Gaming on Linux - Daily Driver Challenge Finale

[Paul Thexton]

21 minutes ago, Caroline said:

*furiously opens GIMP* ugh, FINE

Damn, you beat me to it

[dogwitch]

1 hour ago, Paul Thexton said:

Damn, you beat me to it

dont worry half  of the linux user... had a failed batch command for image to work in command line.

[Bramimond]

Addressing the sentiment, that gaming should just work and be entertainment, that was already kinda addressed in the video: just use a console.

It solves the privacy threat that Windows poses and on a console you have to do zero tinkering.

 

But I like the irony that the crowd telling console players that PC is better, even though you have to fiddle with the settings in each game and maybe install drivers or whatever can then turn around and tell the Linux crowd that no-can-do, that's just too complicated. 

 

You can have your cake (privacy) and eat it too (use a console for modern gaming). 

It's really just specifically people using Windows that are willingly giving up their privacy for the privilege to still have to tinker around to get all their games working.

 

And by the way, Steam doesn't solve any of this with their Linux approach, since Steam itself is still spying on you. On a console you can just turn off online functionality and not have to worry about the privacy implications that might be in place. 

[papajo]

It seems to me that they went full passive-aggressive on linux and I am not sure why... 

 

First of all (I am talking about the first vid) like 90% if not 100% of the issues they faced wouldnt be an issue with ubuntu and steam  (e.g popOS is a joke almost its made specifically for one brand of hardware) 

 

You want to see how a noob mainstream guy would fair gaming on linux? then use a noob friendly mainstream linux distro

 

Also WTF is that Galus guy Paul is referring to? 

 

Ok evidently he played some part on an kickstarter game PA... so what? 

 

1) he makes typos on his tweets so no wonder he can create bugs as well lol   

 

2) PA  launched 7 to 8 years back, back then linux gaming wasnt really a thing nor were GPU drivers for gaming... 

 

3) His numbers do not add up... I mean on one hand he says that they must have spent hundreds of thousands for ironing out the bugs for linux, while linux revenue gave them a few hundred bucks and on the other side he says that linux sales accounted for more than 0.1%

 

Only on kickstarter PA's revenue was about 2.5 M usd (2,500,000) on steam they (according to steam spy) they had 2.000.000 copies sold at $29 each, and I am sure they had other sources of revenue after that..

 

More than 0.1% (or even exactly 0.1%) of those sale figures is not "just a few hundred bucks"  

[DrSparklegasm]

4 hours ago, papajo said:

3) His numbers do not add up... I mean on one hand he says that they must have spent hundreds of thousands for ironing out the bugs for linux, while linux revenue gave them a few hundred bucks and on the other side he says that linux sales accounted for more than 0.1%

 

Only on kickstarter PA's revenue was about 2.5 M usd (2,500,000) on steam they (according to steam spy) they had 2.000.000 copies sold at $29 each, and I am sure they had other sources of revenue after that..

 

More than 0.1% (or even exactly 0.1%) of those sale figures is not "just a few hundred bucks"  

I was glad this wasn't turned into a dig at "linux users just pirate everything" lol, part of me was bracing for that conclusion in the video.

 

9 hours ago, Bramimond said:

Addressing the sentiment, that gaming should just work and be entertainment, that was already kinda addressed in the video: just use a console.

It solves the privacy threat that Windows poses and on a console you have to do zero tinkering.

Not exactly. There are some game experiences you can only have via pc, such as the huge driving simulator, or using joysticks for flight games, etc. Again it depends on what a "gamer" wants to be able to do. If its latest and greatest games, then sure consoles are a way to have it "just work".

 

I agree on your irony sentiment. However I will admit as a full-on linux user who is still pretty intermediate. So it's really a step above in terms of how much tinkering is needed.

[William Payne]

To poke at the wound a bit. Saying that a user should have to accept using older things to use linux is not going to convince anyone to use linux. 
 

I want Linux to succeed but I want it to deliver and live up to how people try and sell it to the end user. 
 

I dream of Linux being the absolute cutting edge OS where you use it because it is the best OS to use. For example I envision a future scenario where some kind of hardware is so cutting edge that you have to use Linux. 
 

It would make using linux mean something serious in desktop computing because it would imply that you are doing serious stuff. 
 

It is already that way in other computing areas. 

[finest feck fips]

On 1/1/2022 at 12:58 PM, Eonfge said:

There is a factual inaccuracy in quoting Ben Golus.

 

He stated that Linux is the cause of 20% of all issues, while only contributing to 1% of the sales. He had to withdraw this statement because he was wrong.

