Great post, thanks for sharing your experience with Nvidia in all those distros!
Just wanted to add: if you are stuck with Nvidia but want to get started gaming in Linux, install Pop!_OS . They have carefully tweaked Ubuntu to make even Nvidia “just work”. It works for me so far, on 2560x1440 @75Hz.
I would rather have some distro freedom with an AMD GPU but unfortunately my main (Windows) game (DCS World) does not work well in VR specifically with the RX7000 series drivers yet.
i do own a steam deck and can say with certainty that, after seeing how well it's handled every game i've thrown at it, i will be switching my primary pc to linux once support for win10 ends
I think any gaming on games or boxes post 2019 is just silly. It is a horror minefield of broken and buggy programming and drivers. The best bet is to stick with all hardware and software pre 2018 , preferably running Linux. Windows sucks so stick with pre win10 if u can. Windows is doomed. Hang on to all your all hardware and stick with old games, everything past 2018 is about to slide into a massive shitshow of broken bugs.
IIRC it was already fixed when Linus did this, just not distributed. It was caused by the bluntness Linus developed due to unmeaningful Windows warnings in the 1st place.
The bug was that you couldn't install steam without faking a the installation of a dep that went down the dependency chain ending in a conflict of essential packages. The functionality to still proceed is a feature. Linus could also just have copied rm -rf --no-preserve-root / from the internet as solution and would have trusted it blindly. If you want to be nannied all the way, I'd suggest you switch to iOS for everything.
If Linus would be a non-techie, he would have tried to install it with a graphical AppStore, it wouldn't have worked and he'd either given up or found the flatpak version of Steam, which would have worked. Not restricting power users is a good aspect. If I play around with Windows registry to force the removal of edge, Linus would blame me, not Windows. You have to differentiate between things normal users tried and things Linus attempted because he has some technical knowledge.
Some random user saying anything doesn't make anything true, you don't believe flat-earthers on the internet, either.
There was a library incompatibility between the Steam image in the Pop_OS package manager and the OS. It was caused by a bug introduced by the Pop_OS developers. Linus tried to install Steam using the package manager and it failed. So he went on Google to find out how to install Steam on Pop_OS. A thousand blogs and forums told him to enter "sudo apt-get install Steam", which he did. Unfortunately doing so automatically uninstalls certain important desktop components in Pop_OS.
@JasSmith@miggs597@F04118F@bionade24 lol, that's completely hilarious imo. Still though, that bug is definitely weird, I never got it my self on ubuntu or any of its derivatives. Is it only a pop OS issue then?
If I play around with Windows registry to force the removal of edge, Linus would blame me, not Windows.
He didn't "play around" with anything. He entered, "sudo apt-get install Steam". That comes straight from thousands of blogs and help sites which instruct users to do just that when they have issues installing Steam.
Talking about games, I’m so happy I don’t have any title that I play stuck on Windows. None EAC games always worked for me when I started using Linux full time, but I was only able to delete my Windows partition after Apex added support for EAC on Linux. Ever since I haven’t looked back :)
Yeah - I’d narrow that down to brand new AAA game (likely to have Denuvo) or multiplayer, as some anticheats don’t work. Basically everything else now? Perfect.
I took the day off work to play Elden Ring when it first came out, and was gutted when it didn’t start on Linux. Glorious Eggroll had the fix up about three hours later, after which it’s been absolutely perfect.
If you’re a beginner… or hate jank, don’t use Arch. And make sure you’re using a desktop environment that supports Wayland (GNOME or KDE). Gaming on X11 can be buggy, janky and inconsistent
Take a look at DRM-free games (ex. GOG) and then check their rating on ProtonDB. If you don’t want to use Steam, there is Bottles and Heroic Game Launcher. I’ve tried former and it has a “gaming” profile which will automatically add DXVK and VKD3D for you.
Is there a simple guide to Bottles? I have used Arch and NixOS, I use a tiling Window Manager, and I use the terminal daily, and even then, I still find Linux gaming to be quite confusing (probably related to the fact I’m not the paying type; I’m more of a “sail the seven seas” type).
I’d suggest Mint. It’s Ubuntu minus Ubuntu-specific annoyances, so it’s right in your zone of familiarity. Friendly enough so my tech-illiterate mum uses it, unobtrusive enough so I’ve been using it without issues.
Arch would give you more control, and you’ve been getting into it, it’s also a good option.
