Linux Is Good Now
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The Linux community is abuzz with excitement as mainstream PC gaming press now sings its praises, with many users chiming in to share their positive experiences. Some commenters, like ErroneousBosh, boldly claim that Linux has surpassed Windows in gaming performance, while others, such as spockz, note that certain games still pose challenges, like kernel-level anti-cheat requirements. As the discussion unfolds, a consensus emerges that Microsoft's priorities have shifted away from Windows and gaming, with some, like voidfunc and dontlaugh, arguing that the company's focus on Azure, AI, and stock price growth has left its core businesses hollowed out. The thread is relevant now as it highlights the evolving landscape of PC gaming and the growing viability of Linux as a desktop operating system.
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Stock price growth is their core business because that is how large firms operate.
MS used to embrace games etc because the whole point was all PCs should run Windows. Now the plan is to get you onto a subscription to their cloud. The PC bit is largely immaterial in that model. Enterprises get the rather horrible Intune bollocks to play with but the goal is to lock everyone into subs.
I thought all of them more or less have operated under Ponzinomics ever since Jack Welch showed that that worked in the short term.
That resulted in Windows 8.
More recently they've freaked out about ads, app stores, and SaSS revenue, which has resulted in lots of dark patterns in the OS.
The one thing I haven’t been able to get working reliably is steam remote play with the Linux machine as host. Most games work fine, others will only capture black screens.
This is a far better user experience for Battlefield players than in Windows.
Have you ever actually attempted to play that half-assed buggy piece of shit?
The strength of Linux and Free software in general is not in that it's completely built by unpaid labor. It's built by a lot of paid, full-time labor. But the results are shared with everyone. The strength of Free software is that it fosters and enforces cooperation of all interested parties, and provides a guarantee that defection is an unprofitable move.
This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely.
I doubt it's a large reason. I'd put more weight on eg Linus being a great project lead and he happens to work on Linux. And a lot of other historical contingencies.
Conventional companies just have a lot more money, and it's easier for them to internally 'coordinate' when they want something to get done.
That said, yes, there are certain things that the broader/volunteer FOSS community simply isn't any good at.
This flow is basically the bread and butter for the OSS community and the only way high effort projects get done.
Granted, I don't play online games, so that might change things, but for years I used to have to make a concession that "yeah Windows is better for games...", but in the last couple years that simply has not been true. Games seem to run better on Linux than Windows, and I don't have to deal with a bunch of Microsoft advertising bullshit.
Hell, even the Microsoft Xbox One controllers work perfectly fine with xpad and the SteamOS/tenfoot interface recognizes it as an Xbox pad immediately, and this is with the official Microsoft Xbox dongle.
At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion, are online games and Microsoft Office. I don't use Office since I've been on Unixey things so long that I've more or less just gotten used to its options, but I've been wholly unable to convince my parents to change.
I love my parents, but sometimes I want to kick their ass, because they can be a bit stuck in their ways; I am the one who is expected to fix their computer every time Windows decides to brick their computer, and they act like it's weird for me to ask them to install Linux. If I'm the one who has to perform unpaid maintenance on this I don't think it's weird for me to try and get them to use an operating system that has diagnostic tools that actually work.
As far as I can tell, the diagnostic and repair tools in Windows have never worked for any human in history, and they certainly have never worked for me. I don't see why anyone puts up with it when macOS and Linux have had tools that actually work for a very long time.
I didn’t see a performance increase moving to Linux for the vast majority of titles tested. Certainly not enough to outweigh the fact that I want EVERY game to work out of the box, and to never have to think if it will or won’t. And not all of my games did, and a not insignificant number needed serious tweaking to get working right.
I troubleshoot Linux issues all day long, I’ve zero interest in ever having to do it in my recreation time.
That’s a good enough reason for me to keep my windows box around.
I use Linux and OSX for everything that isn’t games, but windows functions just fine for me as a dumb console and I don’t seem to suffer any of these extreme and constant issues HN users seem to have with it from either a performance or reliability standpoint.
