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Comment by sonzohan | Hacker News Reader

When Windows 11 was force-installed on my main game development desktop, I was skeptical, but kept using it. I was annoyed at having to turn off all the tracking and noise (like news articles)

When it updated and started shoving AI down my throat, with no easy way to turn it off and suddenly lots of data I don't consent to sharing getting used, 11 became the last Windows OS I'll ever use.

Whenever the next version comes out, Im moving fully to *buntu.

My main laptop already uses it and Steam on Linux has been fantastic. Any bugs or issues Ive experience have been due to my very unusual setup (like an eGPU over Thunderbolt)

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On my wife's laptop, I've uninstalled MS AI 3 times. I'm just about to lose my mind. I'd have already wiped the machine and moved it to mint but the data in her one drive, bookmarks, etc, I'm sure migrating her over won't be a totally seamless experience. I also have not tested battlenet under linux wine in a long time, and I expect some level of anti-cheat to give me hell there.

On all of my machines bar one, windows is completely gone. I have a simrig, currently running win10, but the hardware there, simucube base, simucube pedals, require some drivers I don't believe exist under linux, and/or don't work properly, and then there is iracing with it's easy anti cheat usage, from my understanding I'm screwed there as well. So it'll live on Windows 10 until the day iRacing stops supporting windows 10, or start supporting linux.

after having written that, I wonder if the simucube tools will just work under linux anyways, the UI is all written in QT, maybe simucube has/is developing linux drivers, given they're finland based :) .. I'll need to test it out

Sadly, the original Assetto Corsa is also borked on Linux (AC Evo and AC Rally, on the other hand, run great).

In my (admittedly limited) experience, it does run, even with quite comparable performance, but getting a wheel to interact with the game has been a bit challenging. But this could be resolved with a custom driver for my specific hardware. Using the community standard mod manager seems to resolve the UI jank by completely bypassing it.

yeah, I've heard this too.. and I'd rather my rig just works rather than try and stuff around making it work under linux + I know iracing is cooked anyway, and I've spent enough money on the rig to just want it to work, and not get stuffed over by some anti-cheat, maybe soon

picture of my rig https://www.arcturus.com.au/rig.jpg

What is your specific wheel hardware? It should simply be a case of binding the wheel axis in Content Manager’s controller options.

Hop on either matrix or discord listed at https://simracingonlinux.com and one of us will be happy to help you work through the issue.

AC works fine just requires a little extra setup, either use this script[0] or use the latest GE-Proton (with a fresh prefix), I recently updated protonfixes to fix a CM/CSP issue. The latter is better as newer Proton has some definite performance improvements.

0: https://github.com/sihawido/assettocorsa-linux-setup

That’s excellent, thanks for the heads up! By chance, RPS covered the Mulholland Drive mod recently and I’m keen to try it on Bazzite.

I would definitely prefer to go the GE-Proton route. To clarify, what do you mean by “fresh”? Just the most recent release or something more specific?

Fresh should mean creating a new prefix. For example, Proton-GE enabled wow64 in Wine by default, but it requires recreating the prefix to use it. Should be easy enough with Protontricks or even Winetricks.

Yes very much this. It is possible to modify an existing prefix but there are quite a few things to do, it's easier to back up savegames and game config files and then create it anew.

Thank you very much to both of you. Got it running flawlessly with CM on Steam Deck OLED at 90fps using GE-Proton10.34 and LSFG-VK for frame-gen. This one goes straight to the top (alongside DR2.0 and AC Rally) as favourite gaming on the go.

Nice, glad to hear it.

Simucube uses the hid-pidff driver which is built into the kernel. For setting up the base using the SC2 software there is a guide available[0]. I’m not an SC owner myself but there are a few people on the SimRacingOnLinux[1] discord who seem to have everything working nicely.

0: https://granitedevices.com/wiki/Using_Simucube_wheel_base_in...

1: https://simracingonlinux.com

You can install programs under Steam that are not distributed through Steam.

You can install battlenet under Steam and use all the proton magic to make it work. Starcraft 2 and diablo 2 both work very well (those are the only two I've tried). At least for SC2, anti-cheat did not cause any issues if it's even there at all.

Seriously the only thing stopping me from putting linux on my wife's laptop is the fact that she uses a cricut, which has software that doesn't work well on linux.

Also, I really dislike cricut as a company. Such a scammy business model.

That matches my experience almost exactly. I was hanging onto Windows almost entirely due to cutting edge graphics and my Nvidia card on my desktop that I'd built.

Windows 10 was already pretty bad, but it felt fast and stable. I think they started putting content in the start menu, and I think I did regedit stuff I can no longer remember to get rid of it.

Windows 11 they made us upgrade with a gun to the back of our heads, they made it feel sluggish, they hid settings in such a way that you're expected to use Search to find the setting (although Apple has that issue too), and somehow the Search wants to include the whole Internet instead of what's local.

But the AI agentic force-feeding was the last straw. What am I, at work?

And then HN insisted Linux gaming was ready and they were right! Someone wrote to me in a comment, "join us, brother" and I'm glad I did, it's brought joy back to using my machine and playing around again.

