The main problem is that they all kind of do their own layer on top. But they’re hardware companies, not software companies, so it ends up being a bit janky. And since they’re on Windows, users expect to be able to do Windows thing, which makes everything even more janky because it’s trying to do too much.
I think that’s why Steam Deck worked out. Valve is a SW company, already had a start with Big Picture Mode, and they didn’t need to make desktop Linux a first-class citizen. It’s there, but it’s not right in front of you like it is with Windows handhelds, so the experience can be super focused.
If these handheld companies teamed up and made a common UX across their devices, perhaps it would’ve worked out better.
Well, if you only plan to do one more, this could actually be the penultimate list. But if this is the last one, then the previous one would have been penultimate.
Mind you, I’m 100% okay with using penultimate to mean second best, instead of the actual definition as next to last. It makes sense as a non standard/slang usage, since the last is often the best (depending on the list, of course, but most save the best for last). It’s a good play on the way we use ultimate as both final/last as well as best.
One of these days, the dictionaries will catch up to this usage and it’ll become a standard usage, so you’re getting in on the penultimate use of penultimate as slang, in a way :)
A living language is going to shift. It’s inevitable. It’s necessary to hold a formal version of a language for important things for sure, but for every day conversation, pedantry is just silly. Not only can we never expect everyone to know every word and every usage of every word, mistakes happen. It’s a very human thing to pick up a word and never run across a formal definition for it, and that’s okay.
It’s easy enough to offer a formal definition if there’s a misunderstanding, to get everyone on the same wavelength. But if everyone gets the intended gist, why get all het up? Communication should be fun and engaging, not a battle over semantics and usage.
Mind you, I’m 100% okay with using penultimate to mean second best,
That was my intended use of the word, but I’m not ashamed to admit that I fully misread the little info blurb in my search engine, which led me to believe I was using it appropriately 😅
Well hell, that’s just as cool as using a word in a fun way. You looked it up and just got steered wrong by difficult typesetting. My dyslexic ass would have gotten the same impression as you if I had to scan that on my own and come out with a definition.
After 15 to 20 years of 64bit supporting systems being sold, I don’t think it’s an issue to drop 32bit support. Even if someone wants to use such an old pc for any reason, it should be fine to run an older version of Minecraft. There’s still MC 1.8 servers around, and they’ll likely continue to exist for many years to come.
Any specific graphic card to recommend from your own experience or article with tests ? I don’t have same vision from reading forums, as some games seems to not work properly with amd… But I’m no expert & I try to take care about comments on internet. I’m a protondb user with nvidia gtx 1650 (laptop version).
It seems I can’t find those good graphics on laptops ? Because otherwise I have no clue, if anyone has a good laptop builder brand / website I’ll take it too
I bought an AMD GPU before and the experience was so horrible that it’s deterred me from ever buying one again.
I never knew how good I had it with Nvidia until I tried AMD. The main issue? Drivers. AMDs drivers were abysmally shit. I never had to ‘choose’ specific versions of Nvidia drivers to get them to work. I did with AMD, and some features would work while others would break depending on the version.
When I was due for an upgrade, I chose low to mid-range AMD card supported by new open source drivers on Linux. Literally 0 issues and nothing to install. Pure plug and play. Am not sure about performance gain or loss since I haven’t touched Windows for a while.
With nVidia it was annoying and occasionally painful experience. Annoying because you had to install drivers and sometimes nVidia stops supporting your card, so you have to chase older drivers which might not be supported on your OS now, etc. On occasion those drivers would break after update and my system simply won’t start and I would have to revert to Nouveau to get any work done. Didn’t happen often, but enough to be annoying and the fact they chose the worst moment to break made it painful.
One thing I really liked about AMD cards that makes me happy I have one right now is output ports. AMD seems to be pushing more modern connectors than nVidia. In same generation I had nVidia with HDMI and VGA, while AMD pushed for HDMI and DVI, which can push analog but is at the same time digital. Since I like having two displays AMD’s choice was better. These days I use fiber optic HDMI cable for TV and having card with 3 digital connectors is very nice. Pushing 3 displays with nVidia card at the time was problematic if impossible. My solution was usually to have built-in Intel card push TV HDMI and other two displays were on nVidia, but since nVidia likes stepping over open GL libraries there was no hardware acceleration for Intel.