As much as I hate doing it, I’d recommend using the proprietary NVidia drivers. I also have a NVidia GPU; the difference in performance between the proprietary drivers vs. Nouveau is noticeable for me. Worst hypothesis though it’s fine to test and see which works better for your machine.
That’s what I think I’ll be doing with my weekend. I recently (probably back in January) discovered Ventoy - it makes things much faster for testing different OSes when I don’t have to flash ISOs very time.
I second Mint. I hear the Nvidia integration works pretty well. Apart from that, it just works and doesn’t get in the way. If you like to fiddle, you can try something Arch based. But only if you’re willing to put in the extra effort.
I’m not sure what is more surprising that he is at the green giant or that he’s able to continue working on the Nouveau driver in an official capacity. Ben Skeggs has been involved with the Nouveau project for more than a decade.
Yeah, I’ll get right on that and resolve conflicts and maintain my own driver…
I honestly just gave up on NVIDIA and bought AMD. If this ends up working out well, I’ll consider NVIDIA the next time I need a GPU, but the GBM nonsense drove me away.
Nvidia has been slowly trying to open a little over the years; first GBM support in the proprietary driver then the open OOT module and finally GSP firmwares for the kernel; allowing an OSS kernel module to exist.
The OSS graphics community has obviously shown that it doesn’t want Nvidia’s open module (which is tied to the proprietary driver anyways) and would rather build out its own OSS drivers atop an adapted Nouveau/NOVA. Perhaps Nvidia finally realised this?
I’m sceptical too but for now this appears to be an actually good move from Nvidia?
Hopefully? I’m optimistic, but skeptical. I hope the dev gets actual information about the product that they can legally use to improve FOSS NVIDIA drivers.
I switched from Windows to Linux during the whole Vista debacle back in 2008. For basically ten years I was out of the PC gaming scene. I fucking love Proton and what its done for Linux as a gaming platform. Now I play (almost) everything on Linux, no sweat. The only things I ever need my Windows partition for anymore are things with those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.
Yeah I’m right there with ya, of course it’s the users fault for choosing an alternative OS, it has nothing to do with gaming companies choosing the cheapest, least effective and most invasive client side anti cheat solutions instead of more universal server side ones. Nothing at all.
I kinda get it, there’s a reason games a turning towards P2P architecture instead of the traditional client-server architecture. Servers are expensive and turning the game effectively server-authoritative is even more expensive.
I imagine the cost benefit analysis rarely pays out which is why companies go for the cheaper option.
those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.
To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.
But as a sweeping measure these anti-cheat measures are absolutely unacceptable. The only other explanation is that they just don’t want to bother with the market share still being low compared to Windows.
Personally, if a game requires anti-cheat, it’s probably not a game I’d enjoy playing. Not a big fan of competitive gameplay. But for those that are, this needs to stop. Especially with all the new bullshit Microsoft has been pulling in Windows lately.
Trusted-Computing requires a more locked down system than any distro provides, and also (effectively) everyone going along with some MS-controlled standards for TPMs and so forth.
allow private servers - you can still have competitive play, just with people you trust to not cheat
anti-cheat on the server only - would require human moderation as well (users could submit reports, which could be compared to server logs)
increase cost for cheating - maybe have players ante up, and lose their ante if they’re caught cheating (e.g. pay for game licenses and have the license revoked); to be fair, this would require independent review
@sugar_in_your_tea Private servers exclude MMOs as a class of game. That works well for death-match style (or BG3 style) 4-player games, but doesn't work for 30-300-3000 people games.
Anti-cheat server-only allows too many cheats. There's already enough trouble distinguishing someone using wall-hacks from someone with good headphones in a game that does 3d-spacial-sound... trying to do that on the server side ... just won't work. Same applies for other ways of increasing the costs if detected
Why? There are some massive Minecraft servers (thousands of players), and Palworld is self-hostable (closer to other MMOs), so I honestly don’t see the issue. You’d have a different set of characters on each server, but that just increases the risk for cheaters who get booted.
wall-hacks
Part of anti-cheat is not sending the data cheaters use to cheat in the first place. A wall hack is possible because the client is aware of what’s beyond the wall, and that doesn’t need to be sent for anything that’s not visible. That increases computation on the server, so games tend to send more game state than is necessary for smoother gameplay.
