Malf on 6/5/2022 at 10:26
I was in the first wave of deliveries of the Steam Deck, and have been enjoying mine every day since release. It's an impressively capable bit of kit for the size, and having access to my library of games on a portable is just... *chef's kiss*
The interesting thing is that combined with my experience of using Ubuntu as my operating system of choice on my personal work laptop, I am now confident enough in Linux as a platform that I'm going to be making the jump on my main home PC this weekend.
Windows 11 doesn't do what I want (yet), and I'm getting increasingly ticked off with MS and Apple moving more and more towards being "Walled Gardens".
I'm sure there'll be some teething problems, as well as programs that I forget about, but I'm actually looking forward to going full Linux.
Now it's just a case of settling on a distro; I would go for SteamOS, but Valve haven't updated the desktop version to be the same as the Deck version yet.
So it's a toss-up between vanilla Ubuntu or Pop_OS.
There's numerous distros out there that have been tailored for gaming, but they're usually made by enthusiasts, and don't have a big company/community behind them, so updates and support would be limited by comparison.
And the other big one is, do I take this opportunity to play with ZFS?
Sounds quite complicated to set up, but the inbuilt snap-shotting is REALLY appealing, as well as features that prevent against data corruption, even when a disk is failing.
Wish me luck!
Anarchic Fox on 7/5/2022 at 18:24
Proton (Steam's compatibility program) really is fantastic nowadays. It handled every 2D game I've tried over the last couple years, though a few 3D ones still crashed.
Renzatic on 16/5/2022 at 22:42
The weirdest thing about Proton is just how random it can be with what it decides to run well with. I've been on Linux nearly exclusively for over a year now, and I'd say it's run probably 9 out of every 10 games I've thrown at it. The games that don't run, though, are the ones you'd expect would play just fine.
Like Prodeus? Runs just like native, no tweaking required.
Elden Ring? Once again, runs like it's a native application. The only thing I did was tweak it to use FSR, because my comp's a little too underpowered to run it at 1440p or even 1080p
Doom Eternal? No problems whatsoever.
Tunic? Like butter.
Forgive Me Father? 5 FPS slideshow, and no tweaks will fix it.
You'd think that if Proton can run games like Doom Eternal and Elden Ring, it wouldn't have any problems with Forgive Me Father. It's only slightly more demanding than some Doom source ports. But no. It's just not playable.
And the other game I couldn't get to run recently? The Quake rerelease. Wouldn't even boot it up for some reason. OlliOlli World worked great though.
Anarchic Fox on 21/5/2022 at 02:55
Yeah, Proton is unreliable enough that you need to mind the two-hour refund window. But it's also reliable enough to finally make Linux a viable gaming platform. (How did your experiment turn out, Malf?)
...I'm glad to hear Tunic works well, for obvious reasons. :sweat:
My current problem is that some part of my ancient gaming rig produces outright crashes, particularly (but not exclusively) during games, and I lack the Linux know-how to narrow down their source. My Disco Elysium playthrough is in limbo as a result. My PC is ten years old anyway, so I'm just going to replace it outright. I'll be a tad annoyed if the cause turns out to be my relatively new graphics card, since that's one of the pieces I'm keeping.
Malf on 21/5/2022 at 07:39
Quote Posted by Anarchic Fox
(How did your experiment turn out, Malf?)
It's going really well, albeit after an initial hiccough with Ubuntu and experimenting with ZFS.
I'm now running Pop!_OS, and it's been great so far.
I'm really impressed with Proton and how easy Valve have made it to run anything through it.
I've tried other dedicated apps, like Lutris and the Heroic Games Launcher, but I keep coming back to Steam.
Also, day-to-day desktop usage feels a lot faster and snappier than Windows or Mac OS.
I did have an issue with my USB soundcard initially (a Sennheiser GSX 1000), but after reading a few things, simply changed the sound subsystem I was using from Pulseaudio to Pipewire. Yes, that took a bit of command line wrangling, but was relatively easy thanks to extensive and helpful community guides.
And my Rift doesn't work as a "Plug and Play" device, and from what I've read, the community projects to get it working aren't great. But let's see what Valve do with the next iteration of Index.
