Linux gaming is BETTER than Windows?

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

What SpaceGhost said is what I have found to be true too, which is strange since a lot of people on the Internet always goes on about how "real work" is done on Windows, yet the most common answer to why someone doesn't use GNU/Linux is "I wanna play games".

 

If we're talking about "real work" in IT, then GNU/Linux is king. But I suspect a lot of people who talk about "real work" being done on Windows doesn't actually work with IT. To me, "real work" is programming, running servers, network configuration, IT management, security testing and hardening, and things like that. For those things, GNU/Linux is usually waaaaay more for "real work" than Windows.

But if you don't work in IT and instead work with for example sending mail, writing things in Word and Excel, making power point presentations, and stuff like that then Windows is probably the best suited for the task (especially since MS Office is king in the office world). Not a whole lot of media applications exist for GNU/Linux either so that field is dominated by Windows and MacOS as well.

 

I guess Windows domain admin is one of the rare exceptions where you don't need GNU/Linux when you work with IT.

I find the concept of "real work" to be valueless in the context of discussing what product is best. All work is real and the denotation of "real work" is arbitrary.  There are clearly cases where linux is better, but that is not based on how real someone considers the work type, it is based on  what the worker wants to use and what is best to use for that specific case.   What makes IT admin more real than engineering design or content creation or modal analysis?  Some "real work" is better on windows and some is better on Linux.   

 

One who manages the banking sectors back end might argue that you need a risc powered mainframe running something akin to Unix in order to be doing "real work".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[quantum-]

On 6/18/2020 at 8:48 PM, Radium_Angel said:

What pisses me off most about *nix, is they scream from every rooftop they can find that they are better and different, than slavishly copy everything Apple or Redmond do in the UI dept, and in several other places.

I don't know about that, I haven't seen a decent tiling window manager for macOS or Windows. An example data does not make, but I'm sure I could find several more.

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, mr moose said:

I find the concept of "real work" to be valueless in the context of discussing what product is best. All work is real and the denotation of "real work" is arbitrary.  There are clearly cases where linux is better, but that is not based on how real someone considers the work type, it is based on  what the worker wants to use and what is best to use for that specific case.   What makes IT admin more real than engineering design or content creation or modal analysis?  Some "real work" is better on windows and some is better on Linux.   

 

One who manages the banking sectors back end might argue that you need a risc powered mainframe running something akin to Unix in order to be doing "real work".

Exactly.

Which is why I put "real work" in quotes and had an issue with the Radium_Angel saying that GNU/Linux was only suited for Youtube browsing and if you wanted to do real work you used Windows.

Like I said, if you work in IT then chances are you will use GNU/Linux in one way or another. If you work at an office or doing media work then chances are you will use Windows. It doesn't make sense to define one of those as "real work" and the other as something else. The right tool for the right job.

[kelvinhall05]

2 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Exactly.

Which is why I put "real work" in quotes and had an issue with the Radium_Angel saying that GNU/Linux was only suited for Youtube browsing and if you wanted to do real work you used Windows.

Like I said, if you work in IT then chances are you will use GNU/Linux in one way or another. If you work at an office or doing media work then chances are you will use Windows. It doesn't make sense to define one of those as "real work" and the other as something else. The right tool for the right job.

Also the fact that the internet runs on Linux servers kinda defeats the "Windows is for doing real work" point.

[Chunchunmaru_]

Even if it's improving, what I think is really missing right now in Linux Gaming is decent optimus laptop support, obviously you can't tell someone to edit environment variables just to make it run to a specific graphics card, not to mention that it's not even close to what Windows offers (mainly no dynamic discrete graphics card loading, plus consuming more power)

 

7 hours ago, LAwLz said:

If we're talking about "real work" in IT, then GNU/Linux is king. But I suspect a lot of people who talk about "real work" being done on Windows doesn't actually work with IT. To me, "real work" is programming, running servers, network configuration, IT management, security testing and hardening, and things like that. For those things, GNU/Linux is usually waaaaay more for "real work" than Windows.

I guess Windows domain admin is one of the rare exceptions where you don't need GNU/Linux when you work with IT.

