Is there anything that makes AMD CPU’s the preferred choice over Intel CPU’s, when running Linux? I was of the understanding that compatibility was quite smoothed out at this point at the CPU/motherboard level and that there wouldn’t be any particular preference in that respect.
I myself have had both Intel CPU’s back in the Sandy Bridge days and then AMD CPU’s since Zen - both worked equally well for Linux in my experience.
as another comment said, it’s probably the steam deck contributing to the amd numbers. i don’t think intel is any worse compared to amd on the cpu side of things.
Intel’s Linux support has always been pretty good. IIRC they even do open source video drivers, it’s just that nobody cared about drivers for their IGPs and they didn’t have real video cards until recently.
I am generally supportive of the “underdog”, so at least for now I am choosing AMD parts (disclaimer: subject to change - or at least continuous reconsideration)
I think the Ryzen CPU just gives more bang for the buck, as well considering purchase price as energy consumption. That’s not Linux related, but I think Linux users generally tend to care less about “market leader”, sometimes even as far as consciously supporting the underdog.
But the GPU level (APU) on the other hand, Intel is still bad there. If you want a small box, where you can occasionally do some medium gaming, you better get AMD.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself but I recently built a new PC for myself with an AMD Ryzen 7950X. When I was doing research I looked at loads of benchmarks and prices of both AMD and Intel chips and ultimately chose AMD because it offered the best value. Especially when you factor in the power costs over time (eco mode is very impressive and yes, I do run with eco mode enabled).
I’d imagine most folks who build their own PCs go through the same sort of obsessive process, haha.
There’s no major issues with either AMD or Intel CPUs on Linux these days so that’s not really a factor. I did go the extra mile though to double check that the 2.5GB Ethernet and Wifi chips in the motherboard I chose had excellent Linux support. I also made sure that updating the motherboard BIOS didn’t require Windows-only software (turned down one motherboard because of reports of Linux users having bad experiences there).
I like the eco option too! Zen CPUs are quite effective at slightly lower clocks than what gives the utmost of performance, which is neat when an energy crisis hits. Is that why you bought a 7950X, and then chose to make use of the eco option? So that you at a later point could turn up the performance (given an acceptable trade off with energy at that time)?
I’d also guess a lot of people like that somewhat obsessive but exciting feeling when researching new gear (be it hardware or otherwise)! Choosing the right stuff for you - with options and capabilities - is a fun exercise in optimisation. At least that’s how I think of it.
Yeah i get that about support and ability to update firmware; and it’s actually what I was interested in learning when I asked with regards to the Intel/AMD debacle. But it’s more regarding the other components in the setup that would affect the experience, right? Do you run a Linux distribution daily, or was it simply required that it should be able to someday?
I myself have used Ubuntu for years, and finally got my better half to let me install it (though it was Kubuntu for both of us at that time). It actually worked quite well, until we got to gaming Hogwarts Legacy… that didn’t quite agree with our setups. On one (5600X+6950) it was sadly only fixed when I switched it to Windows. The other one was also switched to Windows (😓) but it didn’t fix the problem - after a lot of tries and increasing frustration, I tried turning off SMT. And it worked… entirely. That is a 1800X+6950.
I’d really like to go back to Kubuntu (or Neon), but it would have to be a sure solution as I have just started a job and the free time is limited now. I tried lots of debugging measures, including trying to increase the memory maps (I think - please correct me if I’m wrong) to rather large number, as others said it was defined to on the Steam Deck. Also I tried SAM both on/off without luck. So, Windows it is for now, but I lurk in these sections on any input for gaming on Linux, hoping 😅
I used Solus for a while on my laptop. One day a minor kernel version bump caused my display to stay black. I reported it to the Solus bug tracker and they told me it’s not their problem, and I should deal with the kernel devs. But of course the kernel devs reasonably tell you to deal with your distribution if they’ve modified the kernel, which Solus had.
So I installed Tumbleweed and never looked back. I don’t miss Solus. It was fine, but I don’t trust it now, the way I do trust Tumbleweed.
The nice thing about a decent sized distro is when something specific about your hardware or config causes you a problem like that there will be others who experience the same thing, and it is easier to get help. And if you want to be cautious, you can even wait a bit for updates and watch the forums to see what pops up.
