TR Forums

Now I've been watching this guy's Youtube channel for awhile and this episode brings up a good point about how much negativity there is in the Linux world. I'm agreeing with him about how much we can do with Linux at this time and shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Linux on the desktop is not only alive and well, it is growing!!! Hell I manage to ditched Windows completely about three years ago without ever looking back since then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_m1ZlvQYTo

IMO the best, and at the same time worst part of Linux is how you are free to infinitely tweak it to suit your needs.

It makes Linux incredibly versatile if you know what you're doing, but at the same time the tweaker culture behind it also raises the bar for users. You're expected to spend time and effort learning how to do things a lot more so than vs OSX or Windows, and that excludes the greater majority of potential users.

called it

jihadjoe wrote:

IMO the best, and at the same time worst part of Linux is how you are free to infinitely tweak it to suit your needs.

It makes Linux incredibly versatile if you know what you're doing, but at the same time the tweaker culture behind it also raises the bar for users. You're expected to spend time and effort learning how to do things a lot more so than vs OSX or Windows, and that excludes the greater majority of potential users.

How hard is it to read a few documents or play around the system? Or for that matter use a freaking search engine?

derFunkenstein wrote:

called it

Yep.

Me too. This is gonna end up becoming a tr drinking game.

Heiwashin wrote:

Me too. This is gonna end up becoming a tr drinking game.

I think it already is. Or at least, I find these threads much more amusing when I've been drinking.

And this is coming from a committed (more than a half-decade now) Linux developer and user...

just brew it! wrote:

Heiwashin wrote:

Me too. This is gonna end up becoming a tr drinking game.

I think it already is. Or at least, I find these threads much more amusing when I've been drinking.

And this is coming from a committed (more than a half-decade now) Linux developer and user...

Ditto.

The worst enemies of Linux adoption are the tenacious Linux users, in my experience.

Waco wrote:

The worst enemies of Linux adoption are the tenacious Linux users, in my experience.

I'll drink to that.

Waco wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Heiwashin wrote:

Me too. This is gonna end up becoming a tr drinking game.

I think it already is. Or at least, I find these threads much more amusing when I've been drinking.

And this is coming from a committed (more than a half-decade now) Linux developer and user...

Ditto.

The worst enemies of Linux adoption are the tenacious Linux users, in my experience.

Oh really? How???

We've been around this block at least a dozen times before. Let's just say you're very predictable, and stuff frequently seems to go right over your head.

The most zealous, vocal Linux users who have to tell everyone they use Linux any time the topic of PCs comes up make door-to-door salespeople look positively docile.

just brew it! wrote:

We've been around this block at least a dozen times before.

This.

Oooh, this is one of those trick questions. "The positive parts of Linux," just like "everything that men understand about women": two books with blank pages.

I'm joking, I use Linux in servers, and also, what JBI said

derFunkenstein wrote:

The most zealous, vocal Linux users who have to tell everyone they use Linux any time the topic of PCs comes up make door-to-door salespeople look positively docile.

just brew it! wrote:

We've been around this block at least a dozen times before.

This.

Hey at least I'm not going around screaming it's "GNU/Linux!!!" at folks.

I don't think that matters. Some folks have built their identity around it, and honestly, I don't want to build my identity around an operating system. It's like macOS in that way.

derFunkenstein wrote:

I don't think that matters. Some folks have built their identity around it, and honestly, I don't want to build my identity around an operating system. It's like macOS in that way.

Or the AmigaOS folks? Amazing enough you can still buy PowerPC boards to put this on, or use old PowerPC based Macs instead.

Let's be fair, I kinda like penguins...Although I do have to say I've never found a six foot one that could run a hundred miles an hour...But then again, I'm not Finnish or Swedish...I guess it makes a difference...

whm1974 wrote:

derFunkenstein wrote:

I don't think that matters. Some folks have built their identity around it, and honestly, I don't want to build my identity around an operating system. It's like macOS in that way.

Or the AmigaOS folks? Amazing enough you can still buy PowerPC boards to put this on, or use old PowerPC based Macs instead.

Completely different thing. That's a retro/nostalgia deal.

derFunkenstein wrote:

The most zealous, vocal Linux users who have to tell everyone they use Linux any time the topic of PCs comes up make door-to-door salespeople look positively docile.

That, and the ones that push people who aren't ready off into the deep end of *nix...

But yeah, we've been through this before.

Waco wrote:

But yeah, we've been through this before.

