I really wish they would put out a version on Steam. I know it’s easy enough to install the game (which I have on my PC and deck) but I have friends who literally won’t play a game unless it’s on Steam ☹️
I wish installing linux for non-technical people using windows were as easy as downloading an .exe and walking through an installation wizard. Something that gave very very simple instructions, backed up their stuff, rebooted to install linux with the chosen settings, and restored their backup into linux.
IMO if it were that simple or as simple as double clicking an .exe and hitting Install Linux (with default settings) that did all of the above with a default distro set by the installer, more people would be willing to install linux.
And non of that Gnome shit. Drop them into a distro with a DE configured to look like windows (probably KDE or Cinnamon).
Non tech savvy people don’t install windows or macos either. Everything comes pre-installed with the machine you buy.
If you make it to the point where you kinda know what Rufus and an iso file are, Pop! OS and Mint are easier to install than Windows.
I suppose a program could be made that partitions your OS drive and installs a distro on the second partition with a dual boot selection screen on next boot, but if you’re at the point where you’re curious enough about Linux to try it, you’ve probably learned enough to use Rufus and an iso file.
The answer is system integrators need to pre install and actively support one of the more friendly distros (like Valve with SteamOS on the deck) or it’ll never catch on.
Simple users don’t care what OS you present them with, as long as it’s already there and it’s easy to use.
I think you’re assuming too little and assuming too much of average users at the same time. Either you don’t deal with them or have forgotten what it was like to be one.
normal users install software. OS to a user is just software. let it be installable like MPV, VLC, GIMP, Regex cleaners, games, …
just because you know what linux is doesn’t mean you understand Rufus, the BIOS, partitioning, ISOs vs EXE, etc.
I think the best we can do is “easier to install than Windows.” Which it currently is, barring the fact most devices ship with Windows pre-installed. If you’re a PC or gaming enthusiast and you’ve built your own computer from spare parts, installing Linux is a similar though more streamlined process than Windows.
I think Fedora Media Writer kind of hits those boxes, and the Fedora installation (with the Blivet partitioner) is fairly easy.
My problem, however, and Brodie on YouTube can attest to this, is the language. Open source projects have a problem with communication, messaging and signalling.
It should be the priority of design and the UX to properly communicate actions, events, consequences, etc. It’s also about accessibility, as bad messaging can be confusing and off-putting.
But no VRR apparently, at least according to a random Reddit thread.
Some of the ones on Amazon claim it in their description, but since the description is now the search engine optimization field, who knows if they do or don’t…
I have the adapter from Cable Matters I think and I’m fairly sure it supports VRR at 4:4:4 chroma subsampling. Tested it on a Hisense U8H. I stopped using the adapter though because on Windows it wouldn’t work with VRR, the screen would kind of go black when I moved the mouse. Not sure what it was.
I think the issue was a lot of things being sold in the early days of HDMI 2.1 that claimed full compatibility, but there was so little hardware that actually supported it all that most people had no way of testing. And I suspect all the usual stroke-at-the-keyboard branded Amazon specials just took all the existing HDMI 2.0 kit and stuck new labels on it.
Can it pre-load shader cache like steam games does? Because that’s a big plus to running games on the higher half of the graphics demand side. Otherwise you’ll still need games to be steam in order to get the best performance.
Yeah. Good point. The problem I see with that is that SOMEONE has to store the shader caches that you download. With some games, it’s megabytes and some games it’s gigabytes. Also, the shaders are different for different hardware configurations. Who is going to not only store, but share all of this data when only a small portion of people donate to FOSS? Steam, gets a portion of the sale, and moving people to Linux is a far sight goal that they are monetarily incentivized to help towards.
True, but complex and probably a tad unrealistic. My old days of using torrents taught me that people don’t typically seed.
Ignoring that, if you automatically download torrents and start seeding them many people wouldn’t understand them and will have their internet overwhelmed and blame Linux, or Google it and come to the conclusion to “turn off the seeding feature”.
Also, Shader Caches get changed/updated CONSTANTLY. When I first got my Steam Deck, I was getting Shader Caches updates every time I turned it on for nearly every game. That has slowed down a lot but torrents specifically wouldn’t be the best solution for something that changes frequently. You can re-check so that you can just only download new caches with the latest torrent. But the re-check can be computationally expensive as well.
Idk the answer and I love the idea of P2P. But, we’d have to be careful to implement it well.
Magicland, I suppose. I guess it would need to spoof that it’s a steam os installed game in order to download the cache from valves server and then move the cache over to the appropriate folder for the game. I guess it would be a lot of work for each game, since the cache folder isn’t going to be named the same and in the same spot.
Even then, the shaders for steam deck wouldn’t work on other devices with different GPU architecture. I think it might require the same CPU architure as well. But, I’m not confident on the second part.
