I know this is not a good way to get community approval around here, but: Chatgpt can write that for you. My bash-fu increased tremendously since it exists and I script everything now. In the past, it would end up with having an idea and also fear of failure. Now every scripting idea gets to be implemented and executed.
Window dodging recently broke on me so I can’t dodge windows on any of the panels properly anymore, was working great on 6.1. Certain windows will cause the desktop to lock up and I can’t click on any windows or icons in the panel task manager. The global menu only works half the time now. I’m getting severe mouse cursor stuttering on a 120Hz display on the desktop, certain games running proton that were fine before have micro stutter. It’s been a pretty terrible experience on the AMD side recently.
Wildermyth is a lovely combination of storytelling and xcom-style combat, with a genealogy system and chances for your heroes (and their descendants) to reappear in future games.
I was just wondering what would happen if I downloaded a game that was infected by a computer virus and ran it in Linux using Proton.
Depends on the mechanism. Some viruses will target stuff that WINE doesn’t emulate – like, if it tries to fiddle with Windows system files, it’s just not going to work. But, sure, a Windows executable could look for and infect other Widows executables.
Has this happened to anyone?
I don’t know specifically about viruses or on Proton. But there has been Windows malware that works under WINE. Certainly it’s technically possible.
How would the virus behave?
Depends entirely on the virus in question. Can’t give a generic answer to that.
What files, connections or devices would it have access to?
WINE itself doesn’t isolate things (which probably is reasonable, given that it’s a huge, often-changing system and not the best place to enforce security restrictions). On a typical Linux box, anything that you, as a user, would, since Linux user-level restrictions would be the main place where security restrictions would come into play.
I do think that there’s a not-unreasonable argument that Valve should default to having games – not just Proton stuff – run in some kind of isolation by default. Basically, games generally are gonna need 3d access, and some are gonna need access to specialized input devices. But Steam games mostly don’t need general access to your system. But as things stand, Steam doesn’t do any kind of isolation either.
You can isolate Steam as a whole – you can look at installing Steam via flatpak, for one popular option. I don’t use flatpaks, so I’m not terribly familiar with the system, but I understand that those isolate the filesystem that Steam and its games have access to. That being said, it doesn’t isolate games from each other, or from Steam (e.g. I can imagine a Steam-credentials-stealing piece of malware making it into the Steam Workshop). On the other hand, I’m not totally sure how much I’d trust Valve to do a solid job of having the Steam API be really hardened against a malicious game anyway – that’s not easy – so maybe isolating Steam too is a good idea.
Could it be as damaging as running in in Windows?
Sure. If it’s not Linux-aware, it probably isn’t going to do anything worse than deleting all the files that your user has access to, but in general, that’d be about as bad anyway. If it is Linux-aware, it could probably do something like intercept your password next time you invoke sudo, then make use of it to act as root and do anything.
Ah see I didn’t think of the flatpak aspect. But if you download a game from some shady source and want to run it via flatpak Steam, how would you go about it?
If you don’t use steam because it’s a shady source, I guess Bottles would be your go-to. I think parent is talking about if you bought a game off steam.
In that case Steam flatpak isn’t really what you want. You probably want to use Bottles, which creates a flatpak-like sandbox. This is not a guarantee or anything, but does give you some protection (at least, better than running it on Windows I guess).
I haven’t done it, but as long as Steam itself is isolated – as I expect flatpak Steam is – anything it launches will be too, and you can add arbitrary binaries. AFAIK, that works with Windows binaries in Proton.
Referring to your response to dillekant, I’m not sure how much Steam buys you in terms of security, though, unless you’re buying from Valve. The flatpak might provide some isolation by virtue of being flatpak (though I dunno how many permissions the Steam flatpak is granted…I assume that at bare minimum, it has to grant games access to stuff like your microphone to let VoIP chat work).
Steam, itself as of today, doesn’t provide isolation, at all.
Adding a non-Steam game to Steam lets you launch from Steam, which might be convenient. Maybe use Proton, which has a few compatibility patches.