I work in the IT field too and all of my servers run on Linux, including domain controllers,  with a few exceptions, and myself for managing them I feel much more comfortable, I absolutely LOVE to work with Remmina, it's a life saver, but for clients?

Even if they could use Libreoffice most of them just cannot work without Outlook, sadly some of my customers in some cases are still using Access, with strange macros since the 90' that do not work on libreoffice (they barely work on newer windows versions) also in my country the 80% the ERP software (and other government ones for taxes, querying customs information about goods, etc) requires Windows and it's definitely a no-no on Linux (except for a few web-based) excluding some thin clients I personally set up in manufacturing environments all the clients must be running windows

Assuming I want them to use Linux instead, asking customers to buy a Terminal Server (or a virtual machine on their computers) just to use a bunch of important software, considering all the work that is needed, is definitely a waste of money at the current state (also terminal server licenses in W2019 server...)

[Nayr438]

32 minutes ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

Even if they could use Libreoffice most of them just cannot work without Outlook

Has a learning curve and some extra setup, but Kontact Suite has been a great alternative for me personally. Integrates better with the KDE Plasma Desktop.

[Chunchunmaru_]

16 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

Has a learning curve and some extra setup, but Kontact Suite has been a great alternative for me personally. Integrates better with the KDE Plasma Desktop.

The problem is that Exchange mail servers are widely used, and Linux mail clients have no decent support to it

[Radium_Angel]

14 hours ago, cybik said:

Say goodbye to your money.

 

https://system76.com/desktops

Jesus, you ain't kiddin.

I bet they'd sell more of the cases by themselves, if they offered those.

 

Thisis getting off topic, but proper "works of art" cases (like the one mentioned here) seem to be few and far between, but ugly black cases are a dime a dozen.

[G0dSpeed]

On 6/17/2020 at 3:20 PM, Drama Lama said:

Games that only use Direct X can run on Windows?

I think that the Vulkan API has mostly caught up to  DirectX. And is certainly light years ahead of Opengl. I don't think the differences between the two are that meaningful.

[M P]

15 hours ago, cybik said:

Say goodbye to your money.

 

https://system76.com/desktops

Thanks, actually since the case is open source, I thought about going to a friend of mine with a CNC, but then I saw linus and others reviews and it was said it is loud which was a dealbreaker for me...

 

But thanks and also thanks to SpaceGhostC2C

 

Why must everything pretty on the outside be so ugly on the inside... (or terrible expensive)

[Radium_Angel]

48 minutes ago, M P said:

or terrible expensive

Look at it this way, that case is *peanuts* compared to this

It's all in how you look at things 

[starry]

On 6/19/2020 at 5:06 AM, Luscious said:

That's a fair argument except where the learning part ends up costing you valuable time and money. I am already familiar with Windows and yes, OS options are always great. But if the switch takes away $$$ and weeks that might not be recouped, or worse, support problems down the line, it becomes a valid concern if a different operating system really is the right (or best) tool for the job. At the end of the day I just want something that works.

That's why I said its the hard part. Doing it isn't for everyone though.

[Radium_Angel]

1 hour ago, seapriestess said:

That's why I said its the hard part. Doing it isn't for everyone though.

The amusing part of  using *nix is if your hardware is supported out of the box, and the programs you need are in the repository, then it's no more difficult to use than MacOS or Win*, the tricky part comes in if it's not.

 

Heaven help you if your wireless NIC isn't seen by default.

I still have nightmares about dealing with ndiswrapper...

[Required]

can someone tell me pls how it should run on linux when the not even run on windows propperly because the copyright protection sshhtttt kicks in and the shout down there Server?

Thanks!

[nanopone]

in a lot of cases, linux kicks windows' ass in terms of gaming.

by the way, i'm not sure why you guys are recommending ubuntu in 2020, manjaro has long since passed it in terms of user friendliness and powerfulness. 

[onlybuilt4cubanxlinx]

Installed Pop OS on a 128 ssd and my Steam Library on a 500gb. Only had a issue with changing the permissions on my Steam Library HDD. I have practically zero experience in Linux.  

