This is fantastic! I recently installed Debian after not having tried it for years, and was wondering what the best way to get things such as newer versions of Mesa is.
In your article you brought up alternative Kernel options, from what I’ve always been told these kernels don’t really make a massive difference than the regular kernel. Do you have any experience with the ones you mentioned, and if so did either have an actual impact for you?
Additionally, since I’ve only recently started using AMD cards (took me a bit to scrape up the money to move over from Nvidia, but it has been done thankfully) are there any details on what the additional firmware components add on? I have a 6700 XT so I’m not sure if that counts as being new enough to need them (I suspect it doesn’t but figured I’d check).
Do you have any experience with the ones you mentioned, and if so did either have an actual impact for you?
I’m currently using the Xanmod variant. I haven’t compared them in any objective way but I have the impression that with the Debian kernel I get slightly more stuttery games. It’s very minor though. I imagine with recent enough CPU and GPU the difference would be minimal, if any. It’s easy to switch between kernels, so it doesn’t hurt to have them all installed to try them out. In the end, whatever works for you is the best choice.
are there any details on what the additional firmware components add on?
I’m not sure. You can search dmesg for messages of missing firmware (grep for amdgpu and if there are any missing ones it should show). In any case, there are no downsides to just pulling them from upstream the way I mentioned in the post. If the driver requests them, they will be loaded and you’ll benefit from it. Firmware files that are not required by the driver will just sit on your drive taking up a little bit of space.
If there is firmware missing, some functionality of the GPU might not be available and you could have degraded performace or maybe other issues.
Anyway, if you go through the post or parts of it, let me know how it went. If there’s anything that needs correction or could be improved, I’d be glad to amend it.
Thank you for the breakdown! I’ve pretty much always been on Nvidia GPUs since I had a computer with an actual dedicated GPU, so this is all quite new to me.
I did end up following your guide though shortly after I mentioned my questions here, since I figured they both fell under the “If they’re not needed, it won’t cause any harm” - I did definitely notice that during the upgrade I got a ton of notices about missing firmware for the amdgpu module, whereas after I pulled the firmware files and added them, the notices were gone after a reboot when I went to go install Liquorix so it seems to have been for the best either way.
I haven’t had a chance to try out too many games yet, but I did give Halo Infinite a quick go which I did notice had a lot of stuttering previously, and it does seem to be better in that regards now! It’ll also be nice to be able to use the native version of Steam, not that I have any qualms with Flatpak but as silly as it is, MangoHud can’t read the media status of Spotify while under Flatpak whereas it can when running natively. I like having the media info present, and it kind of continues to light my issues with Flatpak sometimes (in which most things work, but there are always those small things that don’t due to the sandboxing), but I digress haha.
Really appreciate the guide again! It all went smoothly and all the steps were laid out very concisely! I love that the steps had an explanation rather than just effectively being a list of commands to run without any context leaving me with the question of “Why should I run this”, even down to the comments that you added to the various apt configuration files.
I’ve added a note on the firmware section clarifying there’s no harm in just pulling them, and also a link to a Stack Exchange answer explaining how to configure the default kernel.
Let’s just take a moment to recognize his struggle to find a few more programmers
Maybe if we pool together and buy just one more pack of gems (or whatever they call them) they can pull off what must surely be a truly Herculean technical feat
No, definitely not but getting there! Last year despite slow production ramp up, about one million were sold. Source: a SteamOS developer on a KDE conference in autumn.
This year a financial analyst company predicted an additional two million until the end of this year but that was before the OLED announcement. Valve then recently said “millions”. So I guess 3 million may be a somewhat conservative estimate now that the OLED model is out. 4 million if we’re generous. It’ll take a while until 10 million are reached, if they’ll be reached at all. My memory is a bit foggy but I think Valve people said that the Steam Deck was intended to launch earlier but the Covid semiconductor crisis delayed the announcement. My guess is that at least a Steam Deck Lite will be announced first but the overall performance will stay about the same, so that could drive sales a bit before the eventual successor comes out.
I conveniently had my UT04 retail box sitting on the shelf next to me. I can confirm there’s a little penguin on the back of package, and under OS requirements they list Linux with an asterisk explaining it’s not supported by Atari (publisher).
There is nothing else in the manual indicating how to use the Linux version, which disk to use, or any additional information that I can find.
Edit: geez I miss game manuals sometimes. All the game mechanics are so nicely explained, and it has instructions to setup modding tools!
Epic shut down the UT2004 master server back in this spring, before it died the community had created a new public master server, I had to edit the master server address in ut2004.ini but it works.
Epic does deserve credit for running the master server for a game for 19 years, regardless of their current actions, that deserves mad respect.
They even ran their stats tracking service untill then IIRC…
About ten years ago, I switched to Linux, but two years later I switched back to Windows for gaming, I didn’t want to have to deal with gaming on Linux and fiddle with settings to get it all working.