If I wanted to run an untrusted Windows binary game today on my Linux box, if it needs 3d acceleration, I don’t have a great answer. If it doesn’t, then running it in a Windows VM with qemu is probably what I’d do – I keep a “throwaway” VM for exactly that. It has read access to a shared directory, and write access to a “dropbox” directory. I wouldn’t bring Steam into the picture at all. I don’t want it near my Steam credentials (Steam credentials have been a target of malware in the part) or a big software package like Steam that may-or-may-not have been well-hardened.
It does get network access to my internal network – I haven’t set up an outbound firewall on the bridge, so a hostile binary could get whatever unauthenticated access it could get from my LAN. And it could use my Internet connection, maybe participate in a DDoS of someone or such. But it doesn’t otherwise have access to the system. It isn’t per-app isolation, but if the VM vanished today, it wouldn’t be a problem – there’s nothing sensitive on it. It doesn’t know my name. It can’t talk to my hardware, outside of what’s virtualized. It doesn’t have access to my data. There are no credentials that enter that VM. Unless qemu itself has security holes, software in the thing is limited to the VM.
I have used firejail to sandbox some Linux-native apps, but while it’s a neat hack, and has a lot of handy tools to isolate software, I have a hard time recommending it as a general solution for untrusted binaries. I don’t know how viable it is to use with WINE, which it sounds like is what you want. It has a lot of “default insecure” behavior, where you need to blacklist a program for access to a resource, rather than whitelisting it. From a security standpoint I’d much rather have something more like Android, where firejail starts a new app with no permissions, warns me if it’s trying to use a resource (network, graphical environment certain directories) and asks me if I want to whitelist that access. It requires some technical and security familiarity to use. I think the most-useful thing I’ve used it for is that it mostly can isolate Ren’Py games, cut network access, disk write access, and a number of games (though not all; arbitrary Python libraries can be bundled) can work with a reasonably-generic restrictive firejail renpy profile. It just requires too much fiddling and knowledge to be a general solution for all users, and “default insecure” is trouble, IMHO.
I do wish that there was some kind of reliable, no-fiddling, lighter-weight per-game isolation available for both Windows binaries and Linux binaries out-of-box. Like, that Joe User can use and I could recommend.
I did see something the other day when reading about an unrelated Proxmox issue, talking about Nvidia apparently having some kind of GPU virtualization support. And searching, it looks like AMD has some kind of “multiuser GPU” thing that they’re billing. I don’t know how hardened either’s drivers are, but running VMs with 3d games may have become more practical since last I looked.
EDIT: Hmm, yeah, sounds like QEMU does have some kind of GPU virtualization these days:
Need native performance, but multiple guests per card: Like with PCI passthrough, but using mediated devices to shard a card on the host into multiple devices, then passing those:
You can read more about vGPU at kraxel and Ubuntu GPU mdev evaluation. The sharding of the cards is driver-specific and therefore will differ per manufacturer – Intel, Nvidia, or AMD.
I haven’t looked into that before, though. Dunno what, if any, issues there are.
EDIT2: Okay, I am sorry. I am apparently about four years out of date on Steam. Steam didn’t have any form of isolation, but apparently in late 2020, they added Pressure Vessel, some form of lxc-based per-game containerization.
I don’t know what it isolates, though. I may need to poke more at that. Pretty sure that it doesn’t block network access, and I dunno what state the container gets access to.
I switched my gaming PC to Linux a few months back. I distro hopped for a while due to various issues, and landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. Everything just works (except for the occasional bug in the updates where I have to wait for the next snapshot for a fix, but that’s NBD).
Caveat: I’m all AMD so no Nvidia stuff to worry about. YMMV.
Same here except I stuck with leap as the newer kernel does not play nice with the suspend function. My little travel laptop has tumbleweed on it no problems. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more suse recommendations because it’s the only one that mostly “just worked” out of the box.
If you’re playing the games in Steam, using Steam Input, there’s an option to disable it.
Steam->Settings->Controller->Game rumble
A number of games will also have an option to do so.
EDIT: If you are certain that you don’t ever want rumble, you could probably open up the controller and just disconnect one of the wires running to each motor. I think that the XBox controllers use security bits, though. I had to open one a while back.
A TR8 Torx Security screwdriver can remove the fasteners securing Xbox 360 controllers and standard Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S controllers.