- Played some TF2, Minecraft, and Prison architect, Everything went smooth.

 

- Only beefs are the taskbar is at the top and I can't seem to just minimize programs. 

 

Everything is still pretty foreign, but it's a great experience and eventually I can see myself using it full time. But for now my Win10 setup is flawless and I'm not looking forward to xfering a million files over yada yada yada. 

[kelvinhall05]

4 minutes ago, onlybuilt4cubanxlinx said:

Installed Pop OS on a 128 ssd and my Steam Library on a 500gb. Only had a issue with changing the permissions on my Steam Library HDD. I have practically zero experience in Linux.  

- Played some TF2, Minecraft, and Prison architect, Everything went smooth.

 

- Only beefs are the taskbar is at the top and I can't seem to just minimize programs. 

 

Everything is still pretty foreign, but it's a great experience and eventually I can see myself using it full time. But for now my Win10 setup is flawless and I'm not looking forward to xfering a million files over yada yada yada. 

One nice thing is that you can customize and/or change your DE to basically whatever you want. You can easily get rid of the taskbar at the top (or move it), or use KDE and customize fucking everything. I dunno. All up to you. I would try a different DE.

[onlybuilt4cubanxlinx]

13 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

One nice thing is that you can customize and/or change your DE to basically whatever you want. You can easily get rid of the taskbar at the top (or move it), or use KDE and customize fucking everything. I dunno. All up to you. I would try a different DE.

Holy shit KDE is wild. I'm glad I posted my experience. Thanks for the addition to my setup. 

[kelvinhall05]

2 minutes ago, onlybuilt4cubanxlinx said:

Holy shit KDE is wild. I'm glad I posted my experience. Thanks for the addition to my setup. 

Yeah, take a look at /r/unixporn. See what can be done, and maybe copy someone's setup you like  

[Required]

Again how to deal with the Copyright sshhttt who even suck on windows?

[pipnina]

I've hopped from mint to ubuntu to other ubuntu flavours since 2017, with a few different pieces of nvidia-intel hardware. No problems for me hardware wise. My wifi or ethernet didn't need setup, my audio worked just fine, even my multiple monitors are detected and working properly out of the box.

And on modern ubuntu based distros, a reasonably up to date and vetted nvidia driver is provided by default.

I've used Linux 99% of the time since 2017 too, only hopping back over to my Win7 (recently Win10) SSD for Space Engineers and virtual reality. (yes they are on entirely different SSDs, much simpler than typical dual booting)

Honestly VR I still need to check out a bit more in Linux. I just use it in Windows at the moment because Alyx didn't launch with Linux support, but has it natively now I think.

Biggest gripe for me is how browsers do not yet have hardware acceleration support, and how mouse settings do not stick properly between sessions without having to set up a script to run at session start to apply them. Other than that I feel more comfortable on Linux than Windows now, once you get to know it the subtle conveniences in KDE and power of the terminal really shine through.

On 6/20/2020 at 9:36 PM, G0dSpeed said:

I think that the Vulkan API has mostly caught up to  DirectX. And is certainly light years ahead of Opengl. I don't think the differences between the two are that meaningful.

 

Vulkan was ahead of DX12 from the get go. Nvidia's RTX changed that briefly but Vulkan is going to be the API with the cross-GPU vendor raytracing support soon.

To be honest the sooner devs ditch DX12 and move to a Vulkan-only production the better off all gamers will be. I think it's odd that Valve launched Alyx with DX11 and only added Vulkan later with the Linux release since Valve themselves were part of the consortium that made the Vulkan specification in the first place.

