As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/

The brand [GNU/Linux / Alternate OS] thread: Steam finally confirmed

1282931333439

Posts

  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    edited April 2020
    No lie, it's a really nice piece of hardware. I'm now sorely tempted to buy my own Surface and put Linux on it if that's possible. And when they inevitably take it back, I just might.

    Although I think I'd want something with more than 256Gb drive space. I wonder if there's going to be a Zen2 core edition?

    EDIT: Apparently it's a right pain in the arse to put Linux on them. Oh well, just an idle thought.

    V1m on
  • a5ehrena5ehren AtlantaRegistered User regular
    Seidkona wrote: »
    Also the mystical all Linux all the time jobs do exist.

    I haven't touched windows in 3 jobs.

    In theory I can do my entire job in Linux, but they issue Windows laptops for email anyway. They only support Oracle Linux 7 for internal use on our workstations, which is annoying because the RHEL/CentOS/OL family suuuuuuuuuucks as a Desktop.

    Left to my own devices, I'd probably load up Solus or Xubuntu 20.04.

  • SeidkonaSeidkona Had an upgrade Registered User regular
    a5ehren wrote: »
    Seidkona wrote: »
    Also the mystical all Linux all the time jobs do exist.

    I haven't touched windows in 3 jobs.

    In theory I can do my entire job in Linux, but they issue Windows laptops for email anyway. They only support Oracle Linux 7 for internal use on our workstations, which is annoying because the RHEL/CentOS/OL family suuuuuuuuuucks as a Desktop.

    Left to my own devices, I'd probably load up Solus or Xubuntu 20.04.

    I am running Manjaro XFCE with I3 replacing the standard WM on my work box. It is really good.

    They also give me full control of my work machine which is increasingly rare it seems.

    Last job did make me use a Mac. It was a horrible experience but I didn't run much locally on it. I sit almost all of my work on a bastion I set up for myself.

    Mostly just huntin' monsters.
    XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
  • SeidkonaSeidkona Had an upgrade Registered User regular
    Also @august

    Check out the Linux foundations certs. Whole the Linux cert is not quite as good as the Redhat one they do have some other tracks that have some good certs.

    Like Kubernettes admin.

    Mostly just huntin' monsters.
    XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
  • Zilla360Zilla360 21st Century. |She/Her| Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered User regular
  • FremFrem Registered User regular
    edited April 2020
    WSL 1 is generally snappier than VirtualBox, but has some pretty big compatibility gaps. In particular, I wasn’t able to get Flatpak working on it (a year ago), and it definitely doesn’t support Docker at all. File system access is also pretty slow for lots of small files; npm install is glacial. But it is pretty cool to be able to run GTK applications seamlessly next to native Windows apps.

    WSL 2 is an optimized VM using HyperV. I’d expect it to feel more snappy than VirtualBox, and it’ll have much better compatibility and file system access performance than WSL1, but I’m not counting on it being significantly better than VirtualBox in raw CPU benchmarks.

    (Also, X410 is a great bit of software, so much nicer than the free alternatives on Windows.)

    Frem on
  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    edited May 2020
    Is this process current & correct? I've done 4 release upgrades without any serious issues so far, but I feel like I'm pushing my luck a bit, so I want some insurance.

    EDIT:
    It doesn't make explicit is whether there is any issue with having the Home partition on a logical partition on the same physical drive. Is it OK to make a new logical partition in the empty space in the current boot drive and use that? On windows it would be fine, but I don't want to trust to that assumption.

    If possible I would like to keep Home on the 500Gb EVO 970 boot drive (which currently has ~250Gb free and will have ~430Gb free when the 2Tb SATA SSD I ordered for holding media arrives.) because it's by far the fasted drive in my PC.

    Lastly, because I don't want to be constantly fiddling about with gparted, what's a sensible size for a Home directory? would 50Gb be ludicrously oversized or optimistically tiny?

    V1m on
  • ThawmusThawmus +Jackface Registered User regular
    V1m wrote: »
    Is this process current & correct? I've done 4 release upgrades without any serious issues so far, but I feel like I'm pushing my luck a bit, so I want some insurance.

    EDIT:
    It doesn't make explicit is whether there is any issue with having the Home partition on a logical partition on the same physical drive. Is it OK to make a new logical partition in the empty space in the current boot drive and use that? On windows it would be fine, but I don't want to trust to that assumption.

    If possible I would like to keep Home on the 500Gb EVO 970 boot drive (which currently has ~250Gb free and will have ~430Gb free when the 2Tb SATA SSD I ordered for holding media arrives.) because it's by far the fasted drive in my PC.

    Lastly, because I don't want to be constantly fiddling about with gparted, what's a sensible size for a Home directory? would 50Gb be ludicrously oversized or optimistically tiny?

    It kinda depends on what you do with your PC, honestly.

    My current gaming rig has / mounted to a 250 GB SSD, and my /home mounted to a 1.5 TB drive. This was mostly because I wanted to be able to have a lot of games installed simultaneously, and also I store my music and photos there, and then I just back up /home on another drive weekly.

    It was beneficial at times as I kept trying out different distros, as I'd be able to install a new distro, and not lose anything or have to move anything.

    However.

    There are a lot of things I will do differently on my next machine (hopefully to be built in late Fall). Steam likes to run its library out of your /home by default, but you can set up steam libraries anywhere (and have multiple libraries, at that), and on my SSD is where I should have done it (I've been migrating them slowly as I play them). I thought it was nice to not have to re-install them when I was installing a new OS, but that didn't always pan out anyways, each distro seemed to handle the steam installation differently, which I thought was frustrating and nonsensical. And ultimately I just ended up using Ubuntu and stopped playing OS roulette. I liked Budgie quite a bit but I need full access to wine and installing stupid amounts of packages and their approach cut me off at the knees.