Does LMG have a fact checking process? There were factual errors and misleading claims in each video in this series that LMG already had adequate in-house resources (internal expertise or just the ability to Google a bit) to prevent from making the final cuts.

Seems like with as large of a staff as LMG has, the high tech equipment, and the current expansion of the company, etc., LMG is overdue for bolstering its fact checking.

[finest feck fips]

  

On 1/1/2022 at 11:50 AM, Uttamattamakin said:

The truth is most who "game on linux" really don't game "ON LINUX".

I'm not sure. There are a substantial number who game exclusively on Linux. They're just not really embedded in ‘PC gamer culture’, so-to-speak. In other words: they game mostly offline, they play mostly indie games, or they play mainly emulated and retro games. These are people whose use cases are more similar to Linus' than to Luke's. If you're already on Linux and you're looking to add PC games to what you do on your computer, there are more excellent games available for the platform than you have time to play.

 

On 1/1/2022 at 11:50 AM, Uttamattamakin said:

If they have a powerful Threadripper system like Linus does they game the way Some ordinary gamers does.  They have a Windows VM, pass a GPU to it, and game on that.

This is mostly an interesting proposition if your game selection is fundamentally faddish, i.e., one of the top reasons for you wanting to play a game is the mere fact that lots of other people are playing it at a given time. This is probably a lot of people in LTT's audience, since its audience is mostly boys and men in their teens and twenties, and relatively fanatical about videogames. But it's not everyone!

The selection issue is mostly for fanatics, who follow trends because gaming is among their single biggest passions in life, and competitive gamers, who are forced to pay attention to network effects because they need games that have a large enough playerbase to host a healthy competitive scene. But Linux gamers who don't fall into those categories really are gaming on Linux these days.

 

On 1/1/2022 at 1:48 PM, Middcore said:

Most flight simulation enthusiasts aren't going to be satisfied with something that looks graphically comparable to FS2000 these days.

Is MS Flight Simulator really for flight simulation enthusiasts?

FlightGear is in actual FAA-certified training simulators, and so is X-Plane, which has FAA-certified distributions, and a native Linux client. FlightGear was created because MS Flight Simulator was too videogame-y and not realistic enough in terms of the flight mechanics. I imagine that a flight simulation enthusiast would care about the realism of the simulation.

That said, MS Flight Simulator 2020 is gorgeous and FlightGear is not, really.
 

[finest feck fips]

Posting this separately mainly because it's really long. Sorry for the triple-post, but this seems better than having people search through a long post for quotations.

 

 

On 1/1/2022 at 5:09 PM, Nord1ing said:

3. At least for me, use of /home directory as main for storing installed program/settings and files is a horrible idea. I am not Linux expert and trying to use directories outside of /home constantly create issues with access permissions. And yes, I do not use NAS, but rather nextcloud sync with local copy. Symbolic links make a second layer of access permission issues.

 

/home isn't generally used for installed programs. except for Steam assets (by default, but you can put them anywhere) and Homebrew (whose usage of /home is wrong). It's just for config files and per-user asset caches.

 

On 1/1/2022 at 5:09 PM, Nord1ing said:

I am not Linux expert and trying to use directories outside of /home constantly create issues with access permissions.

Then... don't do that? Sounds like you're not competent to manage permissions yourself and are insisting on doing so anyway.

 

On 1/1/2022 at 5:09 PM, Nord1ing said:

As example, on Windows programs are installed in c:/user_soft, d:/work/simulation; d:/work/video; d:/work/BIM; d:/work/other for easier tracking (with symbolic links in c:/ if needed).

Is this mainly for storage constraint reasons? Like your root partition is a small SSD so you want to install some programs on your big HDDs? You don't need to ‘track’ applications on Linux; your package manager does that systematically.

 

On 1/1/2022 at 5:09 PM, Nord1ing said:

And documents also stored in different places with symlincs when needed and nextcloud sync configured.

I'm not sure what permissions issues you're running into with symbolic links, but if you want to map directories inside your home directory to directories outside your home directory in a way that's more transparent to applications, you can use bind mounts. You can mount your big disks outside of the traditional FHS in a way that's analogous to Windows drive letters, e.g., to

 

/media/SomeBigDisk
/media/AnotherBigDisk

 

and then create per-user and shared subdirectories in each, like

/media/SomeBigDisk/per-user/nord1ing
/media/SomeBigDisk/shared

/media/AnotherBigDisk/per-user/nord1ng
/media/SomeBigDisk/shared

and give your user ownership of the appropriate per-user directories. Then you can use bind mounts to mount specific directories over directories in your home folder, e.g.,

 

mount -o bind /media/SomeBigDisk/nord1ing/Documents /home/nord1ing/Documents

mount -o bind /media/AnotherBigDisk/nord1ing/Simulations /home/nord1ing/Documents/Simulations

mount -o bind /media/AnotherBigDisk/shared/Videos /home/nord1ing/Videos

 

etc. Make them persistent with appropriate entries in /etc/fstab. You can set default permissions for new files and handle multiple groups with setfacl.