For some reason amongst other people, these bits of debugging just "don't count". I don't know why.
I have a console. They can not offer performance I can tolerate. I require 120+ fps for most titles in order to not get motion sickness from modern displays.
> I've had plenty of bullshit fighting with DLL files and registry keys to get games working on Windows in the past.
I've had no such fighting. Shit, the last time I touched a registry to "fix" anything in windows was probably XP.
> I don't know why.
Probably because not everyone has the same experience. None of the major operating systems is free of issue, but in the same vein, neither have caused me particularly more headaches than another.
Game studios will keep buying Windows and Visual Studio licenses, target DirectX, and let Valve do whatever they need for game content.
Pretty horrible technology, and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.
Sure, except that anyone can just compile a Linux kernel that doesn't allow that.
Anti-cheat systems on Windows work because Windows is hard(er) to tamper with.
I don't really care about games, but i do care about messing up people and companies that do such heinous crimes against humanity (kernel-level anti-cheat).
That way you could use an official kernel from Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch etc. A custom one wouldn't be supported but that's significantly better than blocking things universally.
I'm not aware that a TPM is capable of hiding a key without the OS being able to access/unseal it at some point. It can display a signed boot chain but what would it be signed with?
If it's not signed with a key out of the reach of the system, you can always implement a fake driver pretty easily to spoof it.
Is it possible to do this in a relatively hardware-agnostic, but reliable manner? Probably not.
I feel like this is way overstated, it's not that easy to do, and could conceptually be done on windows too via hardware simulation/virtual machines. Both would require significant investments in development to pull of
And then you have BasicallyHomeless on YouTube who is stimulating nerves and using actuators to "cheat." With the likes of the RP2040, even something like an aim-correcting mouse becomes completely cheap and trivial. There is a sweet-spot for AC and I feel like kernel-level might be a bit too far.
This isn't complicated.
Even the Crowdstrike falcon agent has switched to bpf because it lowers the risk that a kernel driver will brick downstream like what happened with windows that one time. I recently configured a corporate single sign on to simply not work if the bpf component was disabled.
Anticheat and antivirus are two similar but different games. It's very complicated.
At the same time, Vulkan support is also getting pretty widespread, I think notably idTech games prefer Vulkan as the API.
Id Software prefer Vulkan, but they are an outlier.
https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-6-dev-5...
DX12 worked decently better than openGL before, and all the gamedevs had windows, and it was required for xbox… but now those things are less and less true.
The playstation was always “odd-man-out” when it came to graphics processing, and we used a lot of shims, but then Stadia came along and was a proper linux, so we rewrote a huge amount of our render to be better behaved for Vulkan.
All subsequent games on that engine have thus had a vulkan friendly renderer by default, that is implemented cleaner than the DX12 one, and works natively pretty much everywhere. So its the new default.
But even then, when everyone is trying out a new indie game there’s a chance it won’t work on non-Windows. It’s happened to me.
I'm far from an authority on this topic but from my understanding both Sony/MS have introduced mkb support, but so far it looks to be an opt-in kind of thing and it's still relatively new.
The problem is more the audience. Console players generally expect to be able to just connect the console to the TV, sit on the sofa and play with the official controller. That’s all the game are required to support to be published on the platform.
Even if you were willing to play at a desk, you’d be matchmaking into a special (and small) mouse pool on the console game. Anyone willing to go through so much faff will accept the extra annoyances of a PC, even with kernel anti cheat.
I am very pro-Linux and pro-privacy, and hope that the situation improves so I don’t have to continue to compromise.
It kind of both does and doesn't. The official matchmaking system doesn't use kernel AC, but the prevalence of cheating on there has driven the development of third party MM providers like FACEIT which do have kernel AC. The bulk of casual play happens on the former, but serious competitive play mostly happens on the latter.
And for what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Valorant is the most played competitive shooter at the moment.
The best Valve could do is offer a special locked down kernel with perhaps some anticheat capabilities and lock down the hardware with attestation. If they offer the sources and do verified builds it might even be accepted by some.