I had the same experience! Not looking back at all.

They already crossed your line with 11, and you're still using it despite Win10 or Ubuntu also being an option. Are you really going to switch when 12 comes out, or is something holding you back?

I will warn you, Ubuntu is basically dead now.

Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.

Please switch to Linux, but find a distro that actually wants you as a user.

Is your name a reference to the Blizzard game? If so, I worked on that :)

You're not wrong, but tbh I'd move upstream to Debian. I use Termux on my phone (Z Fold) with Debian and XFCE, and have been extremely pleased with the performance. Combined with a folding keyboard and some AirNeo's, it's become a fantastic micro-development system that fits in a hand bag.

Not that I don't like Arch, it has a very few (subtle!) things that Ubuntu has solved recently, like eGPU hotplugging

Nope, my nick predates Blizzard Entertainment, Co. I chose it as my nick on IRC in early 1991, and have used it everywhere ever since.

> Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base

When was that? I don't disagree that it appears to be the case (especially with replacing coreutils/sudo/etc and the... varied approach to .deb vs snaps) but I'm not aware of them saying it explicitly in those terms?

As somebody who has been around linux almost for as long as it exists, i must say that is a very strong statement.

In real life: systemd IS useful, Wayland is becoming (has become?) the default, ubuntu is the most popular desktop distro family.

He's not wrong though, the amount of Snap stuff you have to remove in a fresh install is starting to get a bit annoying (I usually remove at least the Snap versions of Firefox and Thunderbird and replace them with binaries from Mozilla - they will still self-update).

You don't have to remove them though, it works fine.

You are right, the snap versions mostly work fine. It's just that there are a lot of annoyances due to the nature of Snap packages (slowness, increased disk space requirements, problematic integration with the rest of the system...), but it definitely is possible to live with them.

My Gentoo system is fully systemd and Wayland based from the start. Might sound like heresy to some users, but it was my decision from the start as I liked how they worked, that they are the future, and that you don’t have to wrangle shell scripts for building an OS. I had used systemd a lot via many Ubuntu servers before, so that helps.

In my experience, Snap is frustrating to use, buggy and is opinionated in ways I don't like.

It's also a weird choice for servers running Ubuntu. I recall some CLI utilities being moved to Snap and you can't install them with apt anymore.

Ubuntu on servers has always been "a choice", Debian is definitely the preferable of the two. Even on desktops, I'd sooner suggest Debian or Mint than Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a dead distro coasting on a reputation 15(+) years out of date.

(And it used to be that Ubuntu was still a defensible choice for maximizing the chance of getting help online, but LLMs have effectively neutralized this advantage.)

Mint still uses Xorg, so it's outdated. I tried it recently, it wasn't working with my iGPU+dGPU (nothing exotic, just a regular PC), and all the other distros already went to Wayland so nobody was talking about this online. I feel bad for anyone who gets convinced to switch from Windows to Mint, being told it's the easy one. The fix was to just install Ubuntu.

Maybe Xorg is inherently better than Wayland, but that doesn't matter, the ship has sailed and the community evidently doesn't have time to properly support both.

I genuinely don't think Xorg is a deal breaker for newbs and I would characterize dual-GPU as at least slightly exotic, maybe because I've never owned such a computer, but that's a fair enough point. Personally I think the polish of Cinnamon makes it the best recommendation for somebody new, and I know a whole lot of people start with that and have a sufficiently good experience that they stick with linux (while maybe moving on to other distros.)

It's not exactly dual GPU, just the Intel CPU has integrated graphics as usual. I'm not surprised if you don't have that, but it has to be the most common desktop setup, and quite common on high-end laptops. Was giving black screen after wake. Probably a solution exists somewhere, but even if I found it, the fact that this was broken out of the box and didn't have a clear fix was already reason enough not to trust it.

The GUI layout of Cinnamon vs KDE vs w/e seems like the main thing people argue about, but it doesn't matter compared to this. Anyone who even knows what an OS is enough to go install Linux will figure out how to use whatever GUI you give them, provided it works. The bar needs to be at making sure stuff isn't straight up broken.

To be honest I haven't owned a dGPU in almost 20 years, but I've been lead to understand that most users with them use them all the time and ignore their iGPU, unless they're laptop users, in which case they might have to use Nvidia's proprietary drivers from what I understand; the installation of which is something Mint makes straight forward for novices, or so I've been lead to understand. Maybe I'm wrong about some of that.

I definitely agree that KDE vs Cinnamon probably doesn't matter. But I'm afraid I don't think particularly highly of any KDE-first distro; it's great from, for example, OpenSUSE, but that's not a distro I'd recommend to new users for other reasons.

The problem I've got with Ubuntu is they keep doing weird shit like submitting desktop searches to Amazon or putting ads in the motd. They're an erratic organization and I think it's a mistake to send new users in their direction. Mint may not be perfect, but I think it's broadly inoffensive and mild, a good distro to leave a good first impression on a new user fumbling through the process themself.

So Debian is a no because it ships with KDE?