 

On 1/1/2022 at 5:09 PM, Nord1ing said:

I still search for full system backup of disks and partitions from inside Linux (like paragon backup and recovery).

You mean from inside a running system? You can't take a disk image of a normal, running disk unless you have a CoW filesystem or you're using logical volumes. Does Paragon Backup and Recovery let you back up the partition of the C:\ drive while the system is running?

What's the use case for block-level backups here?

 

On 1/1/2022 at 5:09 PM, Nord1ing said:

Even on server the I ended up with running everything inside vms and auto backup whose vms for 1-click restore in somethings goes wrong.

If this is your use case and you'd like to do it without virtualization, look into tools like Snapper,  Timeshift, or basic ZFS snapshot and clone usage. Linux has much more advanced and mature filesystems than are available on non-enterprise editions of Windows, and they're generally preferable over dumb (filesystem-agnostic) whole-partition clones.

 

On 1/1/2022 at 8:03 PM, Sho2048 said:

If you're messing with anything that is not /home you're seriously misunderstanding the structure of a Linux system.

Yes.

 

On 1/1/2022 at 8:03 PM, Sho2048 said:

If running stuff from a folder, I usually make them a folder in /opt.

Also yes.

If you're having trouble understanding where things go and what permissions for different shared directories should be on Linux, the thing you need to learn about is the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. The full documentation is available online, but you might start with a video like this one instead. (If you let me know what your native language is, we can look for docs in that as well.)

 

On 1/2/2022 at 5:20 AM, Nord1ing said:

Auto-mounted point not every time is accessible for writing, including ntfs volumes (and I don't know any other cross-plateform file systems (FAT is not an option)).

There aren't really any cross-platform filesystems in terms of permissions, including NTFS. If the issue with FAT is metadata features, there are no alternatives. But if the issue is just large file compatibility, exFAT is one.

NTFS is second-class on Linux and it has some permissions issues. That's a tradeoff you can make for files that mainly get used on the Windows side. But you can also make the reverse tradeoff for files that you mostly use from Linux, by installing Windows drivers for Linux filesystems. The main three are ext2fsd/ext3fsd and ext4fsd for ext2/3/4, WinBTRFS for BTRFS. and ZFSIn for ZFS. (Probably none of them are as stable as ntfs-3g or the new Linux kernel driver for NTFS donated by Paragon, but WinBTRFS looks relatively good.)

[Bramimond]

4 hours ago, William Payne said:

To poke at the wound a bit. Saying that a user should have to accept using older things to use linux is not going to convince anyone to use linux. 

The pitch isn't to have everything just work, the pitch is usually that you have total control over your system. 

There's no "Microsoft did something I don't like and it is impossible for me to do anything about it". 

 

In the past twenty years on Linux I was never forced to relearn how to use my computer. 

My operating system never forced me to reboot my computer because of updates. 

I'm in control, not some company insistent on spying on me. 

 

Most of the issues with Linux are that most people still use Windows. 

Developers go to where the people are. 

 

If everyone ditched Windows, not even Nvidea could afford to keep sabotaging Linux. 

Linux would be the place for bleeding edge stuff and you'd get to keep your privacy.

But for that to happen people have to ditch Windows. En masse. 

I have no delusion about the chances of that.

But that's the actual solution.

 

Nothing else has the power to change the status quo.

You would have to ditch Windows first.  

[Ultraforce]

22 hours ago, Bramimond said:

Addressing the sentiment, that gaming should just work and be entertainment, that was already kinda addressed in the video: just use a console.

It solves the privacy threat that Windows poses and on a console you have to do zero tinkering.

 

But I like the irony that the crowd telling console players that PC is better, even though you have to fiddle with the settings in each game and maybe install drivers or whatever can then turn around and tell the Linux crowd that no-can-do, that's just too complicated. 

 

You can have your cake (privacy) and eat it too (use a console for modern gaming). 

It's really just specifically people using Windows that are willingly giving up their privacy for the privilege to still have to tinker around to get all their games working.

