court to specifically play with some established rules. If other people are there playing HORSE or "what time is it Mr Fox", that's fine.

People who get intensely serious about 12 year olds playing basketball because their kid will be in the NBA some day so everyone needs to take the game very seriously so their kid can practice have rightly always been mocked. The entire point is to have fun.

I've played in Friday night sports leagues where people were drinking during the tournaments (and sometimes that's the point, c.f. sloshball). There are absolutely tons of people that do not take even the "competitions" seriously, and even more that aren't even serious enough to join a league.

Video games being something people play at home, I'd probably be surprised if there weren't more people that regularly play any given esports title under the influence of marijuana or alcohol than there are those who take it as a serious thing[0].

On competitive coding, Advent of Code removed the global leaderboard exactly because "people took things too seriously, going way outside the spirit of the contest".

[0] A quick search turns up this poll in the competitive halo subreddit where 40% say they play high. I doubt that's a good sample, but I'm sure the true number is not insignificant: https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveHalo/comments/10mvihq/we...

Re: Linux is good now

#964

Post by ruszki »

sgc wrote: post #746
ruszki wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 runn…

I don’t know why you think that I haven’t tried those configurations in your mind. Are those completely undocumented and cannot be found on the internet or something?

Re: Linux is good now

#965

Post by ruszki »

tstrimple wrote: post #936
ruszki wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Linux truly is far better now than it was even a year ago for gaming stuff. The Linux fanboys stating that everything works flawlessly and better than on Windows aren't doing anyone any favors. Steam Compatibility is a useless flag and ProtonDB is full of "Platinum" games that are barely functional. Despite the additional complexity what got Linux to work well for my son is NixOS. He had attempted to run with multipl…

I heard about it for a while now. I look into NixOS, thanks!

Re: Linux is good now

#966

Post by wltr »

tstrimple wrote: post #936
ruszki wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Linux truly is far better now than it was even a year ago for gaming stuff. The Linux fanboys stating that everything works flawlessly and better than on Windows aren't doing anyone any favors. Steam Compatibility is a useless flag and ProtonDB is full of "Platinum" games that are barely functional. Despite the additional complexity what got Linux to work well for my son is NixOS. He had attempted to run with multipl…

I used Arch Linux on my MacBook Pro 13” (2011) and it was almost perfect (one iGPU), some weird sleep issues, plus battery calibration issues: battery often went down to 7% within like 30 minutes, and then it takes a couple of hours to 0%. But if you happened to close it, it will either power off or hibernate (won’t recall). Then a couple of keys would stop working, and I’d just rsync my entire system to a newer (2014) retina MacBook Pro 13” (instead of fixing the keyboard, there’s no point in that). Perhaps, these laptops are very popular for Linux enthusiasts — I think 15” from 2015 is the best Linux laptop you can get for the money — but this laptop is just perfect! Everything works flawlessly, sleep, hibernation, screen, keyboard backlight… ah, I forgot about the web camera, doesn’t, but I never used it really, it’s crap anyway. The battery life is amazing, I’m getting like 8 hours of real work for the new battery, or even longer for very light work. So, I’d say it depends on the hardware quite a lot. Maybe I’m just very experienced now, but I won’t say I am.

Re: Linux is good now

#967

Post by tsoukase »

I don't play games, so you can imagine the enjoyment of having Linux since 2005 and the same installation of Arch Linux since a decade(?). Free, stable, light, secure, private etc. The hardest troubleshoot is a few commands in bash (eg media PC, phone hacking, server stuff)

Re: Linux is good now

#968

Post by kentonv »

MangoToupe wrote: post #825
kentonv wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nouveau has never been good for gaming. Not their fault (they had to reverse engineer everything), but it was only really ever viable for mostly 2D desktops in my experience.

Sure, but nvidia has always been seen as a liability for basic operation of the computer. Their driver quality is notoriously as bad as it gets. Nouveau fixed this.

I keep hearing people assert this but I've been using nvidia drivers on Linux for 25 years and aside from the pain of getting them installed, they have always just worked with no issues at all.

Whereas every time I install Debian fresh and temporarily get the Nouveau drivers temporarily, basic desktop graphics are slow (no hardware acceleration) and crash-prone.

Re: Linux is good now

#969

Post by sgc »

ruszki wrote: post #964
sgc wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 runn…

I don’t know why you think that I haven’t tried those configurations in your mind. Are those completely undocumented and cannot be found on the internet or something?

Because having so many unsolvable problems would be an extreme edge case (if you had one, it would be much more likely a bug than a basket full of what you are calling unsolvable problems), and there are a lot of bad setting recommendations out there which make it rather difficult to find the right one for your device. It can take quite a bit of experience and quite a bit of persistence - which is again, as I said, not the way it should be. If you are sure you have exhausted your options, please file bug reports.

Re: Linux is good now

#970

Post by ruszki »

sgc wrote: post #969
ruszki wrote: post #964

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know why you think that I haven’t tried those configurations in your mind. Are those completely undocumented and cannot be found on the internet or something?

Because having so many unsolvable problems would be an extreme edge case (if you had one, it would be much more likely a bug than a basket full of what you are calling unsolvable problems), and there are a lot of bad setting recommendations out there which make it rather difficult to find the right one for your device. It can take quite a bit of experience and quite a bit of persistence - which is again, as I said, n…

If you check a thread about GrapheneOS, almost everybody praises it, and many even state that everything works. If you look into it however, a ton of things simply don’t work, and they just don’t care. Heck, even in this thread there are people like that. They just flat out state, that “it works perfectly”, then a few sentence later “x, y, z don’t work”. So, how should I know that 25+ years of Linux knowledge, custom kernel and Linux building, and tinkering are less, than those people who are fine with their free drivers which don’t utilize half of their hardware’s features?
Post reply on HN