Granted this is all thing of a past but I don’t think I’ll switch from AMD anytime soon as they seem set on providing good quality open source drivers.
Am well aware nVidia is better optimized for games, or rather games are better optimized for nVidia. However to me, gaming is a secondary concern and getting work done primary one. So not giving me troubles while using it scores highly on my necessity list. That said I also think people should get what they want and what works best for them. Even though figuring that out is probably a harder task than it sounds.
On Linux all the drivers are included with the kernel. No software to manage either, it just works. Nvidia drivers need to be installed separately on Linux and are generally very low quality with performance and technical issues.
Idk about Windows though, never used an AMD GPU on it personally. My Nvidia GPU has always worked perfectly on Windows.
That’s bizarre, I have the opposite experience ha. Nvidia drivers with my 1660 produced buggy video output nearly 100% of the time, even idling on desktop would randomly cause black bars to appear every few frames. I tried 3 different driver versions but each one broke something different. Both X11 and Wayland sucked. On the Nvidia forums the devs were basically apologizing and saying it would be fixed later in these huge threads of people documenting similar issues. To my knowledge a lot of my issues still exist with my hardware.
My 5700 worked flawlessly OOTB without any tinkering. Open-source MESA drivers were packaged with my Debian 12 install and they have never stuttered or bugged out on me. I literally do not even think about my GPU setup anymore, it just works and required 0 configuration on my end.
Did you just have a different hardware setup? Was this a brand new release of an AMD GPU that just didn’t have good driver support on your distro yet?
Sounds like they probably last used AMD devices shortly after the ATI acquisition, and yeah for awhile the drivers were absolutely shyte (as they were with ATI).
The second possibility it’s - as you mentioned -, running bleeding-edge (i.e. trying to run a video device just released). I got a 6900XT early when they came out and drivers were a bit finicky for maybe the first 1-2mo. I think I had to manually download the firmware files to get it running. However, I’ve had the same issues - or worse - with other vendors in that regard.
Apart from that, then anything in the last half decade shouldn’t require any driver installs and minimum to no tinkering. It’s all
I think instead of damage control for AMD, you could try to open your mind to the possibility that their drives may not be so superior that they work for everyone just because they work for you.
Funny, I was very much in camp NVidia until the RX480, which ran just fine. So did my Vega56, and my 6900 as well as numerous APU’s (one was a bit annoying for overscan on the attached TV). No driver installs, just what came with the OS.
I’ve also got a tablet with an Intel Iris chipset that works fine with the in-kernel driver, and a laptop with an Nvidia chip that most of the time worked but periodically after a kernel update fails to output video requiring me to manually piss around with it and figure out why the stub didn’t build properly.
Maybe you should stop being an ass and consider that when the product/brand has worked for MANY people, maybe the issue is you
Maybe you should stop being an ass and consider that when the product/brand has worked for MANY people, maybe the issue is you
Hmm. You’re right. It’s me with my exotic hardware and configurations, not the drivers that many other people outside of /r/linux routinely complain about. My bad. Different AMD drivers breaking some things and fixing others (while never being fully functional) is because of me. The drivers are literally perfect, and have been for years.
Lol. Delusion is just not a river in egypt. Keep fanboying, gonna block you now.
Everything worked fine with my Nvidia 660ti. When I switched to an RX 580, I had issues with refresh rates and Freesync (that I can remember, it’s been awhile and I don’t care to keep all this recorded.) Some versions of drivers would fix issues but cause others. Some versions required certain configurations to fix issues but cause others. It was a mess.
Switched back to the 660ti, no issues. Bought a used 1070, no issues.
Haven’t gone back to AMD since that horrendous experience, but maybe they’ve improved.
I think it’s sad how few people here are willing to acknowledge that AMD’s drivers may not have been adequate for most users even if they worked for them. I bought AMD listening to ya’ll, and was horribly disappointed.