I mean, I could pick up an Index right now, but it feels like there might be an announcement from Valve about the next version any day now.
Games I have played with no issues at all:
Guild Wars 2 (Proton)
Hitman 3 (Proton)
Vampire Survivors (Native)
Space Haven (Native)
WH40K Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters (Proton)
Weird West (Proton)
Oxygen Not Included (Native)
I have tried getting Sifu running through the Epic Store, but it doesn't recognise controller input, and there's really no point playing Sifu without one.
But in general, I'm massively surprised by how many of the games in my library are already Linux native.
Overall, I think I'm here to stay :)
Renzatic on 23/5/2022 at 23:10
Just bought Biomutant on sale for $20. It runs perfectly in Linux. I've set everything to high, though I'm playing it at 1600x900 with FSR enabled to make sure it stays at 60FPS.
It's really getting to the point where I see no reason to use Windows anymore.
Anarchic Fox on 30/5/2022 at 16:05
I'm glad to hear you had such a positive experience, Malf!
Quote Posted by Malf
Also, day-to-day desktop usage feels a lot faster and snappier than Windows or Mac OS.
Yeah, that's the problem. A new Windows PC will be decently fast when you first purchase it, but it'll gradually become slower and slower as the operating system gathers more updates. There's a boost in speed every time Windows releases a new major version, but it doesn't counteract the decline between versions. It's probably forced obsolescence.
Whereas a Linux system's performance will be more or less constant throughout the computer's lifetime. I have a Mint Linux PC and a Windows 10 laptop, both about ten years old. The PC takes less than ten seconds to load, the laptop takes... about three minutes. Too bad I need it for work and for various programs not on Linux.
The downside is that Linux systems often need tweaking, and that can be a hassle. It's kinda liberating being able to fuss around with the innards of your system, though, when Windows does so much to protect itself against its users.
Nameless Voice on 31/5/2022 at 10:34
"Being able to" sounds nice, "being forced to"... not so much.
I was seriously considering switching my main PC from its severely-outdated Windows 7 to Linux, but ended up just going to Windows 10 in the end.
There's just too many programs which I use that don't have good replacements on Linux. Plus, not all games run properly on Wine, especially multiplayer ones that use anti-cheat systems.
Renzatic on 31/5/2022 at 14:50
Quote:
"Being able to" sounds nice, "being forced to"... not so much.
You don't have to tweak things nearly as much as you used to. These days, I only have a few gnome extensions that tweak some cosmetics. It's not nearly as much of an involved process as it was 4-5 years ago.
Though whether Linux is ultimately good for you or not entirely depends on what you intend to do with it. If you, say, use your computer primarily for photography, and play the occasional online game, I wouldn't recommend it.
Nameless Voice on 31/5/2022 at 16:10
The tweaking is mostly for hardware that doesn't work right out of the box. A lot of things mostly just work - probably more than on Windows, if I'm honest - but the things that don't work are generally much harder to solve, and tend to involve lots of googling and obscure terminal commands.
For example, Linux on my desktop has a weird bug where it doesn't turn the USB off when it shuts down the PC - so the keyboard lights stay on if I shut down from Linux, whereas they turn off if I shut down from Windows. Never did figure out how to solve that one.
I don't know about photography - as the major photo processing programs likely don't have Linux versions - but I'd actually recommend Linux over Windows for anyone who just wants a computer to access the internet on.
The real trouble is if you want to use more specific software. A lot of my everyday software doesn't have great alternatives on Linux.
I could never found a good music player to rival AIMP, the video player isn't as good as MPC-BE, there isn't a great text editor (though Notepad++ runs through Wine), there's no simple image viewer/editor as good as IrfanView, and those are just general every-day items.
Gaming is a pain; there's no GOG Galaxy (which would mean losing all my tags and game times); there's no Epic Launcher (though Heroic Launcher works fairly well and even lets you install Unreal Engine without spending several hours compiling it yourself now); multiplayer games that use Easy Anti Cheat won't be playable; there's no 3D software other than Blender; you're limited to an old version of Git Extensions because they dropped Linux support; etc, etc.
The GOG Galaxy and Epic Launcher ones are especially relevant for the Steam Deck. I'm really hoping that the success of the Deck pushes those two companies to really step up their Linux game.
