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Comment by thewebguyd | Hacker News Reader

> oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming

People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.

I haven't fully switched over yet because the games the combo of the hardware I have + the games I play regularly, still give me issues vs. Windows. Getting them to run isn't the problem, but I haven't been able to solve miscellaneous crashes, lag, lower frame rates, etc.

My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.

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> People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.

This. The corollary is also that people take the such quips way too literally.

I, personally, don't play that many games, and those that I do play tend to run faster on Linux (with an AMD GPU, which I bought specifically to avoid nvidia headaches).

But I still game on Windows. Why? Because I still have a Windows box, "because Linux is not reasonable for photo editing". I actually daily drive Linux, but I can't be assed to move from Lightroom and photoshop, so I still keep a windows pc under my desk. I just play games on it because it's much beefier than my 5 yo ryzen U laptop, and since I don't interact with that box all that much, I didn't feel like partitioning my smallish drive for no tangible benefit. My laptop is more than enough for all my other needs.

Ok, if you want to be stubborn about it then leave Windows on a partition and only start it when you want to play that one game. Problem solved.

In many ways, moving to Linux is like starting to live on your own. Your mommy might be a better cook than you, but is that a good enough reason to keep living in your parents' basement?

I’ll be honest I’m really struggling with this analogy.

Win partition will make you want to cry.

Win insists on bootlocker/secure boot, meanwhile most of the Linux doesn’t boot with it or you have to go though hell and back to install unsigned drivers (nvidia, gentle-yall).

I’d all say that Linux is like living in a car with 0 euros and saving up for a house. Simple user can scrape by, but mowing dev work life to Linux is much harder than to Mac. VPNs, inconsistent distro support for weird work stuff and such will make you spend days to weeks of unpaid overtime to get comfortable

Bazzite supports secure boot just fine, its actually enabled by default. I'm sure others do too.

Secure boot mainly gets annoying if you have an Nvidia card, since the akmod needs to be self-signed. It's not insurmountable but you have to load your keys into the UEFI before it'll work.

Bazzite builds the Nvidia driver into its kernel, so you don't need to do anything special. Post installation it prompts you to do key enrollment, so all the user needs to do is select "Enroll MOK" and type "universalblue".

This is a solvable problem and there's even pacman hooks around to do it for you

But also don't blame Linux. Even your comment says the problem is Microsoft. We need to be collectively mad at the right entity if we're going to get them to change. Otherwise they'll keep bullying people and they've found that they can bully people so much it gives them Stockholm Syndrome, where they feel they can't leave.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware...

For quite a while I've found that the much easier answer is to have a physical drive per OS and make sure it's the only drive connected during install, or at least one for anything that doesn't play entirely nicely with multi-boot. Obviously there's downsides to that, buying another drive or you might be using something like a laptop which is less friendly to extra drives, dis/reconnecting M.2 drives isn't as trivial as SATA either.

Linux can handle BitLocker & Secure Boot just fine. The problem with dual booting in that configuration is rather that every time Linux updates the boot loader, Windows will freak out and stop booting until you enter the recovery key for BitLocker. This can be prevented by first booting into Windows to disable BitLocker until the next reboot and then installing the Linux updates, but in practice I find that I forget about it all the time with my dual-boot laptop (which spends most of its time booted into Linux).

Running two systems has cons of its own

Which are?

I've had Windows in one disk and Linux in another for maybe a decade and use the boot selection to pick what I want. Never had a single issue.

Although I haven't opened Windows in months, so I'll likely nuke it soon and give more space for my Linux.

I’m sorry but are you being intentionally obtuse? You can’t think of a single downside to running two systems on your machine instead of one? If you lack imagination to that level I can’t help you dude

Of course running one system is better. Use Linux and stop being miserable ;)

Still, you haven't said what are these extremely horrible cons that two systems have. For me they're so small it's not even comparable to having to submit yourself to a shit Windows system only to avoid the "hassle" of having two systems.

I used Windows only for gaming and Linux for everything else. Now I'm fed up with games that choose to block Linux out, so I no longer need the two systems and couldn't be happier.

I’m not miserable in the slightest, just endlessly bewildered that people in the Linux community continue to have attitudes like yours, despite that being literally the main reason people are put off of Linux. It’s self defeating.

Over the last year or so, nVidia support for the 3+ series of hardware has gotten pretty stable.

With that said, I'm probably going to grab and AMD or Intel card once my 3060 becomes too much of a pain to continue using. It's a little ridiculous that the 5060 gives very little reason for my to update my 5 year old video card.

I only update my rig ever 8-10 years. Saves money though I tend to then play the older games, which is OK for me. I've had a 3080 for 3 years and it still feels like a new card.

FWIW, I've been gaming with a 1660 on Nobara OS for the past 3 months w/o issue.

FWIW my 4070 Ti Super has had zero headaches in Linux. It’s only older Nvidia cards I’ve had issues with. Seems like there was a major driver change starting with the RTX 20xx series.