I know that things have changed and that gaming on Linux is far better now, but as I now work mostly in Windows, I am just too comfortable with it to switch again right now.
Instead of asking for Linux support maybe we should be asking companies for wine/proton support, since that works for Mac and Linux. Not ideal but probably more realistic and that would solve issues for all the non-windows desktops. I would also imagine it’s less work for the company to just ensure it works on wine, than it is to compile a seperate client for Linux. I don’t know about anti cheat stuff but personally I wouldn’t run a game that wanted that level of access to my system.
(All copy-pasted from what I’ve written in the linux_gaming subreddit)
This is the same guy who compared Linux to moving to Canada once, had moved away from PC gaming because of “rampant piracy” only to return back to it because he wanted that sweet, sweet pie of the market Valve had ripened, built the shittiest store imaginable, that was initially literally spyware and took 3 years to get a fucking shopping cart feature, did all these shitty exclusives to keep the said store afloat, instead of you know, trying to improve it? The same guy who allowed shitty creepto games into his store only when Steam had banned them (btw does anyone remember that Epic Shit Store was supposed to be a “highly curated store”)?
And this is the same company who specifically makes sure Fortnite won’t run on Linux because they literally use several anti cheat software, apart from the one they’re literally developing themselves, deliberately to NOT make Linux run it (such confidence on their software amirite :V)? The same company who has (hopefully had) a dumbass developer complaining about Steam Deck .
And there is also the matter of Rocket League, Artstation, Bandcamp, and so many other things.
Epic and Tim Sweeney are the most two-faced scumbags I’ve ever witnessed in my life, and it still fucking hurts me because I’ve loved the Unreal series so goddamn much, man.
In fact, I’m more angry at Heroic and Lutris and co. for allowing games to be installed from that store. Epic shouldn’t get this amount of work done for them for free.
Just FYI, the expression makes more sense the other way around:
You can’t eat your cake and have it too.
And yeah, dual booting is absolutely a thing. That said, I find rebooting to play a game silly, so I just avoid stuff that doesn’t work on Linux. I can totally see the opposite perspective as well.
The point is you can’t eat your cake and still have it afterward, because it has been eaten. So the more common version OP referenced makes no sense because you obviously need to have your cake before you’re able to eat it, so it’s unclear what you’re trying to say.
Right, but then the cake is gone and you don’t have it anymore, you just have a plate with crumbs. That’s what the adage is trying to convey (you can’t have it both ways). Either you save your cake for later, or you eat it not, you can’t do both.
It’s not boot time, but context switching (close apps and whatnot). I suppose I could hibernate, but I still lose access to my network services, like my kids’ Minecraft server and network shares. And then Windows usually has massive updates because I launch it so rarely.
If I play on Linux, I just launch the game, and that’s it.
Before Steam came to Linux, I just didn’t play games very often. Now that most games work, I can just push play and I’m in a game, so I play a lot more games.
Fortnite uses both EAC and BattleEye, so it really isn’t that easy to integrate with their custom solution. Also, they have to test it to make sure no bugs are introduced. Afterall, it’s a multi-billion USD game.
But as we know, they really don’t care, so even if it was only a day of development time, they wouldn’t do it.
I highly doubt they’ll find any bugs even if they did test it. Even if there were bugs, most likely Valve + the community would be the one’s patching it.
Epic doesn’t want to try because they have a stick very deep up their ass.
Just as a heads up, while they did drop the Linux client, unless it’s been changed very recently you can just use the Windows version through Proton/WINE and play that way.
Which isn’t an excuse for what they’ve done, I only mention it in case you or someone else didn’t already know.
I did do a lot more stuff but only things specific to my personal setup, like having the games on a separate Btrfs partition which can be mounted from other OSs, that kind of stuff.
Assumin all one wants to do is install a few games from Steam, once the setup I described is done, everything is an apt install steam away.
I run a bog standard bookworm + kde. Only needed to update kernel from backports when I replaced my aging 1060 with an rx6750xt for more recent amdgpu firmware. Games run just fine. Solid as a rock.
Awesome stuff! I’m running KDE as well - can’t wait for Plasma 6 to start hitting the repos to get HDR on CP2077.
I have an even newer GPU so a more current kernel was needed. I went with testing because I prefer to follow a more up-to-date system, and it’s almost as solid as stable so I don’t see many downsides. I wouldn’t do it on a server but on the desktop I can easily work around or fix whatever minor nags appear.
I really wanted to get Mesa from experimental though as it follows upstream pretty closely (just a few days lag usually), and testing being generally closer to it probably helps. Or not, I haven’t really tested that assumption. :D
but i can’t seem to find any posts saying hiding vm doesn’t work with intel and multiple posts about hiding vm status with intel specific instructions on a quick ddg search so you might want to try again.
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