Hacker News Reader

Comment by oh_nice_marmot | Hacker News Reader

Beginning with the XP I became a heavy Windows user until version 7. Those releases were the heyday for Windows IMO. But since 8 and, worse of all, 11 I ditched it altogether and none of the computing devices in the house run Windows.

This is all to say that my main gaming rig runs Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Gnome, heavily tweaked, to look and behave like MacOS and.... Its a dream.

Heck, in fact I like it so much that I prefer it to MacOS in every possible way. The only issue is, still, the lack of Adobe support.

And that is why I still have an Apple machine.

Give it a try. You will be surprised by how well so many games run.

View on HN

What kind of graphics card are you using and have you run into many issues for multi display and/or high refresh rates (assuming you're running this)?

I'm so close to dumping windows and my final concern is gpu and multi monitor support. I only ever run linux on servers or VMs, so no real experience on bare metal.

Not the person you asked, but I run Kubuntu with an RTX 4080 and a 4K 144hz display and every single thing works out of the box. Not every game I want to play works with Proton, but close. Gaming performance vs Windows has been indistinguishable, and it boots up much faster. My Windows drive sits at a half-loaded desktop with no icons for like a minute... No idea why.

Dual monitors will work well if they're similar, but I wouldn't mix hi-dpi with low-dpi or different refresh rates. I've heard most of that doesn't work or is poorly supported.

I am on an ancient 1080 ti but that still gets the job done on the games I want to play (Total War series, RDR2 and some indie games).

About high refresh rate games: I have gamed on 144hz/120hz (one gaming monitor and another OLED TV) but I prefer to lower it so I can increase quality of graphics.

Multi monitor I can't say I have much experience with them connected at the same time but I have used the OLED+Gaming monitor few times but I can't say I do it often.

What I do very often is to leave the machine running and use RDP/Steam client to connect to it and game/work.

Linux support, and Ubuntu and Gnome for that matter, improved leaps and bounds since last LTS.

I've been looking more and more at this since I got a Steam Deck and found surprisingly good compatibility on almost every game. If Steam OS was made available for your run-of-the-mill gaming rig I'd install it in a heartbeat and give it an earnest test run.

That said, there is still a latent unease from my last misadventure with a Linux gaming PC from 2017, which ended in a LOT of restarting into Windows whenever the guys wanted to play a game I couldn't get working

I haven't tried it yet but: https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown

My only speedbump at this point is non-steam games, specifically in my case overwatch2 and diablo4. Can I run the battlenet launcher and it's games on steam os .. can i do it and not be banned by their 'anti cheat' spyware?

I saw that page right after I made the comment and googled it, but it seemed a little light on details and I was suspicious that it was the old Steam Machines distro as opposed to the frankly quite pleasant distro on the Steam Deck.

EDIT: Yep [1], it looks like that page is for the old SteamOS

[1] https://repo.steampowered.com/steamos/README.txt

Try Bottles (use bottles.com).. I smashed through the Diablo 4 Beta on VanillaOS and Bottles and can also confirm that Overwatch, Hearthstone, StarCraft and Diablo 3 works. The scaling / DPI for the BattleNet client is a little small on my 4K monitor, but other than that, it works well.

> This is all to say that my main gaming rig runs Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Gnome, heavily tweaked, to look and behave like MacOS and.... Its a dream.

Would you mind sharing your setup? I would absolutely love to get something like this going on my Linux boxes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com