Doubt it would be popular or even successful on non-Valve machines.
For competitive gaming, I think attested hardware & software actually is the right way to go. Don’t force kernel-level malware on everyone.
It's a bit like complaining that these days people just want to watch TV, instead of writing and performing their own plays.
Who said anything about meaning? People being shit at the game invalidates that the game ruleset is competitive?
"Competitive tennis cannot possibly be huge"
"Competitive coding cannot possibly be huge"
People play competition sports. They except no, or minimal amounts of cheating. Your personal feelings about it don't matter. The kid that plays basketball with 12 years olds on saturday mornings has the right to not have to deal with cheaters, and it doesn't matter if he's in the top .0001% or a shitty player that cannot distinguish his hands from his ears.
Have a quick look at the ladder on Counter Strike, or Faceit, or ranked play on League of Legends/Valorant/Whatever: it's not a niche. These games requiring kernel AC no matter the type of play is another subject, but people play to compare themselves to other, massively.
People who get intensely serious about 12 year olds playing basketball because their kid will be in the NBA some day so everyone needs to take the game very seriously so their kid can practice have rightly always been mocked. The entire point is to have fun.
On competitive coding, Advent of Code removed the global leaderboard exactly because "people took things too seriously, going way outside the spirit of the contest".
Other games did similarly. Quake 3 Arena added Punkbuster in a patch. Competitive 3rd party Starcraft 1 server ICCUP had an "anti-hack client" as a requirement.
I could almost get on board with the idea of invasive kernel anti-cheat software if it actually was effective, but these games still have cheaters. So you get the worst of both worlds--you have to accept the security and portability problems as a condition for playing the game AND there are still cheaters!
the bloggers/journalists calling it malware is doing the conversation a disservice. The problem is only really the risk of bugs or problems with kernel level anti-cheat, which _could_ be exploited in the worst case, and in the best case, cause outages.
The classic example recently is the crowdstrike triggered outtage of computers worldwide due to kernel level antivirus/malware scanning. Anti-cheat could potentially have the exact same outcome (but perhaps smaller in scale as only gamers would have it).
If windows created a better framework, it is feasible that such errors are recoverable from and fixable without outages.
I'm already salty about the binary blobs required by various pieces of firmware.
For most people, a computer is just another appliance. They don't consider the security implications that this appliance can leak credit cards and such.
But I think they ought to. I also suspect that the current state of affairs is largely due to lack of understanding.
> as long as it doesn't try to update its firmware
I agree. But that isn't what we're talking about here. Things that can't update their firmware generally don't need you to upload a binary blob to them on startup.
FPSs can just say 'the console is the competitive ranked' machine, add mouse + keyboard support and call it a day. But in those games cheaters can really ruin things with aimbots, so maybe it is necessary for the ecosystem, I dunno.
Nobody plays RTSs competitively anymore and low-twitch MMOs need better data hiding for what they send clients so 'cheating' is not relevant.
We are at the point where camera + modded input devices are cheap and easy enough I dunno if anti-cheat matters anymore.
Case in point from a few years back - Fall Guys. Silly fun, sloppy controls, a laugh. And then you get people literally flying around because they've installed a hack, so other players can't progress as they can't make the top X players in a round.
So to throw it back - it is just a game, it's so sad that a minority think winning is more important than just enjoying things, or think their own enjoyment is more important than everyone else's.
> pub servers
Most of these popular competitive games probably don't even have community servers of any kind. Maybe some games like RTSes have custom matches, but they're not used much for the standard game mode, at least not for public lobbies.
Competition vs other human beings is the entire point of that genre, and the intensity when you’re in the top .1% of the playerbase in Overwatch/Valorant/CSGO is really unmatched.
Also, for more casual play, don't players have rankings so that you play with others about your level? Cheaters would alll end up just playing with other cheaters in that case, wouldn't they?
That would require essentially turning it into a console or Android.
Hardware support would inevitably be somewhat limited but that's still better than the situation with either consoles or kernel anticheat.