I wasn’t talking about other devices. Just the steam deck. If it’s a game bought through steam you get the pre-cache files. If it’s a game you’re playing on the SD, but was purchased/obtained outside of steam you can still play it but you won’t have the pre-cache files to use.
For anyone interested in this awesome concept, but isn’t a Hyprland user, there’s a great flatpak app called Nyrna, which basically does the same thing.
one of two things, or maybe both, manjaro has a really weird issue with the AUR where they repeatedly pushed updates to pamac that have crippled the AUR.
there are also often times where AUR packages inexplicably break on manjaro so using the AUR while running is is fairly sketchy
I think I understand your latter point. I had no time to invest in another arch build last time I did a reinstall. This was before arch had a gui install. So I went Manjaro. I’ve noticed this problem where sometimes I install direct from aur and it messes stuff with pamac. Now that there’s a gui install for arch I’ll just go back to that next time.
I grew up as a web developer, and one of the things they hammer home to you is to never trust the client. The end user can tweak and modify their web browser and send data that is invalid or even malicious.
Instead, you’re supposed to validate everything the client sent you when you receive it. To always consider the client hostile, and check that what it wants to do is sensible.
It’s a shame to see the opposite of that mindset from these game studios. They want to ensure that the client is as trustworthy as possible using invasive techniques and trying to restrict people’s ability to use their own computers.
Which sounds fine on paper, but doesn’t really work. Until we live in the world that Microsoft wants where we are only allowed to use software officially signed and approved by Microsoft, people can still run arbitrary code on their devices.
Anticheat binaries can be modified and tanpered with to ignore things. Network traffic can be intercepted. The game could run in a virtual machine with a modified cpu.
It’s annoying to me that these big companies have managed to shift the narrative so effectively to what is effectively the PC equivalent to confiscating water bottles at aorports to give the illusion that they are stopping terrorists.
Google actually tried to push an “anticheat” for Chrome (as far as I know they failed because they didn’t have enough market share to force things). This would allow websites to require you to use Chrome with no extendions.
If that had gone through, I wonder how many people would be mad that they wouldn’t be able to play browser shooters on Firefox or other Chromium based browsers? Would we have these same kinds of posts where people were arguing over whether Firefox “has more cheaters”?
The important question to ask isn’t “would Linux allow more cheaters?”, it’s “why isn’t the modern games industry actually doing anything to stop cheaters?”.
TL;DR - Yes, and companies should fix this by catching cheaters on the server, not the game client. Client-side cheat detection will always have gaps.
Server-side cheat detection is a lot harder than integrating an off-the-shelf cheat detection engine since it needs game-specific logic and likely more moderators to determine the difference between a cheater and a high performing player. It also requires more server resources, which also has ongoing costs.
Client-side anti-cheat is “good enough” for most studios, so they can get away with it. It’s also often cheaper to not support a niche platform if the missed sales are likely less than the cost of ongoing support (or the opportunity cost of other lucrative projects).
I think that’s really important to understand, especially when it comes to larger games like Fortnite supporting Linux, especially since most of those potential Linux users are likely already playing on Windows, console, or mobile. The profit is low, and the risks make it a hard business choice to defend. It’s still stupid, but it likely makes sense from a business perspective.
I won’t claim that it’s all flawless, because it really isn’t sometimes, but a lot of things just work. Both new games, and old ones, that don’t even work on windows to begin with.
My biggest two showstoppers are games like Destiny, and VR titles, that unfortunately are completely unplayable because I own a Rift S.
I still play practically everything else on Linux, and don’t see any reason to not to. I already do everything else on this os, so why would I switch
There’s a bunch of other things, like HDR; I don’t have a HDR monitor so I can’t say what people are missing, but I tried to mess with it in my pet-project game engine and vkSetHdrMetadataEXT just does not exist at all, and I don’t know what library or Vulkan layer could provide it.
It matches with what I’ve heard around, although apparently KDE supports it now?
Apparently they’re a really good choice for video encoding (e.g. if you’ve got a Jellyfin server or are a streamer or something) because of AV1 codec support. (I think that’s the important one, anyway.)
I’m a big Pop!_OS fan. Based on Ubuntu so great for following guides and comparability. But no Snap, Flatpak is installed, the OS looks fantastic and runs smooth and gaming on it has been great.
+1 for Pop_OS. They also have a version with Nvidia driver support out of the box. Their UI is also a fantastic edited version of GNOME, so it’s sleek and easy to use
I thought Ubuntu was the best distro to get started as a gamer but it required so much tinkering. Pop like mentioned had Nvidia installed and with flatpak integration it just made everything honestly fun again
Another happy pop user here! The business model for system76 is basically to make a distro that works seamlessly on the hardware they sell. Side benefit: their distro also works seamlessly on a bunch of other modern hardware, and they pay a lot of attention to quality of life features that make hardware customers happy.
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