That said, I used to use a smaller distro (also a Tumbleweed user now) and they were always good about helping users troubleshoot such issues, so your experience doesn’t speak well for Solus. The character of the user forums is an important thing to look at when choosing a disto.
No, it was a small dev team and it died out. Stick to distros that are established and have been around for awhile. You’ll see a lot of small hobby distros that’ll disappear over night. For an easy beginner rolling release distro, I’d suggest openSUSE rolling. They are an established company and aren’t going anywhere. Their releases are very stable and have a very easy to use GUI installer and updater in the distro. It’s general use as well, not a lot extra besides the desktop environment, tools, browser, etc. Seems exactly what you’re looking for and is all out of the box.
I think they mean the fact that the development team has seen some shuffling and the project stagnated for a bit. I love Budgie, which comes from Solus, but I’d rather use it on a different distro than using Solus, which seems a bit off-balance at the moment. Give them time to stabilize before trying them.
I don’t think the advice is that people should ignore small distros but that small distros won’t be as beginner friendly.
Really learning to function in Linux involves a lot of searching for what went wrong and being in a larger distro increases the chance that somebody has run into your problem before.
That you should take them with a grain of salt and see their track record over time. If a distro is only up for a month and ran by one person, maybe don’t make that your daily driver. If that same one person keeps going for 3 years, maybe consider it having more legitimacy. Even mediumish size distros like Void Linux almost crashed over night. Big ones like Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE won’t ever die over night.
Manjaro’s delayed package system can actually make things less stable if you use AUR. I’d recommend EndeavourOS for that experience, it’s very similar to Manjaro but in my experience hasn’t broken as much
I use arch because i like to do research mess with things and is fun, manjaro that’s what i would suggest anyone moving to Linux it’s just that good of a distro to use and mostly sre trolls so let them be.
I’ve never used Arch or Nix, but I switched from Void -> Guix and have been very happy with it. It’s such a huge peace of mind to be able to have your whole system declaratively configured, package changes being atomic and generational (rollbacks so no worries about breakage), Guix shell for messing about, and being able to make your system do anything you can write in Scheme.
That’s my daily driver. On servers so far I’ve gone with Debian Stable + Guix.
Also Void is still a fantastic distro, and is what I would use if not for Guix/Nix.
Interesting! Thank you for that. The only init systems I am really familiar with are the old system V, rc.d, OpenRC, and systemd. I actually don’t mind systemd all that much now that I’ve gotten used to it. I still don’t like the way Poettering basically forced it on us but it’s tolerable.
i use arch, it’s amazing, everything i wanna do works other then games since i have some old cheap nvidia gpu which is hardware fault itself, i wanna do developer tasks just works, wanna do tweaks just works and it’s fun to use. i tried using other Distros i just can’t use debian based or arch based just bare bone arch with gnome or xfce depending on my mood. if i switch fedora is always my 2nd choice but not sure after some news released on red hat I didn’t stick to fedora because of lack of package or something like that just package management things kept me in arch.
Maybe certain people should think twice about setting up an entire business model of support based on having the current company do all the engineering work, cloning it, and then taking the support contracts for it.
Both Fedora and CentOS Stream are still very much upstream. Just certain CentOS alternatives are throwing a hissy-fit/tantrum that their nice neat little “cloned distro + support” business model fell apart overnight because they built their entire business off of what’s basically (not entirely) a loophole.
The Red Hat controversy has popped up a lot lately but this is the first time I’ve seen this perspective. It’s the the actual reason behind the change? Was there a distro particularly guilty of doing this?
Oracle for ages, and Red Hat had made changes in the last to make it more difficult for Oracle (something about the kernel patches).
Rocky more recently, CIQ had been selling support contracts, including a well publicized contract at NASA very recently for a few workstations.
If it was just AlmaLinux making a free clone I’m not sure if they would have made the change or not. Obviously they got rid of the original CentOS so it might have still been on their minds. Also, they were doing a lot of packaging and debranding work to enable this that was no benefit to Red Hat, so it may have been a matter of deciding the cost and resources was more than they could justify, especially when it is essentially putting the code in yet another, third place (Stream, customer SRPMs, the git site).
There’s no way this change stops Oracle, though. Oracle will continue doing whatever they want and the consumers can abandon hope, all ye who enter into contracts with Oracle. (The fact that this is all Rocky and Alma and nobody was talking about going to Oracle after Red Hat killed CentOS should be a sign.)