I guess that’s part of why theory is no substitute for experience.
I think the counter argument is also valid and the open source drivers are in the kernel, but proprietary drivers that… I actually dont know how to get, so I use Nobara… Proprietary drivers seem key to some of the performance gains I’m getting with my AMD + Linux rig.
Yeah gaming on laptops only makes sense with streaming from a PC that has an actual GPU and an actual cooling solution. Or super simple stuff like papers please or ftl or something
Those devs have a boner for huge corporations for some reason. They hate anything that is “community driven”. Fuck’em, we will manage without them like we always have.
Those devs have a boner for huge corporations for some reason. They hate anything that is “community driven”. Fuck’em, we will manage without them like we always have.
SteamOS isn’t a community project. It’s a corporate project. It’s just that Valve themselves aren’t even pushing for native SteamOS games. There was an interview once with one of the SteamOS guys who merely said in passing during an interview that native games are better but that remark was lost in pretty much all reporting. Even developers of games based on Unity don’t care to export Linux builds because Windows builds work just fine (until they don’t because a Proton update breaks something).
Quick search shows only like 30 of developers as a whole use Mac’s and I’m sure share is lower there because I know plenty of devs using macbooks that are running Linux or Windows. If we are talking game developers as a whole then that percentage of osx devs is far far smaller than the general usage. Windows using devs still dominate as a whole, Linux is not far behind, MacOS is a very vocal yet, smaller in reality group.
@emergencyfood@UnaSolaEstrellaLibre I would spend money on a great Linux laptop that could game at 1440p max settings but I have not found the one, yet. Any recs?
We don’t bother with Linux ports anymore, instead they just added directX and win32 application support to Linux so it can just run the native Windows application.
Unfortunately until gaming companies see their base users move to Linux I doubt any changes will happen. But this could be a very good step in that direction if YouTubers start promoting Linux is the way to go for games and web browsers. Some people don’t use anything else.
I'm not a dev or into IT and I'm on Arch Linux playing games and working without any problems. My sister has more trouble getting some games to run on Windows than I do on Linux.
Only time I reinstalled Windows on a laptop was when I was trying to get an ODB2 over USB connector to work, and the program (FORSCAN) couldn’t automatically read the device in Wine. You had to run a series of commands to find the device and then create a symlink in that Wine prefix. I was not going to tinker around like that while sitting in a hot car upon the hope I get it right and don’t fuck up the instrument cluster.
But besides those weird edge cases, it’s been pretty easy for me too, and I still reinstalled Linux after that little project!
Now that I think about it, I wonder if a Windows VM would have worked…
A VM would normally work if USB passthrough is properly configured. That said, on operations just like that, I normally just boot to my small Windows partition that I keep around for just such an occasion.
So CAD is simple stuff huh. So does CFD, mathematical modeling of a complex control system, robotics… Man, if only mechatronics is so simple. I daily drive arch btw.
Except that it’s not a CAD, just an electric circuit modelling tool. I mean technically it can be called CAD, but you can’t do shit in it except for circuits.
CAD is “Computer Aided Design”. if you want to talk about parametric modeling, then fucking say that because it’s really a lot more niche than you think.
Really? I would say it has less simple stuff and more complicated stuff, although it obviously has a lot of both.
I guess you mean that a lot of proprietary ‘professional’ software doesn’t work out of the box? I guess that’s true, but I wouldn’t call all of the alternatives ‘simple’ lol
Lol, sheeeh, the ratio!! I’m a (sadly) Windows-focused sysadmin in higher education and I agree with this, Linux is amazing for servers but normal business users can’t do shit with it : (
The year of the linux desktop was when AMD open sourced their drivers around 5 years ago and Valve partnered with codeweavers to drop Proton. Its only been uphill from there.
Normal business users are fine if the Company hasn’t deep-throated Microsoft. Our Company does all the business work with no windows machine in the whole company.