 

And by the way, Steam doesn't solve any of this with their Linux approach, since Steam itself is still spying on you. On a console you can just turn off online functionality and not have to worry about the privacy implications that might be in place. 

Many people want to play online games as LAN or split screen is quite limitting most people are fine with certain levels of privacy being sacrificed as long as they have a say. There's also the fact that some games just don't exist on console.

 

I will say I personally prefer console to PC gaming since consoles give the potential of utilizing specialized harddware in games more easily then some sort of simulator game such as wii fit or ring fit adventure. Though honestly when I was younger and started playing games that weren't just on a website and wasn't already set up in 2012 or so what I did was just click accept for everything. It's very easy to just do what Linus did with command line accept instead just saying okay to any driver or .exe that you come accross to get your software working even if it's technically a bad idea.

[Paul Thexton]

9 hours ago, Bramimond said:

If everyone ditched Windows, not even Nvidea could afford to keep sabotaging Linux.

Is sabotaging really the right word here? I mean, I understand the sentiment behind the point, but I'm not convinced. I think many other words work better in that statement. Disregarding,ignoring, neglecting etc. Hell, if it's a case of Nvidia saying "you will do it our way or we'll take our toys away" you could even make a case for the word bullying.

[Uttamattamakin]

20 hours ago, finest feck fips said:

 Is MS Flight Simulator really for flight simulation enthusiasts?

FlightGear is in actual FAA-certified training simulators, and so is X-Plane, which has FAA-certified distributions, and a native Linux client. FlightGear was created because MS Flight Simulator was too videogame-y and not realistic enough in terms of the flight mechanics. I imagine that a flight simulation enthusiast would care about the realism of the simulation.

That said, MS Flight Simulator 2020 is gorgeous and FlightGear is not, really.
 

Flight simulator X is probably peak realism for that franchise.  The lessons narrated by Rod Machado in it  give a feel for what each level of flight is.  For example going through the procedures for an IFR landing in total white out fog.  The concept of a checkride for various levels of certificate named as the real ones are.    Plus there are videos showing people who had only used FSX flying with an instructor and the instructor not needing to say much.  

[William Payne]

Let’s get something straight on the Nvidia thing.   Nvidia is absolute king in the supercomputing world. Everyone else is playing catch up to them in that space. 
 

Nvidia’s number 1 priority is supercomputers, machine learning, AI and all that stuff. 
 

Most computer users are naive to that side of computing and their only real knowledge of Nvidia is their GeForce stuff. 
 

Even the hardware I’m running in my desktop (RTX A4000) is foreign to most users. 
 

That is ok because if you don’t need that hardware outside of curiosity you don’t need to know about that hardware. 
 

Supercomputers don’t run Windows (I could be wrong) but outside of an access terminal, video isn’t really a requirement as it’s all about compute. 
 

I think the Nvidia Linux video driver thing is just a case of “not enough users to make it a priority”. AMD drivers working I imagine is just because of how they implement their drivers and not some pro Linux thing. 
 

For Nvidia their GeForce stuff exists to pay for their supercomputing division as that is their absolute baby. 

[finest feck fips]

16 minutes ago, William Payne said:

AMD drivers working I imagine is just because of how they implement their drivers and not some pro Linux thing.

I'm not sure. AMD had to rewrite their entire driver stack around a new software architecture in order to open-source their drivers, and it took them many, many years to get it done. The way they have implemented their drivers is absolutely a factor, but they had to rewrite their whole driver stack to implement them that way in the first place.

I'm not sure what the motivation was. I think of course it wasn't purely about doing a service for Linux users. But they definitely didn't do it out of sheer convenience.

[William Payne]

1 minute ago, finest feck fips said:

I'm not sure. AMD had to rewrite their entire driver stack around a new software architecture in order to open-source their drivers, and it took them many, many years to get it done. The way they have implemented their drivers is absolutely a factor, but they had to rewrite their whole driver stack to implement them that way in the first place.

I'm not sure what the motivation was. I think of course it wasn't purely about doing a service for Linux users. But they definitely didn't do it out of sheer convenience.

That’s what I more meant. AMD having really good Linux drivers is because for one reason or another it benefits them. 

[A51UK]

I know someone who will not upgrade to Windows 10 or 11, so is now install Linux, so he can play some DirectX 12 game (though Wine / proton) that will not work on Windows 7 but only on Windows 10 / 11 (maybe Wine / Proton). 

 

He's going to keep both Windows 7 and Linux on the same computer. 

 

I hoping gaming on Linux will get better soon.