Same applies for other ways of increasing the costs if detected
There should be a mix of elite players among the “tribunal” for determining whether someone is hacking. Players report other players, and the server should log enough to recreate the play session so moderators can review the gameplay to make a determination. A lot of cheating is pretty obvious to detect algorithmically, so this would be in a “review” scenario where it’s not so cut-and-dry.
But this takes a lot of resources, which cuts into profits, so I think studios tend to just throw on anti-cheat so they can shift blame (hey, anti-cheat didn’t catch it, we’ll forward your report). But I do sincerely believe it’s feasible for serious competitive games where real money is on the line (e.g. tournaments for prize money and whatnot) without clientside anti-cheat. For more casual games, a higher error rate is probably fine.
@sugar_in_your_tea Your response about wall-hacks is my "don't tell the game anything" comment. It's really really damn slow. You typically don't want to do frame-by-frame determination of if an opponent is just in view or not (because that's a full render), so you send the info to the client once it's possible... at which point the client knows.
Even if the game isn't hacked, the video pipeline "knows", and hacks have moved to be outside of the game space (thus the move to kernel-based)
Yup, “don’t tell the game anything” is slow, I’ll give you that. But anything that exists on the client can be hacked, even on a completely locked down console. People still cheat all the time with anti-cheat enabled, and I don’t expect that to change just because they put it in the kernel.
frame-by-frame determination
A couple thoughts:
can be predictive - clients already do a ton of prediction, this just moves that to the server
can run in parallel to normal game update logic
the server should have the (simplified) geometry data and can do a (relatively) cheap visibility check
The data would need to be sent a few frames ahead of time for performance reasons, so there’s risk there, but if someone can wall-hack within a few frames, that’s a good indicator that they’re cheating anyway. I’m no game dev, so I’m probably missing some significant considerations here, but it seems like this is feasible, just expensive when the alternative is a much less expensive anti-cheat service.
And I agree with your reply, this is a hard problem to solve. I just think game companies are pushing the problem onto anti-cheat devs instead of really trying to solve it themselves in a privacy and security respecting way because it’s cheaper and easier to offload a large share of that liability.
@A_Random_Idiot That's basically a form of @sugar_in_your_tea 's suggestion about making cheating more expensive: "We'll find your cheat program later, and retroactively find that you were cheating and ban you. Well after the match ended and everyone else's game was ruined"
If you are pro-active, you’ll just make it easier for cheaters to iterate and experiment and find ways around the pro-active… and what happens then? You’re back to reactive. Not to mention, pro-active anti-cheat tends to be rife with false positives, resulting in very public ban waves against innocent people.
It cant be helped, No amount of giving your butthole over to big daddy game company and their rootkits will make a game cheat-free. all they can hope for is to catch the cheaters, drop the hammer on them in bulk, so they struggle and panic to try and find out how it was detected so you can increase their cycle time before they have a new working one out.
But if youre banning people based on operating system, of what’s now the only viable consumer operating system, youre basically sacrificing 100% of ‘keep the game fun longer’ for those players.
So if that’s the philosophy, it would be wildly counterproductive to even put that on the table.
@melpomenesclevage (my personal investment in windows? 0%? I don't have a windows PC, at home or work. I've been Linux primary since ... shit, 1994 or something? I've got some "bought in store" style linux games? I remember when pre-compiled packages were a feature. I'm an old.
I'm trying to help explain the incentives driving the behavior toward kernel-level anti-cheat so that arguments against it can be well formed. I don't want that stuff infecting linux gaming)
Oh. Yeah I’m not in favor of kernel level anti cheat. That’s fucking unacceptable. That’s like the third to last thing I’d ever want to give that level of access.
That’s … not entirely wrong, but doing more to raise the barriers higher keeps the game fun longer before the cheaters ruin it.
If you are pro-active, you’ll just make it easier for cheaters to iterate and experiment and find ways around the pro-active… and what happens then? You’re back to reactive
@A_Random_Idiot Yes, I think everybody has a reactive component to their plan? In the current situation, being reactive in some form appears to be table stakes.
But keeping higher barriers (is believed?) to make it easier to do that, and keeps some of the initial noise down, and pushes the timing off.
AND PUSHING THE TIMING IS A GAIN (to the makers of competitive PvP games)
@KrokanteBamischijf@hperrin (my wife suggested auditing suspected cheats in games like battlefield by forcing them to play in real world paintball tournaments.