 

----------------

Also to clear up some things said in this thread prior:

1. Proton is WINE (winehq.org) which valve has added extra patches to which specifically benefit gaming. WINE translates Windows API calls to equivalent calls in Linux. This is much cheaper on the CPU than emulation and with future kernel updates will become even less expensive still.
2. Proton uses DXVK (a valve patch) to convert DX9, 10, 11, and (in progress) 12 to Vulkan API calls, which is much more efficient than the old WINE method of converting to OpenGL, also has patches that make (most) games that don't run at native res look nicer in fullscreen mode, patches that improve multi-thread performance and more.
3. Valve seems to still be working on getting anti-cheats to work through Proton, but this is an insanely complicated topic and will likely take them some time, and might even require a custom kernel to be installed (not difficult)
4. Proton can be used on non-steam programs. Lutris will let you install proton to use like WINE would be normally.
5. Given as Windows 10 20.04 seems to be a broken mess for many people, and (1909?) wasn't much better for others, I think it's fair to say that Microsoft's QA is slipping.
6. Linux desktop does have money involved in it. RedHat sells commercial copies of their Linux OS, and they develop Gnome which is a major desktop environment.
7. Most of the stuff that doesn't run on Linux is relatively specialist. Maybe you get on with alternatives, maybe you don't, but in the end it's got to be considered on an individual basis, and I don't really think there are THAT many people who use Adobe suite despite how much it's complained about. For drawing, Krita is great, for photographers (not photo manipulators) RawTherapee and GIMP are adequate or even on-par with adobe's stuff (I have a fair few photos of my own to prove that much, and I'm not even all that good at photography).
8. In a lot of cases, I forget which games I run are using wine and which ones run natively. It's that simple on steam at this point. And getting to a perfectly usable point is as simple now as going through the walk-through ubuntu installer, doing ctrl-alt-t and typing "sudo apt install steam-installer", then opening firefox and downloading the discord .deb from their website, which is the debian/ubuntu equivalent of an MSI installer. It's pancakes honestly.

[mr moose]

On 6/29/2020 at 4:28 AM, pipnina said:

1. Most of the stuff that doesn't run on Linux is relatively specialist. Maybe you get on with alternatives, maybe you don't, but in the end it's got to be considered on an individual basis, and I don't really think there are THAT many people who use Adobe suite despite how much it's complained about. For drawing, Krita is great, for photographers (not photo manipulators) RawTherapee and GIMP are adequate or even on-par with adobe's stuff (I have a fair few photos of my own to prove that much, and I'm not even all that good at photography)

This is still just a subjective consideration.  It's not just adobe and it's not "relatively" specialist it is "industry specific".  Having worked professionally in 3 completely different industries altogether I have seen first hand why there are very few businesses shifting to Linux even though many people like yourself would argue it's better.   

 

No one will take your word for it that a linux variant of adobe, autocad, or any of the other specific packages is better, they need to see productivity with said package first hand or in some sort of real world usage.  The ability to provide either in house or contract support for the overall environment and software solutions is really important too,  so far Linux does not offer this beyond red hat and canonical. Products like gimp don't come with any professional support.  When only 1 or 2 of your prospective IT techs has any relevant experience with linux and the rest have recognized certificates in windows based environments. And the software does not have a 24/7 help desk it is not a very attractive option. 

 

There is an old saying "the proof of the pudding is in the eating"  When you have a product that performs, you have people that like it.  This is not an argument ad populum, this is an observation of reasoned application.  When you ask a company why they use software X, they will give you several reasons, if that reasoning is rational then the choice they make is evidence the product is the better.      There are many cases where a linux based application is preferred over windows, like WWW servers,  the proof is definitely in the pudding there.  But once you move to corporate back ends and you have hefty splits between Linux, Unix and windows.  Every time I look these figures change, at one point 42% of all corporate servers were windows based,  It dropped to 30 something % and moves around a lot.  The largest company I worked for used a completely Windows based IT system.  All workstations and servers were widows.  The 5 CNC routers were all embedded windows (these are very large machines),  they used Autocad primarily and various specialized office and logistics programs. The entire stock control was managed through a browser, so factory computers were just a basic windows box with a network connection.   The concept of them switching anything to Linux was viewed like trying to shoehorn a ford engine into a GM and hoping to gain something that offsets the problems you encounter during conversion process. 

 

 

All in all, Linux for now with regard to alternative programs to adobe and autocad etc will be relegated to individuals and not so much professionals.  This will change of course as programs become supported, but for now, it's an exercise in futility for most businesses.