Imo Ubuntu deserved to lose its users when they switched to Unity, not because Unity sucks (it does) but because it's unacceptable for a newbie-focused OS to rug-pull its entire GUI like that for any reason. But it's still #1, so realistically the leader is going be either Ubuntu or something corp-supported like SteamOS.

Debian is a soft no, because despite being an excellent distro, it defaults to GNOME or the user has to deliberately choose something else, which is a problem for giving distro recommendations to noobs because whe you start tacking on stuff like "and make sure you enable the..." their eyes start to glaze over and you risk them thinking the whole affair sounds more complicated than it really is.

I mean I really do love Debian, if not OpenSUSE I would be using Debian now, but it's not a great distro to suggest for absolute novices.

> So Debian is a no because it ships with KDE?

I don't think this is a problem at all. I tend to install Debian from the command line (Arch-style), but from what I remember GNOME is the default DE. DEs are largely a matter of opinion, but I find GNOME to be more polished overall. I do use a few extensions however to recreate a desktop-centric UX (Dock, boot to desktop and a few other tweaks).

> Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.

Citation very much needed for this claim.

If that means that package versions for commonly used tools are less than a decade old in the future that's probably a good thing though ;)

Sorry but this comment is part of the reason anyone should rightfully be scared to switch to Linux. Not only do you have to pick one of 999 distros, but every choice is wrong according to someone. Which one do you recommend, and is it the kind that will throw random issues or be called evil?

Debian, if you need a rock-stable system; Fedora for cutting edge.

Yeah those are fine choices, but someone is going to say why they're actually horrible, just like Ubuntu which is also fine

These are good choices, also consider Arch if you want the most agency over what goes into your system. That being said, you can also build a very minimal system with Debian from the command line with the arch-install-scripts. It's just that Debian stable will freeze relatively old packages for the sake of avoiding breaking updates, such as changes in configuration files that require manual intervention. On a gaming rig however, you will typically want to avoid Debian as you want the latest drivers, latest Proton/Wine, etc. as the performance uplift can be substantial and compatibility keeps improving.

For the most agency over my system I prefer Qubes OS. I use Debian and Fedora inside VMs. Their mnimized versions are available from the Qubes repositories.

I have had an excellent experience with KDE on Fedora. Has been stable despite being on the forefront of updates, familiar UI approach for Windows refugees while still offering plenty of customisation options for those who seek it.

If you have any unusual set-up going on personally I'd recommend a rolling release distro like manjaro (arch) or fedora, so you get latest drivers and whatnot fast. Modern releases of these distros come bundled with the same desktop environment options as Ubuntu and good, easy to use package install and update GUIs. IMO it's more noob friendly than Ubuntu because your stuff is more likely to work without weird workarounds.

I strongly suggest any other distro that is Ubuntu. Canonical is a Microsoft wannabe

Fighting off snaps would be reason enough to abandon them but Canonical has control of the snap store in a way that is antithesis to open source as they're trying to run a walled garden play. This is the exact type of crap that lit a fire under my ass to get off Windows in the first place.

I’ve heard there are issues with anticheat. Have you had any issues?

It's hit-or-miss, with recent live service and esport titles being the iffiest. The older multiplayer titles, casual shooters and natively ported games are more consistently supported and form a sizable library of working online games.

Anti-cheat systems that rely on rootkit-style undermining of your OS will indeed not work on Linux.

i thought it would bother me, but honestly, tehre are just too many good games that dont require eac.

i would imagine eac on linux will have to be addressed once steam machines drop, but for now i look at it like, if a game requires eac, at this point the game studio is just too lazy or cheap [0] to be linux compatible so we just play something else. far too many great games.

[0] its even more silly considering eac doesnt seem to stop cheaters at all. every single popular game that requires eac is still absolutely overflowing with more than obvious cheaters.

Easy anti cheat works on linux, if the game developers permit it.

It's not the same as EasyAntiCheat and doesn't support the same features. It's like saying Excel works on iPad, but you can't even use VBA on that.

Or a game example: I have Minecraft (Bedrock) on my phone so therefore I should be able to do the same things as Minecraft (Java) on Windows. The problem is they're the same names for different software with similar, but not the same, functionality.

So you're saying that easy anti cheat on linux is different from on windows? I am aware it is not as effective as detecting cheating on linux, but does this affect gameplay itself? Or do game developers not want reduced efficacy of detecting cheaters, and so they don't support linux at all?

I don't play those games myself but the word is that the EAC on linux lacks the same kernel hooks that are available on Windows. I personally consider that a plus but if you're a developer obsessed with strong anti-cheat you probably do not.

Ah, I was under the mistaken impression EAC operated in userspace.

It does on Linux. That's the problem for developers. Unless you're talking about Windows.

Linux kernel provides ways to observe from user space. The problem is that there’s nothing to stop someone running a kernel which neuters anticheat tools ability to observe using that functionality. As far as I’m aware the only way to mitigate that is via measured boot attestation and having signed kernel etc.

There's a good tracker here:

https://areweanticheatyet.com

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