Being locked-in on Microsoft Office is a thing and not the fault of linux
I feel like this is just a new cash grab technique, and it’s actually pretty smart. The audience of people who will buy immediately despite DRM will do their thing, first wave of money complete. Over the next few years, trickle in more cash through steam sales. Once that well dries, get one more wave of cash by removing DRM, which appeases the audience that abstained the whole time, collecting their cash.
Edit: my half baked conspiracy theory got some attention. the argument that companies remove DRM like Denuvo because of cost makes way more sense, Occam’s razor holds true. Both can be true, they save money by removing the DRM, which has the nice side-effect of creating a small new wave of sales. Win/win. I’m sure Denuvo hates this and will one day make it more difficult for studios to just remove their software, because money.
Sorry but that doesn’t really make sense. In that scenario it is more sensible to just release a DRM free game at start, because the first group would buy either way and the second group would buy at the higher launch/near-launch pricing (since games drop in prices over time). It doesn’t make sense to make essentially 2 versions of the game over such a span of time like you described.
A more realistic scenario would be that there is some cost / licensing fee to use Denuvo tech and it no longer makes financial sense for Doom Eternal to do so, hence BOOM! DRM free.
Well, the intent behind adding DRM at first is to maximize profit by making piracy more difficult. Trust me I hate DRM too, but it’s not like they add it for no reason.
I didn’t say anything about that. I’m saying the main reason Bethesda removed Denuvo from Doom Eternal is likely because of cost reasons, not because it’s a marketing play to drive sales (like OP suggested).
That’s the intent behind it, how well does it actually work in that front well it’s tough to say. Fact of the matter is I know this from hanging out in these communities people who aren’t willing to pay for the game but still play it usually aren’t willing to pay for it just to play it.
The actual amount of people who “give in” is tough to estimate, because many people who do it are either astroturfing or are pretending, and most of the people who do “give in” typically will keep quiet about it, it’s not in their best interest to Brand themselves as a shill to other pirates.
So the legitimate people almost never speak up about doing this, and most of the people who speak up aren’t really doing this either. So it’s hard to say just how much the DRM actually curbs it, and since the companies and their shareholders are paying for it they would probably want to imagine that number to be as high as possible because if it isn’t they really are paying for it for nothing more than an imagined benefit.
Pretty sure that’s literally Denuvos pitch. They don’t expect it to be uncracked forever, just last long enough to maximize initial sales and then eventually remove it when it’s done its job. It’s like a padlock on a bike, keeps honest people honest but won’t actually stop a real thief.
It stops real thieves “long enough”, which is why developers and publishers continue to use it. Lots of AAA games go uncracked for a year or more. The first few months or so are the most critical time for sales.
They’ve come a long ways since the '00s, when DRM schemes were both far more draconian and rarely effective for more than a few days.
I mean, it isn’t “new”. This has been the semi-standard approach for games over the past couple years (decade?).
DRM at launch to protect quarter one sales. Remove DRM a year or two later as one of the final patches. It builds up good will with people who want to be able to “play this game forever” and probably reduces licensing fees to denuvo or securom or whatever.
Not every game does it and the fantasy of “We are going out of business. Time to make my last act to be removing DRM from my game” never made sense. But a lot have.
If this were actually true, the vast majority of publishers would be running torrent sites rather than considering giving money to denuvo.
The reality is that it is an incredibly rare piece of media that benefits from piracy. Like “Game of Thrones is the cultural zeitgeist for five or six years” level of rare.
For the vast majority, it is either background noise or actively detrimental to sales. And is why we see so many pointless multiplayer modes and pre-order incentives.
The other thing that gets referenced is the devs who will say something like “if you are going to buy our game on a key reseller site, just pirate it instead”. Which more speaks to how key reseller sites are built around chargebacks using stolen credit cards and exploiting regional pricing in ways that mostly screw over “the global south”. As opposed to the idea that piracy will increase full price sales or whatever.
The other blatant bad faith argument that I always love to see is: “I pirate games to try them out. If it is worth playing I’ll buy it”. Which ignores the ever increasing amount of demos out there, stuff like Steam having incredibly generous return policies, and the reality that is “Well, this is fun but it is more like 40 dollars of fun. I’ll play it now and then buy it later when I see it for that price” that TOTALLY happens.