Probably twice this month alone, but you can't shut up evangelists.

This is worst for people like myself that are learning about Linux.

I get servers- today, and twenty years ago when I ran hlds for an in-house Counter-Strike server. I get attempting to use it as a sole desktop OS, so long as there's nothing that you *require* Windows for, or you can run a dual-boot or VM as needed.

But what really gets me are the Linux gaming evangelists. Square peg, round hole, and 'building their identity around it' is just getting started.

Airmantharp wrote:

This is worst for people like myself that are learning about Linux.

I get servers- today, and twenty years ago when I ran hlds for an in-house Counter-Strike server. I get attempting to use it as a sole desktop OS, so long as there's nothing that you *require* Windows for, or you can run a dual-boot or VM as needed.

But what really gets me are the Linux gaming evangelists. Square peg, round hole, and 'building their identity around it' is just getting started.

You can play games just fine with Linux depending on which games you want to play. Plus if you are willing to use Wine that ups the amount of games quite a bit. Not perfect however.

Thin Man wrote:

Let's be fair, I kinda like penguins...Although I do have to say I've never found a six foot one that could run a hundred miles an hour...But then again, I'm not Finnish or Swedish...I guess it makes a difference...

Little known fact: There is a species of subterranean penguin living underneath the Bonneville salt flats. Now and then small dust clouds can be seen there which are often mistaken for prototype vehicle testing. It's the penguins, and they bite.

whm1974 wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

But what really gets me are the Linux gaming evangelists. Square peg, round hole, and 'building their identity around it' is just getting started.

You can play games just fine with Linux depending on which games you want to play. Plus if you are willing to use Wine that ups the amount of games quite a bit. Not perfect however.

I get that. I'm talking about those for whom Linux is a religion, and they apply that fervor to Linux Gaming.

The challenge with Linux gaming is really very clear: unless a game was built with it in mind, it either has to be hand-ported (if it uses OpenGL/Vulkan) or wrapped (if it uses DX), and generally speaking this means that most AAA-games are not going to be positive experiences right now.

This is changing, slowly, as the major engine developers take Valve's cue and try to ensure compatibility with the Debian-based SteamOS standard, but it'll be slow, and that religious fervor that the Linux faithful apply to anything computing works overtime to push people away and toward the Windows solution that just works.

Posting in another whm1974 Linux thread.

whm1974 wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

This is worst for people like myself that are learning about Linux.

I get servers- today, and twenty years ago when I ran hlds for an in-house Counter-Strike server. I get attempting to use it as a sole desktop OS, so long as there's nothing that you *require* Windows for, or you can run a dual-boot or VM as needed.

But what really gets me are the Linux gaming evangelists. Square peg, round hole, and 'building their identity around it' is just getting started.

You can play games just fine with Linux depending on which games you want to play. Plus if you are willing to use Wine that ups the amount of games quite a bit. Not perfect however.

...and Wine is the sledgehammer that gets used to force the square peg into the round hole. You've just reinforced his point quite nicely.

Airmantharp wrote:

I get that. I'm talking about those for whom Linux is a religion, and they apply that fervor to Linux Gaming.

The challenge with Linux gaming is really very clear: unless a game was built with it in mind, it either has to be hand-ported (if it uses OpenGL/Vulkan) or wrapped (if it uses DX), and generally speaking this means that most AAA-games are not going to be positive experiences right now.

This is changing, slowly, as the major engine developers take Valve's cue and try to ensure compatibility with the Debian-based SteamOS standard, but it'll be slow, and that religious fervor that the Linux faithful apply to anything computing works overtime to push people away and toward the Windows solution that just works.

There's the driver issue as well. Until new GPUs routinely get feature-complete and stable Linux driver support at (or close to) launch, Linux will be a second-class OS for gaming.

Redocbew wrote:

Thin Man wrote:

Let's be fair, I kinda like penguins...Although I do have to say I've never found a six foot one that could run a hundred miles an hour...But then again, I'm not Finnish or Swedish...I guess it makes a difference...

Little known fact: There is a species of subterranean penguin living underneath the Bonneville salt flats. Now and then small dust clouds can be seen there which are often mistaken for prototype vehicle testing. It's the penguins, and they bite.

I hear they're also venomous. The livers of the subterranean herring on which they feed contain small amounts of a potent neurotoxin; the penguins have evolved the ability to concentrate this toxin in their salivary glands.