Anyway point is, Red Hat can cry about Rocky and Alma all they like but if those two had the same institutional backing as Oracle they’d shut up quick. They just think they can get away with preventing small fries from exercising their rights under the GPL.
I think we haven’t seen this perspective is because it’s not a good take on things. After IBM bought RH they killed CentOS which was bug compatible with RHEL. A lot of devs used CentOS to be able to easily ensure compatability with RHEL. RH replaced CentOS with CentOS stream which is not bug compatible with RHEL. The community was able to move past this blunder thanks to Rocky and ALMA “rebuilding” RHEL in the spirit of the old CentOS.
Now RH has killed off the ability for the community to build a free bug compatible distro and instead want devs to register for 16 (free) RHEL testing licenses. No other major distro that I know of does this.
I’m not a dev but it seems like a good way to lose support for your platform. If you want to make money and kill clones make your distro free but charge for official support.
If you want to make money and kill clones make your distro free but charge for official support.
That model just does not work. For the engineering that goes into RedHat (and all the contributions back to the community they send), they just don’t make enough for that to happen. Everyone just wants to shrug this off as “Oh IBM has lots of money so that’s not a problem”. This “make it free and charge for support” model almost never works for FOSS yet so many people want to believe it does. On an enterprise level, it just doesn’t. People who want to use an enterprise distro of Linux for free also likely don’t want to pay for support either, instead wanting to support it themselves. Which is all well and good but that doesn’t account for the fact RHEL does all the engineering, all the building, all the testing, everything, and then puts that release up for use. All of that has to be covered somehow.
There was never any promise that you’d always be able to create a “bug compatible distro”. Ever. The GPL does not cover future releases or updates and never has, and even implying that it should sets a dangerous precedent of people being entitled to what you haven’t even created yet.
Rather than hearing the emotional takes from people that want to turn this into “RedHat vs the Linux Community”, I strongly suggest you listen to LinuxUnplugged: linuxunplugged.com/517?t=506.
RedHat is still contributing everything upstream, and CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. You have full access to the source of whatever you buy.
The only thing that has changed here is that the loophole that Alma and Rocky were using to create a RHEL clone and then offer support for it (Which is literally RedHat’s own business model) is gone. Those two are throwing a tantrum because they got to set up a nice easy business model where they literally did nothing more than clone RHEL and then offer support for it and that free lunch is over. That’s it. They don’t contribute back to RHEL, they don’t do anything to help development. They sold themselves as the “free” or “cheaper” alternative and now they’re getting burned for building their entire business of the work done by RHEL.
Everything else in this story is noise, drama, and unnecessary emotion.
Listening to the podcast at the moment, it’s grim. They have a Red Hat employee as the special guest and just agree 100% with the company line. I think I’m meant to feel sorry for poor little Red Hat & IBM being taken advantage of but it just all feels very silly. I’m gonna have to turn it off shortly but so far it feels like a paid advert for Red Hat. Nothing but positivity for Red Hat and being pretty nasty about anyone who doesn’t 100% agree with Red Hat.
Wow, that’s a weird take. The host brings up several points on the other side too, and the Red Hat employee even acknowledges some shortcomings, but all you really heard was “RedHat good everyone else bad” when you listened to that?
I mean, you want multiple perspectives, you need to include someone who has a stake in both. The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side, does it not make sense to bring in someone from RedHat? Why are they automatically just “company yes men”?
How can you ever have any kind of nuance or understanding of the other side if you just view it black and white like that? I’ve read and understood the claims from people that are upset with Red Hat, and I kind of get it, but I also think these people don’t really understand the value of what it is they’re using. Under-appreciating what you get for “free” is a very, very common sentiment among FOSS users (and I’m no exception, I’m sure I’m guilty of it too). But the facts here are simple; no one is really “losing” anything here except Rocky and Alma, and they should not have built their business model on basically taking de-branded RHEL and selling support for it directly.
Like I said, Fedora is not going anywhere, CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. If you are a Red Hat customer, the source code of whatever you run is always fully available. There is literally nothing being lost by anyone except those who wanted to use Rocky/Alma as a perfect 1:1 clone of RHEL without contributing a single penny back to RedHat. Yet somehow, the narrative has been changed into “Redhat is being evil and violating the spirit of open source and blah blah blah” and somehow, conveniently, no one has noticed that all of the narrative seems to only benefit/support Rocky and Alma? No one finds that the least bit suspicious?