Yeah, that's the entire point. The whole distro in this scenario would be signed reproducible FOSS builds. No untrusted binaries would be permitted to run. State of entire filesystem verified except specific directories. Think Android without the app store and no user provided APKs permitted.
Valve already manages SteamOS so this isn't as crazy as it might initially sound.
Although it does occur to me now that one of the newer GPLs has an anti-tivo provision. Not sure if this would run afoul of that. It's access to a subset of a service that would be restricted (competitive matches), everything else would still work.
Making a Valve-only Linux solution would take a lot of the joy of this moment away for many. But it would also help Valve significantly. It's very uncomfortable to consider, imo.
The issue isn’t binary, but a spectrum. Studios clearly believe that there is less cheating when using kernel level anti-cheats. They have the data so they would know. This is an existential threat to their profit so we can trust they use the most effective tool. Anecdotally, I and many others also experience less cheating in games using kernel level anti-cheat. I’m not saying no cheating. I’m saying less cheating. That’s very important for me and many others.
Valve has stated they are working on kernel level anti-cheat “tools”, but they haven’t yet revealed a method. The entire concept is antithetical to the Linux security model so it requires significant refactoring. That’s a huge investment in not just capex and opex because the fork becomes much more difficult to maintain over time. I think they’ll do their best to work in user space, but I don’t think they’ll succeed and will have to bite the bullet. SteamOS will become more and more its own fork, including consumer-friendly features which Linux fans typically don’t care about.
This is my case with my relatively new/high-end RTX 4080 and OLED monitor. So until I upgrade both, I use HDMI to be able to drive a 1440p 240hz 10-bit HDR signal @ 30 Gbps.
I finally got the 240hz 4K uncompressed but it required buying a $1300 Asus OLED monitor and the RTX 5090. It looks amazing though, even with frame gen. Monster Hunter had some particularly breathtaking HDR scenes. I think it uses DisplayPort 2.1? Even finding the cable is difficult, Microcenter didn’t have them in April and the only one that worked was the one that came with the monitor.
DP1.4 though, so you're still going to need compression.
https://trychen.com/feature/video-bandwidth
DP however can't transfer audio, which doesn't matter for a desktop but matters a lot for a TV.
No, it's not, the protocol is completely different (DP is packet-based while HDMI traditionally was not, though AFAIK HDMI 2.1 copied DP's approach for its higher speed modes). When you use a passive DP-HDMI cable (which AFAIK is not fully passive, it has level shifters since the voltages are different), it works only because the graphics card detects it and switches to using the HDMI protocol on that port; if it's not a dual-mode port (aka "DP++" port) it won't work and you'll need an active DP-HDMI adapter.
> DP however can't transfer audio, which doesn't matter for a desktop but matters a lot for a TV.
On the desktop I'm using to type this message, I use the speakers built into the DP-connected monitor (a Dell E2222HS). So yes, DP can and does transfer audio just fine. If it couldn't, then active DP to HDMI adapters wouldn't be able to transfer audio too.
The only thing DP doesn't have AFAIK is ARC, which might matter for a few more exotic TV use cases, and HEC, which AFAIK nobody uses.
https://www.techpowerup.com/335152/china-develops-hdmi-alter...
(Some games support 120, but it's also used to present a 40hz image in a 120hz container to improve input latency for games that can't hit 60 at high graphics quality.)
Most single player games (Spider-Man, God of War, Assassin's Creed etc) will allow a balanced graphics/performance which does 40 in a 120hz refresh.
(I assume VRR = Variable Refresh Rate)
In my case I have an htpc running linux and a radeon 6600 connected via hdmi to a 4k @ 120hz capable tv, and honestly, at the sitting distance/tv size and using 2x dpi scaling you just can't tell any chroma sub-sampling is happening. It is of course a ginormous problem when on a desktop setting and even worse if you try using 1x dpi scaling.
What you will lose however is the newer forms of VRR, and it may be unstable with lots of dropouts.
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