Note that the security Torx bits aren’t regular Torx bits, so if you do want to do that, be sure to get the security bit.
Could even just remove the motors from the controller, make it a bit lighter.
EDIT2: I think that the controller uses the xpad driver (if it does, it should be loaded and visible when you run lsmod and have the game controller active). Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to have an option to disable force feedback at the driver level:
<span style="color:#323232;">$ modinfo -p xpad
</span><span style="color:#323232;">dpad_to_buttons:Map D-PAD to buttons rather than axes for unknown pads (bool)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">triggers_to_buttons:Map triggers to buttons rather than axes for unknown pads (bool)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sticks_to_null:Do not map sticks at all for unknown pads (bool)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">auto_poweroff:Power off wireless controllers on suspend (bool)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$
</span>
There are some software packages that let you create “virtual” controllers that take input from another controller. That adds more moving parts, but if none of the above options work for you, you could look into that.
Disabling it in steam input doesn’t disable it in Lutris. I have already thought about disconnecting the motors as an alternative method after making sure there’s nothing in the software that can do that, as in Windows.
Although the ‘Xbox Accessories’ tool on Windows 10 didn’t give the option to update the firmware on these two generic controllers (20d6-2005 and 24c6-581a) it did enable the rumble to be turned off (in the Configure… menu).
I’m not sure exactly what I did, but I first attached a Microsoft-brand controller (045e-0b12) which had the rumble feature ticked. I then connected the other two controllers and their rumble feature was unticked too - without me having to untick it. When I moved all 3 controllers back to Linux none of them rumble anymore. And they are all working as expected and no longer affected by this problem.
Not sure if that’s the same controller as yours, but also might be worth looking at.
It did let me disable it on the Xbox Accessories app back on Windows. Then it stopped working, and I couldn’t open it again because it thought I had an old version of Windows for some reason. Now on Linux, it is still working aggressively to the point that the controller sometimes disconnects or falls off my hand.
As a person who has opened up a few xbox controllers to clean them up ‘to the max’, it’s probably beginner level DIY to open it up and disconnect the rumble motors. I think it was even broken in one or two we had ( OG xbox and wired 360 versions), and the system doesn’t prompt you to do something about or, or refuse service (can you imagine? that would suck). Still, I’d try to disconnect it non-destructively first
Wow. I did not know about the Torx security thing. It looks like the ifixit kits come with a torx security instead of a regular torx, so I never even noticed when I took my controller apart to replace a shoulder button. 🤯
New processor, better, brighter display, 120Hz display refresh, thermal improvements in cooling of processor and voltage regulation system, color-coded expansion modules to match bezel, high monitor resolution to avoid fractional scaling, better webcam, new expansion module for SD card storage, option for keyboard with “Super”-labeled key rather than Windows key.
For small-medium businesses, can ship with Windows 11 and provides longer warranty, scaled up support staff.
Neither of my two wishlist items, 100Wh battery or triple mechanical trackpad buttons, though.
Is the 61 watt hour battery new vs the 55? I’m not expecting 100 wh in a small 13" laptop, but 61 is an improvement. I’d really like to see at least 70 (like the 14" MBP) in something that size.
BTRFS is worth it. It’s a bit faster than ext4. And with BTRFS assistant or snapper, you can configure automatic snapshots of your OS partition. And grub-btrfs will allow to integrate them to the boot menu. Once you are booted via snapshot, there is a way to replace / file system with that snapshot permanently, or you can boot to another one.
And remember, snapshots in BTRFS is just a formal thing, use them only if you specifically need their features, like read only sub volumes. If you just need to backup some directory, for example with steam games, no need to do the actual snapshot. You can easily backup large amount of data with just cp -dr dir dir_backup no matter how large is it, it will be done immidetelly and without taking additional space.
There’s still some stuff I’m tied to Windows for, namely music players (MusicBee and Apple Music but they can be used in a VM) and VR. But it’s nice to see Linux growing.
MusicBee. Tried it on WINE. Not great. Linux players also don’t do a lot of what MusicBee does OOTB, and if they do it’s not as seamless as MusicBee. (tag hierarchies are the main thing, but the playlist functionality is also good.)