Whether or not RedHat is going to suddenly claw back a bunch of business from all these people that were using “free” RHEL, that I highly doubt. As far as a move to try to regain perceived losses, I doubt RedHat is going to have any success with that, if that’s their intention. But see, I can have the opinion that they’re removing loopholes for competitors who add absolutely nothing (whether monetary or code contributions) but take and “resell”, and I can also have the opinion that it’s probably not going to change the bottom line much because people who were used to getting “RHEL” for “free” aren’t going to start paying for RHEL, they’re just going to go elsewhere.
TBF someone did say stream ‘wasn’t a great name’ which was the harshest criticism of Red Hat I heard.
If: “The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side” as you say it might not have been too difficult to source someone knowledgeable with a slightly different opinion to that of someone on Red Hat’s payroll for at least an interesting debate, or follow up podcast as presumably Red Hat/ IBM don’t want employees debating this stuff.
If, as you say, the entire community is seemingly against them, a balanced take doesn’t seem to be 2 people just agreeing with an employee about company policy and denigrating “freeloaders”.
I’ve been watching shitty behavior from Red Hat for well over a decade now and am not a fan of the company but I’m happy to be written off as a tinfoil hat wearing relic of the past…but people like Jeff Geerling describing them as sticking a knife in his back, twisting it and abusing the community should at least give a little pause for thought. He explicitly says he doesn’t want Red Hat employees patronizing him with exactly the sort of stuff the Red Hat employee is being encouraged to do in the podcast.
Jeff always seemed like quite a reasonable and easy going chap to me and doesn’t often use his platform to discuss being stabbed, abused, patronized and made a fool out of.
Hm, then respectfully, if it’s not possible for a RedHat employee to be anything more than an advertisement and we’re judging the number of people on either side to be the indicator of truth, then I guess there’s nothing productive for you and I to discuss. I didn’t hear anything that sounded like rationalization or excuses from the RedHat guy.
Something people were getting for free is no longer free. Those people will always outnumber anyone who has a different perspective on the situation. Which is why I said that FOSS enthusiasts have a tendency not to understand or appreciate what they’re getting for “free” and everyone wants to treat open source like it’s entirely powered by community and spirit and “money” or “compensation” or “economics” don’t really mean anything because we shrug it aside.
Everyone wants to demonize the big bad corporate IBM but somehow we’re totally happy looking the other way while Rocky Linux happily clones the product and sells support contracts to NASA that should rightfully go to RedHat, no matter how much money RedHat makes.
I think RedHat has provided tons of alternatives and compromises that don’t involve buying RHEL. Again, I don’t think this decision is going to convert anyone to a paid customer.
It’s entirely possible. They could have gotten Jeff or anyone else who didn’t agree with Red Hat on the show, there is not a shortage of people in the community that disagree as you say. They could have done another show to cover what ‘the entire linux community’ thinks about this.
For whatever reason they choose to invite on a Red Hat employee, not ask any difficult questions and generally just agree with everything he says. I don’t know the Red Hat dev or the people doing the podcast but if the ‘entire linux community’ are not happy it’s not great journalism.
“Now we’ve heard Red Hat’s version of events, for some balance we will interview the devs of Rocky & Alma and next week we have editor of The Register on”
I’ve not looked at the podcast, maybe they have done this sort of thing…but if their only contribution is to get on a Red Hat employee and agree with him, I’m confortable dismissing them.
If I was IBM and my employee was going on a podcast for damage limitation, I’d want assurances those hosting would be doing exactly what they did, agreeing with company policy.
I rely on Linux, not Red Hat. In my time on linux, a decade or so, Linus has been consistently awesome and Red Hat have consistently been dicks.
If Linus starts ranting about freeloaders I will listen, but freeloader chat from IBM is less compelling.
One of the best comments on it that I’ve seen. Kudos to you.
Redhat develops a ton and probably wouldn’t care about a free downstream done by the community but taking their hard work and doing nothing except “support” is just cannibalizing RHEL. Don’t blame them honestly.
I am not concerned at all, mostly because I do not think that they have taken any anti-user actions recently.
There is no circumstance, where I as a user, either as a personal user or in my professional capacity as someone running production systems, am affected by their source code decision. It’s only an issue if I decide I want to release a Green Hat Linux AND I want to be their customer.