Linux probably became first-class for them because a lot of ML workflows rely on NVidia in the cloud, and I don't think anyone really uses Windows for that.

It's telling how Nvidia released an ARM driver for Linux, but has not for Windows.

Up until last week I was running a 960 on mint and had absolutely no problems, nor did I even have to think about drivers. I also have a server running Tesla M10s and they're great too, little more fiddly getting the right driver, but that's moreso on the cards being weird.

Post last week I put in an Arc B580 and I had some issues at the start, but that's more to do with the fact that my workstation has a Haswell Xeon v3... Otherwise it was just turning CSM off.

I find this mostly applies to the competitive games due to most standard anti cheat apps not working outside win32.

Again, all these games are available on console (mostly) so the excuse to not support Linux is conscious. Those ARE Linux machines. Essentially. (Yeah yeah, they have their own tool chain and rendering) but if they are using Vulkan, DX12, DX11, and a window - it can run on Linux.

Of course, and it's mostly DRM and/or anti-cheat. The studios want full control over the device running their IP, and they can't achieve that with desktop Linux, but they also don't want to leave the PC gaming market behind entirely to launch exclusively on consoles. Hence why the Windows versions of these games install rootkits on your PC, they aren't cooperating with the PC ecosystem, they are forcibly turning your computer into a locked-down console.

and for a good reason, you want an infested cheater to be more a problem than currently bad problem that is happening????

giving a user freedom cause it to make multiplayer game to be more unbearable since its human nature to compete and come out of others ???? who would guess

I hope they won't start providing their own tailored heavily locked encrypted operating system versions as a requirement to run their games.

They did, it's called Xbox and PlayStation

Does xbox and playstation run on my custom PC?

Technically PS5 and I think Switch 2 is based on the BSD kernel probably because of the license. Xbox is not exactly Windows but it's using an NT kernel.

Playstation is FreeBSD, yeah, but the Switch runs a completely bespoke microkernel. Nintendo did borrow the BSD networking stack, which led some to infer from the license disclosure that it runs a BSD, but it's been extensively reverse engineered now and it doesn't even vaguely resemble Unix.

Interesting, I didn't know that! Thanks.

The fun thing about it being a true microkernel is that although there's zero official public information about it, it was small enough to fully reverse engineer and more or less reconstitute the original source code. You can see it here, it's tiny: https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere/tree/master/meso...

I’ve been trying to train a model to do this kind of work. Take a black box and try to reverse engineer its functions back into something usable (not necessarily identical). Obviously on things that are out of copyright or copyleft.

I've gamed since 1979 and have used nVidia on Linux since the early 2000's...without issue.

There have certainly been issues (I've been on Linux with mostly nvidia GPUs since 2004) but it's almost always been caused by the module being outside the kernel, and a kernel update breaking compatibility sometimes, understandably. This has always been fixed quickly on nvidias end though. And early Wayland issues and the current DX12 -> Vulkan translation performance issues in more recent times.

But overall I've also had a mostly stable experience during that time. New hardware is supported mostly at release. Not always supporting all the latest features straight away mind you, but still. Meanwhile I seem to hear about issues with support for Intel and AMD cards at release frequently in comparison.

> My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.

Then you'll have AMD headaches. NVidia is the only accelerated graphics card fully supported on Linux.

You only get acceleration in AMD if you use their binary-only drivers and they only support cards for about a year.

AMD drivers are now open and in the mainline kernel. They dropped their proprietary driver and now use the upstream MESA stack. Nvidia also still suffers from a 20-30% performance drop on DX12 games on Linux, while AMD does not.

It used to be the reverse as you stated, but that hasn't been true since about 2015.

Okay, but AMD isn't accelerated. It's godawful slow for anything to do with video, and really you just need an NVidia card if you're doing anything to do with video editing or motion graphics.

The built-in amdgpu drivers are awful, constantly crashy and with very poor hardware support of anything more than a couple of years old.

> AMD isn't accelerated

This is a bewildering assertion.

It doesn't have CUDA beacuse that's NVidia-only and it doesn't have OpenCL unless you use the binary-only drivers, which only work on a handful of very new cards.

What good is it?

You can't use it for editing video.

> CUDA .. nvidia-only

Well, duh.

> unless you use the binary-only drivers

Which you also have to do with nvidia cards.

> which only work on a handful of very new cards

So get a new card?

> You can't use it for editing video.

Yes I can.

----

I actually switched from a 7900 XTX to a 4090 BITD because I wanted CUDA, so I get that angle, but that doesn't mean I go around telling people "AMD isn't accelerated," because it's not true and it's a silly thing to try to claim.

NVIDIA is currently improving as well! Of course AMD is still the safer bet, but I think things look bright for NVIDIA in the future. The kernel driver was open sourced, and they are currently working on the DX12 performance issues.

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