It is rumored that the military started a top-secret program to weaponize the toxin back in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Leaked documents (authenticity of which cannot be independently verified) state that harvesting of salivary glands (which was generally fatal for the penguin) nearly wiped out the wild population, until a captive breeding program was started at Groom Lake (the infamous "Area 51"), roughly 400 miles to the southwest. Subsequent development of a device to harvest the toxin without removing the salivary gland made it possible to obtain the toxin without causing permanent harm to the bird, substantially increasing production rate; toxin can be harvested repeatedly from the same bird, at roughly 4 month intervals. The military has denied the existence of this program, though an anonymous source claims it was still in operation as of 1988 or 1989, and that to this day the military maintains a substantial cache of the concentrated toxin in cryo-storage.

Airmantharp wrote:

But what really gets me are the Linux gaming evangelists. Square peg, round hole, and 'building their identity around it' is just getting started.... that religious fervor that the Linux faithful apply to anything computing works overtime to push people away and toward the Windows solution that just works.

whm1974 wrote:

You can play games just fine with Linux...

just brew it! wrote:

You've just reinforced his point quite nicely.... Until new GPUs routinely get feature-complete and stable Linux driver support, Linux will be a second-class OS for gaming.

If I had more time this morning, I would link to three or four previous whm1974 threads where we've covered this topic before.

Three decades ago, a friend of mine was delighted to show me an IBM PC/XT software emulator running on his Amiga 1000. It ran rather slowly, but it played the X86 MSDOS version of Moria faithfully on the Amiga's 7.2 MHz Motorola 68000, providing the performance of a 1.1 MHz Intel 8088. My friend told me that "It's now how fast the bear dances--It's that the bear dances at all."

For the hundred dollar cost of Microsoft Windows, you could avoid a tremendous amount of headache and have a much better gaming experience.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

If I had more time this morning, I would link to three or four previous whm1974 threads where we've covered this topic before.

Four decades ago, a friend of mine was delighted to show me an IBM PC/XT software emulator running on his Amiga 1000. It ran rather slowly, but it played the X86 MSDOS version of Moria faithfully on the Amiga's 7.2 MHz Motorola 68000, providing the performance of a 1.2 MHz Intel 8088. My friend told me that "It's now how fast the bear dances--It's that the bear dances at all."

For the hundred dollar cost of Microsoft Windows, you could avoid a tremendous amount of headache and have a much better gaming experience.

I know. For whatever reason, I didn't mind wading into this one; changing perspectives or whatever on my part.

With respect to Linux gaming, it's something that's started sound less like nonsense: some AAA titles are actually running at full speed, and to support that trend, most game engines are now being built to be run on Linux as well, including the crucial support for OpenGL and now Vulkan APIs that are actually available in native form on Linux.

I guess the main interest to me is that game engine developers are pushing to be OS agnostic, and the dreamer in me wonders if we'll get to a point where operating systems simply don't matter, like how Microsoft is building support for Linux containers where the necessary parts of the operating system needed to run a particular process are part of the container.

[and JBI, fair point about drivers- don't know if/when we'll actually ever get parity there either]

Airmantharp wrote:

[and JBI, fair point about drivers- don't know if/when we'll actually ever get parity there either]

GPU drivers are an ongoing sore spot. The Open Source ones for NVIDIA and AMD always seem to lag a few generations behind, and the proprietary ones tend to be fragile (breaking when kernel updates are installed, replacing pieces of the stock OpenGL stack with proprietary implementations, etc.); a lot of this comes down to a clash between the Linux driver model, and the desire of GPU manufacturers to protect portions of their driver code as trade secrets. So the driver has a binary blob (the closed source piece), and the installer needs to compile a shim (from source code) at install time to interface the driver to the OS; this process needs to be repeated whenever the OS kernel gets updated. This in turn forces users who otherwise have no interest in software development to have the gcc compiler toolchain and system header files installed, or driver installation will fail. As the saying goes, what could possibly go wrong?

Intel seems to get it mostly right on Linux GPU drivers, most of the time. Too bad they don't have a GPU that is competitive with NVIDIA's or AMD's bleeding edge designs.

And that makes sense, as much as it annoys. I understand protecting proprietary functionality as GPUs are necessarily dependent on their drivers, and thus driver code can tell you a lot about the specific inner workings of GPUs.

Of course it's also a bit silly from the aspect that they really only compete with each other, and that by the time such drivers are put into use, hardware two and three generations down the line has already been fully defined. More of a good practice thing for when GPUs can no longer count on process advances for performance gains, like where CPUs are at now.