The GPL does not force them to do business with me, and it does NOT require them to distribute source to me if they did not distribute the software to me. Many people may consider this move against the spirit of the GPL, and I think that’s what is causing most of the anger. Well maybe it’s time for a new GPL then that codifies that and explicitly says that, and start the herculean effort of driving adoption of that new license. It didn’t go well for GPLv3 or AGPL.
Now the Fedora telemetry proposal… is just that, a proposal. They are being transparent about “hey we are considering this, what do y’all think?”. Well, they’re certainly getting feedback on what the community thinks about that.
Here, people are angry that they are even considering the idea of telemetry. This is understandable. People treat telemetry like it’s a dirty word, because Microsoft and co. have made it so. Telemetry can be used for nefarious purposes, there is no doubt about that.
I believe that telemetry can be a good thing when it is done correctly. The question of whether the box should be checked by default is an important one, they need to be careful that users actually understand and having it enabled is an informed decision and not something they click past without comprehending. As long as the data collected is restricted, strictly filtered to avoid fingerprinting and leaking user data, this can be used to improve the software. Without any data on how your users experience your software, you are flying blind and throwing darts at your codebase trying to make improvements. The people filing bugs are usually not representative of the average user or their experience. Basic information like “does anyone even use this” or “how reliable is this feature” can help them prioritize their efforts.
I’ll take a trust but verify approach on this. The client side code of Fedora is all open source, so if I have concerns I can take a look at exactly what it is doing and raise the alarm if there’s problems. I’m sure someone will make a Fedora De-telemetrified Spin I can switch to in that case. After all Fedora is not RHEL, their source issue is orthogonal to this one.
If you made it this far, you may think I made some reasonable points… or you think I’m on Red Hat’s payroll (I’m not). Well, I gave it straight as asked, this is how I feel. I’m a user if both RHEL and Fedora and I’m not planning to change that anytime soon.
I absolutely agree with everything you pointed out here. Fedora has been my go-to distro for awhile now and I’m gonna ride the Fedora wagon till the very end.
Fuck that noise. There is no reason to support repeated practices which violate the spirit of open source. There are plenty of decent choices out there which are not fedora and I wish people would use them instead of this ibm nonsense.
Not op, but if I’m honest for a laptop user who needs up to date packages. Fedora is the only distro I’ve used which is both stable and user friendly.
An excellent example is when i had Arch installed (both Manjaro and later EndevourOS) when I connected HDMI it never switched over to the new audio source. And whenever I did switch it, it would always go back to the built in speakers if I was to unplug and replug it.
Never had this as an issue in Fedora since it always remembers my last configuration.
Have you tried tumbleweed? As someone who uses both Fedora (or more accurately Nobara) and tumbleweed, my laptop experience on tumbleweed has actually been slightly better on tumbleweed.
Ever since the whole RHEL meltdown here I looked into alternatives if fedora stops getting support. So I’ve tried tumble weed in a VM.
From my initial impression it’s on par with fedora for most things. But a complete lack of community run repos like copr makes it hard for me to switch to right now. Especially since I need XPadNeo support.
However if I was to distort hop again this would be the one I move to next, at least at this time.
“AMD CPU use among people who run Linux, only play custom maps on CS:GO, refuse to buy anything on pistol round, still haven’t learned how to use GIMP properly, and work as a low level IT slave, approaching 90%.”
I mean, we do realize a large percentage of “Linux Gamers” are running steam decks, right? And AMD has been the best choice for Linux users for a while. 70% in that context is kinda sad.
do intel cpus not perform as well on linux? im a little ootl on this but i thought the cpu compatibility was just fine on both amd and intel on linux, unlike the gpu scene where amd is doing the best on linux
Intel CPUs work fine with Linux. They’re still the market share leader and you’d hear a lot of complaining from Linux newcomers if you had problems on literally most pro laptops (Thinkpads were Intel-exclusive or close enough for a while).
GPUs is were vendor choice matters more, Nvidia is STARTING to get good, but AMD has been good for a while.
Intel runs just fine on Linux, but because AMD gives so much support and lip service to open source, and because Intel is the big bad market leader, there’s a lot of “intel bad, amd good” in the open source community.
My original comment was trying to point out that “Linux Gamers” are an incredibly niche category filled with die hard linux fans with strong opinions and steam deck users. And frankly I’m surprised Intel has ANY marketshare with that crowd.
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