I think her experience as a teacher is impacting her suggestions)
To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.
Can we drop this “linux is hackerman territory for cheats” stereotype?
Most people cheat on windows. Not cause they are technical or knowledgable… but because they have a credit card
cause they buy cheats designed for windows.
The overwhelming majority of people out there cheating are cheating using tools they bought and use on windows.
So if anything, its Windows that should be treated as the pariah dog of hackers. Cause its where the credit swiping script kiddies are.
Can we drop this “linux is hackerman territory for cheats” stereotype?
I don’t see this as a negative thing and it is absolutely true to some degree. Most of the incredibly talented low-level developers in the world (you know, those that are actually capable of making non-script kiddie hacks) have a tendency towards Linux.
So no, I’m not dropping the “Linux is a sign you might mean business” thing, especially if their idea of a desktop environment is just a collection of terminal windows neatly tiled together. We should be proud of the fact that some the most talented coders in de world choose freedom of software over anything else.
But luckily most of those people focus their efforts on different subjects. So yes, the problem is definitely on Windows with all the 14 year olds buying cheats off the darknet using their mom’s credit card (dramatized for effect).
Just a thought:
Isn’t that logo a bit weird? One proton but it looks like two electrons, and what’s the extra layer around the proton?
That is neither a Proton ion or a valid atom.
I guess graphically it looks OK, but it doesn’t make much sense IMO.
Stop it, no one cares…making it look like something recognizable to the masses is the idea. No one cares about it looking like a real proton or electron.
Thanks. 😀
I know that most probably don’t care, but I kind of do. Not in a big way, but enough that it irks me a bit.
I’m guessing there are others with a slight streak of introvert autism OCD that feel the same way, or at least find it funny that they’d make such an erroneous logo. 😋
That said, of course I’m all for Proton getting a logo, even if it’s a tad stupid.
On a post about the logo, I should stop commenting on the logo! Is that what you are saying? Really?
Apparently someone cares, you wrote your trash comment, that’s caring too. And some upvoted my post, probably either because they found it funny, amusing, interesting or even informing.
I’m guessing your intellectual curiosity is at the low end, for sure your tolerance is.
I don’t see why there shouldn’t be room for an observation regarding the logo design???
Because it’s a pendantic and contrarian remark that makes you look like some kind of self-indulgent prick. The fact that you can’t just say “you’re stupid” and had to make sure you sound intellectually superior just reaffirms my observation.
Who is or isn’t intellectually superior isn’t the issue here. You may find my comment pedantic, which you are entitled to.
But what do you think entitles you to ask/demand me to stop commenting my observation? When it regards the subject matter, and was all polite and only described a couple technicalities?
How do you claim to know nobody cares, and talk on their behalf, on a post that was already upvoted when you commented?
Seems to me that you are the one who has a sense of entitlement and is pedantic and a prick here.
I wrote earlier. “I’m guessing your intellectual curiosity is at the low end, for sure your tolerance is.”
Seems I was spot on.
The default system monitor application that comes with KDE can do this. You will need to click the “edit page” button in the top right, and create a custom layout that shows all the sensors you want. Here is mine:
They are, though the sensors are hardware specific. So while I could export and send you this particular page, it likely won’t show any temps and fan rpms, as the associated hardware wouldn’t be there.
A lot of stuff does work though, like the application list and network graphs, so I could export it for you tomorrow if you like.
Or I could just explain more about how to configure it, it’s really not that complicated. For a display item, you basically just need to pick a display mode (line graph is good for temps) and then add what sensors you want displayed in it. Everything else is just visual tweaks you don’t have to touch.
KDE’s system monitor is absolutely great, I kinda missed it when switching to GNOME because their default system monitor is very lackluster. I’m now using Mission Center instead tho, which is great! It’s basically an almost 1:1 copy of the Windows Task Manager but I think that’s a good thing, Task Manager is one of the few things about Windows that are actually really good IMO.
That’s a cool program thanks for the recommendation. However, it’s disappointing they don’t have CPU temps on it. Actually there are CPU temps, just missed it the first time I was looking at the program.
They do a decent job of piggy backing on Arch’s work, and loading quite a few things OOB for gaming. That being said, I don’t recommend them due to their instability and issues with the overall project (failing on cert renewals, their withholding of stable packages from Arch but allowing AUR access and causing breakage, poor release schedule, and cherry picking of newer packages for “shiny things” without the diligence to maintain their library compatibility, etc etc).