If you’re gonna pirate, pirate. But don’t pretend it is somehow a moral high ground or that devs should work harder to prevent you from pirating their games but NOT use drm?
Dude, I literally played the pirated version for a weekend and then bought Doom eternal because it was so damn good. I do it all the time. It’s in my steam library and I finished it twice and bought 2 expansion packs for it.
I will now also download version 6.66 + All DLC’s from a pirated source for safe keeping to avoid any future fuckery via online services shutting down etc.
This is not uncommon behaviour at all. Many games are absolute trash these days even when the tech press gushes over them. In spite of your assertions, demos are almost a thing of the past. Hardly anyone does demos anymore.
My personal experience with chasing a refund after purchase does not reflect your experience either. Until critical mass builds into a full public backlash, if you’ve exceeded the return period (mere hours) then you are done.
Then you personally should go buy yourself a cookie (assuming you are representing things correctly).
That is not normal. Again, if it was normal, publishers would be running the torrent sites. But apparently, instead, those greedy publishers… want to make less money by making it marginally harder to pirate their games?
Games are expensive as hell in my country and the tech press have become completely disingenuous worldwide. A good review means nothing. I’m not about to drop $100AUD to $150AUD unless I know for sure that I am going to get a large number of enjoyable hours out of it.
I’m well aware of the old adage “never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to stupidity.” But…the number of times that a completely unprotected update is pushed in the first week of a release is too damn high for it to be accidental.
No. I am not surprised. In the slightest. I’ve seen that article. It was bullshit in 2017 and it is bullshit in 2023.
Because if you read even one line after the headline:
Results suggest a positive effect, but there’s a huge margin of error.
And if you go all the way into the article itself
The 306-page “Estimating Displacement Rates of Copyrighted Content in the EU” report (PDF) points out a number of caveats for this headline number, not least of which is a 45-percent error margin that makes the results less than statistically significant
But even if we say that this glorified coin flip of an outcome has any validity: That doesn’t say that piracy is good for a game. It says it is good f or gaming. To put it in context: Maybe people pirated Game of Thrones but actually bought the blu-rays for The Last Kingdom as a result. Which… is not at all useful to HBO (but better for people. Because Uthred Son of Uthred is a delightfully entertaining fuckboi). And is pretty much the same logic as “I buy the games I like” justifications.
Again: The people who ACTUALLY have this data are the publishers. Why would they be hellbent on trying to stop piracy if it actually made them more money?
I watch a show once and I’m done. I have some games in my library with over 1000 hours of playtime. I’m about as careful with those purchases as I am with a good pair of boots, and buddy I am the most annoying man at the hiking store.
I have used piracy to determine if a product is worthy of a retail purchase my entire life with everything from Android apps to AAA games. I know that you are making the argument that I am an outlier here but I don’t think I am.
Avenza maps is a good example. I tried it out with a cracked copy years ago and found it so useful in my personal and professional life that I have maintained an annual commercial license now for probably 10 years. I don’t receive any additional functionality compared to using a cracked copy, and maintaining the license between installs is actually FAR more difficult than just installing a cracked APK. Avenza has become so essential to my life that I directly support the development at a level above what I require, to hopefully ensure the continued development of this reasonably niche software into the future.
Given the forum we are in, I would compare it to the paid versions available for several popular linux distributions these days. You can download Zorin OS completely for free and have a very close to fully featured operating system much like you can have an almost fully-featured version of a pirated game. You could use this daily without paying a cent. That still didn’t stop me buying Zorin OS Pro. It’s the same deal. I want Zorin OS to stick around and keep doing what they are doing, just like I want ID Software to stick around and keep doing what they are doing. That doesn’t make any of them immune from releasing a box of garbage for full price (I’m looking at you, Rage and Rage2).
The only significant change in the landscape here in the last 30 years is the advent of services like EA Play Pro and Xbox games for Windows live. For me these services serve exactly the same purpose as piracy. If there’s something I’m interested in I can sign up for a month, try the thing that I’m interested in and then cancel the service without any significant penalty. If the game is good, then I’ll grab it when it becomes available on steam. So long as there continues to be no penalty for cancellation, this is an acceptable compromise to me but otherwise I am going to pirate your shit and if it is garbage then I won’t buy it.