AFAIK MusicBee isn’t open source, just Freeware. Which is fair enough if the dev doesn’t want to, but also a bit frustrating personally, as people could’ve improved Linux support considerably if it was.
My music player suggestions for local playback on Linux. Please note that you could pick any of these no matter the desktop environment if you do not care about consistently in look and feel. In that case I suggest to go with Strawberry.
On GTK environments: Rhythmbox, Exaile
On QT environments: Strawberry, Clementine and somewhere next year Amarok should be through its revival that KDE has announced not too long ago.
Quod Libet was one I tried. Doesn’t quite scratch the itch MusicBee gives me, but still solid nonetheless. Tauon Music Box is a gorgeous looking player that’s similar.
Not to mention, Apple Music is so much better than Spotify for my needs and Cider isn’t cutting it for me right now. Once they’re not as reliant on MusicKit, I might give it a go again.
When I’ve used it, gapless playback being non-existent due to it basically being a frontend to the web client/MusicKit for web. I listen to a lot of albums in full nowadays, so that can really hurt the experience. It’s a shame because everything else about it is great. I am aware that the Cider devs are trying to find ways of handling that without reliance on the web client/API, which might enable gapless but also stuff like lossless if you got AM for that.
Edit: I should mention that Cider has a new client that’s paid but still supports Linux (specifically with AppImage, .deb and .rpm packages), and my experience was with Cider Classic.
Edit 2: I bought Cider 2 and so far it’s working well. You sacrifice lossless and maybe some gapless playback still, but it’s a mild loss vs. so far a huge gain in usability.
Pretty sure you are talking about audio fading, gapless is different. Gapless playback just means audio playback won’t stop when a new song plays. Without it, the audio sounds like it briefly pauses between tracks.
I remember getting C&C 4 and was playing at my grandma’s place on my own in the campaign then I lost Internet and it threw me into the main menu. I stopped playing that day since that’s bullshit.
I tried a few games on Linux and I spent more time looking for why one game wasn’t saving my game and why another game wouldn’t actually launch with no error messages then actually playing a game.
The only games thus far that I couldn’t get to work were pirated. Id say 80%+ pirated work, and so far all legit games. Even weird launchers like FF14 (stock, not the 3rd party) and Guild Wars 2. And then of course Steam does most the work.
Everyone’s mileage varies, obvs, plus there’s different distros and games.
I’ve just recently gotten into this and installed steam through ubuntu’s store. Could be why it thought subnautica was on Linux and let me download it. I uninstalled and installed through apt-get this time, hopefully that fixes that issue.
I don’t have Subnautica but it is on my wishlist because you can play in VR, which is what I mostly play these days. PCVR is not as reliable on Linux as standard games, but nevertheless more than 50% of titles do work flawlessly now. Subnautica is definitely one of them - you should check for other people who’ve got your problem on ProtonDB. If you actually care, look into it more, you should be able to get all of those games running.
Having issue with the Steam snap isn’t surprising, as even Valve recommends against using it. A few years ago flatpak Steam had similar issues that got fixed over time.
For now I hope you’ll have more luck with the .deb!
Sounds way too confusing, and goes against the whole idea that “Linux is easier than Windows because it has an App Store” and “you don’t have to use the command line”.
Yes, it’s sad that Canonical is pushing Snap before those kinks are ironed out. In general it’s a solid distro for people not familiar with Linux, but having to stumble over those issues is a dealbreaker.
Linux being easier than Windows is true in some ways, but it completely sidesteps issues Windows and macOS solved for a while, e.g. forcing users to upgrade. It’s annoying but some people just… don’t do the bare minimum. E.g. a friend’s dad has been using Linux for probably a decade by now, and for some reason apt auto upgrades broke (likely powerloss during upgrade). An image based OS like Fedora Atomic doesn’t have this issue, as it won’t apply updates to the running OS (by default).
I play Subnautica on Fedora/Linux, installed directly from Steam (native), so I’m guessing it let you download it because with Proton enabled it’ll play just fine.
Just right click on the game and go into the properties and turn on the Windows/Proton support for the game.
As a side comment, I love Subnautica, a great game!
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