That being said, their theming and UI taste is actually really good. It was a much more robust project back in 2019 and 2020, but on the technical side they’re lacking severely despite having great taste from a theming standpoint. They’ve fallen pretty far in the court of public opinion.
hey, I see people talking a lot about the problems on Manjaro. What do you recommend as an alternative? I used EndeavourOS but an update broke my pc. I then tried debian but the games ran poorly and crashed, then I changed to Manjaro because I didn’t know any better.
To be honest, the default themes for many DE’s are actually pretty tasteful. Just vanilla Arch isn’t bad if you don’t mind running the pacman update command. I honestly recommend Nobara for people who want stability and point/click updates.
Endeavor is more like hobbyist UI purist, and not that well optimized. Arch is insanely optimized, as well as Nobara. I would recommend Ubuntu but, Snaps. Pop would be great if their major rebase was further along, so options are pretty limited. We’re in a weird transition right now as far as the major distros and overall performance metrics.
I'm currently running Nobara and personally cannot recommend it due to a lot of annoying issues. Can't even drag & drop shit out of the FF download window into Dolphin, even though that was working fine on any other distro I used before (including Manjaro, which was still the most stable distro I used).
That to me sounds like their wayland by default setup, which is really more about the wayland ecosystem and reliance on xwayland (although firefox is suppose to launch wayland native on Nobara with KDE).
I’m aware of a few quirks, but that sounds pretty specific. My experience with all DE’s right now has me pretty negative on Linux overall until we get fully migrated to wayland sessions with explicit sync working…and that’s a year off at least.
Wayland is generally a huge mess. At least I can disable Fsync now, which caused my screen to go black for brief moments, especially when playing. Lots of other game or app specific issues remain as well...
Manjaro ran without breaking for me for almost two years. EOS also nuked itself after a few months for me. I think Manjaro's reputation is worse than the actual distro because a lot of people circlejerked about their failed cert issue (which affected only the website) and the "scandal" about the laptop thingy some years ago.
I’ve not had problems but nothing is fool-proof and I have proved myself a fool in the past.
In all seriousness I followed the Manjaro - Endeavour - Arch pipeline and don’t see much value in the other flavors outside of a little handholding that can introduce problems of its own.
Thanks for the info! This is really useful to know and definitely puts me off a little. I would hope installing another OS would preserve the device features. I started to look into “Manjaro Gaming Edition.” It all looks to be from a few years ago and based on XFCE. However on the device’s website it mentions a Plasma desktop so I wonder if they did a special version for this. One can hope it’ll be a better kept version of the OS from what you said.
Manjaro Gaming Edition was a community thing and has been abandoned for 5 years now. All Manjaro editions are listed on their website: https://manjaro.org/download/
The certs were for their website, it had nothing to do with the OS. I used Manjaro for almost two years without any issues. Meanwhile, EndeavourOS broke completely after a few months due to an update and their toxic community just gaslighted & trolled me to the point where the admins closed & hid the thread (can't have people see that huh?) and suggested I create a new one if I still needed support.
It sucks you had an experience like that with the community. There are elitists and then just big jerks. What communities often fail at is a groupthink issue where they have a solution to a problem that’s extraneous to most people, but they accept it as “well duh, RTFM”.
Their project’s goal seems to be the adoption of use, broad use and in turn contribution. The problem is their attitudes toward problems that still need to be resolved, and the release management combined with stability is a common problem in much more than just Endeavor’s community. You see the issue in Pop!, Nobara, Arch, and even Ubuntu. You even see this BIGTIME in Gnome and to a lesser degree KDE.
A Gnome developer will tell you that you should just use it their way, and not expect basic shit to work, where at least KDE puts it for consideration on their own end to fix or develop.
What I’m getting at in short though is the prevailing attitude of elitism being shitty. That being said, there are people who fall into the “time vampire” group of people who will get pointed toward a solution, but not have the capacity to intuit other basic functions and it pisses people off. Nobody deserves to be treated poorly, but the fine line is out there where it’s up to a user to figure their stuff out. From what you describe, updates breaking the user experience falls solidly on their package maintainers fucking their release schedule in the ass, then having an elitist attitude about how to fix it. They’d just as well keep on trucking and treat people poorly for stuff that their own teams broke, to which I respond, fuck those asshole motherfuckers.
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