I tried Battlefield 2042 via EA Play Pro for one month. At release it was an absolute joke. Not even close to finished. A truly terrible game. Those that managed to win a refund were ok, but many people were deemed to have played too many hours in a day to qualify for a refund. My friends and I bought the game on steam for a steep discount a full 18 months after release. That’s how long it took for them to fix the many issues and turn it into a worthwhile experience and a worthwhile purchase.
You can’t hire games from the video shop these days to try them out and I’m not about to be somebody’s sucker. The gaming industry is a complete mess, constantly pushing unfinished garbage and broken games. You’ve got to look after yourself.
Okay. You keep changing the subject the moment any of your arguments are questioned, so let me just repeat this as bluntly as I can:
I don’t care what YOU do. YOU don’t matter. I don’t matter. Jenny on the Block doesn’t matter. What matters is the aggregate. And all signs on that point toward “piracy is bad for profits in the vast majority of cases. Let’s pay for DRM”
If you want to have a discussion? I suggest responding to any of the points I have already made or even acknowledging that your ace in the hole article is about a complete joke of a report.
If all you want to do is talk about how you think you are a good person? Cool. Nobody cares.
And referencing uncited nonsense and then complete and utter nonsense is not “responding”
Go AMD. The open-source drivers already provide the best performance compared to the closed-source ones, and are included in the kernel and Mesa, which means the cards will work out of the box. For the best performance and latest drivers and optimizations you should switch to a distro with more up to date packages than Debian if you plan on buying a current gen card tho. For example, Fedora is a very good mix between working OOTB, ease of use and bleeding-edge packages.
nVidia is… difficult. The open-source drivers are getting better but are still way behind closed-source drivers, and each closed-source drivers version only works with a single kernel version. It might work OK as long as the drivers and kernel are kept in sync (I think Pop! or Nobara have nVidia specific versions for this reason), but otherwise each kernel upgrade is a risk. Plus nVidia drivers are basically shit with Wayland and cause a ton of issues.
Intel has a good track record with iGPUs so discrete cards should be as trivial to use as AMD ones, if more at the entry-level performance-wise.
Second for AMD. Team Red is bringing it right now anyway, the only card that doesn’t have an AMD equivalent is the 4090, anything else you can get an AMD equivalent for basically half the price. I run the 7900XTX and I can’t find anything that stalls this card.
Caveats, if you want to do AI/ML stuff, NVidia is the way to go. Ray tracing is also about a generation behind, but it’s not really noticeable to me. Instead of 4000 series ray tracing you get 3000 series ray tracing (roughly). Even with those caveats, it’s the best card I’ve ever owned.
For the best performance and latest drivers and optimizations you should switch to a distro with more up to date packages than Debian if you plan on buying a current gen card tho.
This is misleading. OP may have chosen Debian for a reason, as most Debian users do, and they don’t have to give it up just because they’re gaming.
Even with Debian Stable and a very recent AMD card, they would just have to grab a newer kernel (the easiest would be from Stable Backports) and maybe new amdgpu firmware (from here). Everything else would be covered by the Steam runtime (or Flatpak, if they use that). It’s not all that difficult. Performance is comparable to other distros.
Source: I game on Debian Stable with a recent AMD card.
and each closed-source drivers version only works with a single kernel version. It might work OK as long as the drivers and kernel are kept in sync (I think Pop! or Nobara have nVidia specific versions for this reason), but otherwise each kernel upgrade is a risk.
Are you sure this is true? I make no attempt to keep my kennel and driver in sync and have never had any problems at all. I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about this
Plus nVidia drivers are basically shit with Wayland and cause a ton of issues.
This is kind of true, but overstating. I use nvidia with Wayland also the time and, apart from some games, it works really well. Many of those issues will be fixed when explicit sync is released.
That all said, is she that AMD is currently best for Linux.
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