[pipnina]

16 hours ago, mr moose said:

All in all, Linux for now with regard to alternative programs to adobe and autocad etc will be relegated to individuals and not so much professionals.  This will change of course as programs become supported, but for now, it's an exercise in futility for most businesses.

I was talking in the form of individuals anyway, I fully understand why many businesses will have and want adobe or autocad or solidworks or even MS Office, but IMO, on personal machines, the number of people who need that kind of software is rather small for the amount of complaints about their absence I hear.

Unfortunately though, I think if Valve gets the gaming crowd to move over, it is possible that nothing will change on this front. Professional use drives those specialist programs and professionals won't have games on their workstations most likely, and I think where gamers and specialist programs overlap, you mostly find students, who use your software without paying much if anything anyway.

Computing is a very unfortunately "All or nothing" industry. One company makes a hit product and if it takes more than a few months for competition to put out something the same or better, it will flop as the customers will already have settled, and for them the cost of moving outweighs any potential benefits, and even if a solution is better, nobody wants to be the first to shoulder the cost.

[mr moose]

6 hours ago, pipnina said:

I was talking in the form of individuals anyway, I fully understand why many businesses will have and want adobe or autocad or solidworks or even MS Office, but IMO, on personal machines, the number of people who need that kind of software is rather small for the amount of complaints about their absence I hear.

Unfortunately though, I think if Valve gets the gaming crowd to move over, it is possible that nothing will change on this front. Professional use drives those specialist programs and professionals won't have games on their workstations most likely, and I think where gamers and specialist programs overlap, you mostly find students, who use your software without paying much if anything anyway.

Computing is a very unfortunately "All or nothing" industry. One company makes a hit product and if it takes more than a few months for competition to put out something the same or better, it will flop as the customers will already have settled, and for them the cost of moving outweighs any potential benefits, and even if a solution is better, nobody wants to be the first to shoulder the cost.

Gamers are becoming the only individuals left who use desktop.  And for sure most individuals don't need anything specific to windows,  which is why they are moving in droves to tablets and simply using the phone only.  Desktop OS's is dying in regard to individual everyday requirements.

 

 

 

 

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

Gamers are becoming the only individuals left who use desktop.  And for sure most individuals don't need anything specific to windows,  which is why they are moving in droves to tablets and simply using the phone only.  Desktop OS's is dying in regard to individual everyday requirements.

 

 

 

 

There is no demand to switch to Linux. Period. What will get people to defect from Windows is OEM's actually making it a boot option, and for that to happen, all the OEM's have to decide on what flavor of Linux they want to support. Which so far has been split between Redhat (IBM) and Ubuntu (which used to be what Google and Steam used to use, but have since forked Gentoo and Debian instead respectively)

 

When it comes to cheap, internet servers, people use Linux because it costs nothing to install on generic whitebox hardware (eg supermicro servers, and repurposed workstation/towers), and works on the most common Dell and HP servers, even with their proprietary BMC and RAID hardware. That's the single most common reason Linux got a foot-hold. Had Linux not come along, that entire space would be taken up with FreeBSD (or it's forks), which is the only actual descendant of original Unix that is free (and I'm discounting OpenBSD/NetBSD which is a parallel fork of what became FreeBSD and Dragonfly BSD which is a fork of FreeBSD 4.x, for all intents the BSD systems are more compatible with each other than Linux flavors are.) 

 

Cloud systems based on Xen are Linux-based and can only run Linux clients (primarily CentOS) unmodified. Windows and other OS's require more effort to run, and if you're just spinning up web servers, you don't really need any other OS since Apache HTTPD or NGINX are available on all OS's, and likewise perl, php, ruby(on-rails), and nodeJS can all be installed on any OS. So unless you need some specific thing that only works on Windows, you're already covered by Linux.

 

The desktop however will just never be unshackled from Windows. Not as long as Microsoft builds game consoles. If Microsoft ever decides to abandon their games console platform (and it would not surprise me if they did, given all the other hardware stuff they've abandoned, if something like Stadia actually worked for everyone.) Then the rise of cloud gaming will be what gets people to stop buying desktops since there will be no reason to own when when an iPad or a smartphone connected to a USB-C dock can replace it.