    I also set up a separate box to be my Plex server, and I don't really need music/video storage on my machine anymore as a result.

    So ultimately, when I set up my next box, I'll probably just get the biggest SSD I can and call it good. If I'm thinking about playing OS roulette some more I'll grab a 128 GB SSD and use that for /

    Twitch: Thawmus83
  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    edited May 2020
    I have a 1Tb NVME set up as a Steam drive - it's not quite as fancy as it sounds because this x470 motherboard doesn't have enough PCIE lanes for a full strength second NVME M2 slot, so it's effectively half speed. That did take a bit of fiddling about (see V1mposts passim) but it's perfect now. However the actual Steam client isn't on it, just the game files. Steam itself is easy to install, and if I have to redownload half a Tb of games, well, I'm on an unlimited plan on Fibre; so be it.

    Anyway, a bit of investigation leads me to believe that a 100Gb / partition and a ~400Gb Home would be more sensible. Linux itself is very small compared to Windows. 100Gb is likely to be big enough for the effective lifespan of the drive.

    V1m on
  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    Update: Apparently shrinking the root partition is Bad Times, so I'm not doing it until such time as I do a complete OS reinstall

  • SeidkonaSeidkona Had an upgrade Registered User regular
    edited May 2020
    The new Gnome3 tiling plug in that system 76 developed for Pop_OS is really good.

    Seidkona on
    Mostly just huntin' monsters.
    XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
  • augustaugust where you come from is gone Registered User regular
    Just sitting here thinking about how my desire to set up any of my family or friends with a Linux desktop went directly in the shitter the minute I found out neither Firefox or Chrom/ium allow hardware accelerated video, and probably never will.

    I know the situation is no one person's responsibility, but how the fuck am I supposed to feel good setting my Mom up with Ubuntu when she's going to be nuking her battery into oblivion by watching Netflix.

    Obviously the answer is get a Chromebook which we've already done, but man.

  • ThawmusThawmus +Jackface Registered User regular
    august wrote: »
    Just sitting here thinking about how my desire to set up any of my family or friends with a Linux desktop went directly in the shitter the minute I found out neither Firefox or Chrom/ium allow hardware accelerated video, and probably never will.

    I know the situation is no one person's responsibility, but how the fuck am I supposed to feel good setting my Mom up with Ubuntu when she's going to be nuking her battery into oblivion by watching Netflix.

    Obviously the answer is get a Chromebook which we've already done, but man.

    Another answer is to use Pop!_OS and Chromium. They have VAAPI hardware decoding enabled by default.

    Upon learning this today, I'm probably going to make that the next distro I try.

    Twitch: Thawmus83
  • augustaugust where you come from is gone Registered User regular
    Thawmus wrote: »
    august wrote: »
    Just sitting here thinking about how my desire to set up any of my family or friends with a Linux desktop went directly in the shitter the minute I found out neither Firefox or Chrom/ium allow hardware accelerated video, and probably never will.

    I know the situation is no one person's responsibility, but how the fuck am I supposed to feel good setting my Mom up with Ubuntu when she's going to be nuking her battery into oblivion by watching Netflix.

    Obviously the answer is get a Chromebook which we've already done, but man.

    Another answer is to use Pop!_OS and Chromium. They have VAAPI hardware decoding enabled by default.

    Upon learning this today, I'm probably going to make that the next distro I try.

    That's kinda cool. Although I gave up on chromium-vaapi when it just broke on nvidia drivers for at least a few months with no sign of it being fixed. Looks like it works now I guess.

  • SeidkonaSeidkona Had an upgrade Registered User regular
    Pop_OS 20.04 is actually really good.

    Mostly just huntin' monsters.
    XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    edited July 2020
    Seeing some pretty encouraging comments from the WINE team:. They've gotten EAC working for a number of games, including Rust, Apex Legends and Halo MCC

    https://mobile.twitter.com/0xdt0/status/1281265922154672129

    V1m on
  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    This could be kind of a big deal btw; if someone could jingle a bunch of keys in front of Tim Sweeney and distract him from his reflexive urge to shit on Linux gaming, then that would be great...

  • ThawmusThawmus +Jackface Registered User regular
    So I've been using Pop!OS 20.04 for a few months now, pretty much ever since I started WFH.

    I'm in love with window tiling. I enabled it right away, was absolutely furious trying to adjust to it for like 3 weeks, and now I'm just in heaven. Couple keystrokes and I have a twitch stream, two terminals, a doc, and PA all on my screen simultaneously, and it's incredibly easy and fast to switch and adjust, I like it a lot.

    Twitch: Thawmus83
  • SeidkonaSeidkona Had an upgrade Registered User regular
    I love the Pop!OS style of tiling. at the end of the day I still feel like i3+xfce gets me more of what I want but the gnome3 plugin that System76 made is really good.

    Mostly just huntin' monsters.
    XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    Want to run your Epic games without dealing with the Epic launcher shitshow?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdU7hkjQuBk

  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    edited August 2020
    Because reasons, I will be rebuilding my PC at the end of the year, and I'm thinking of switching away from Ubuntu
    Partly because I'm targeting a Navi2 GPU (pending availability, reviews, etc), but also because I dislike their stance in regards to snaps, and because I want to try out a different DE and maybe something more customisable.

    It's going to be a clean install, and I'm going to take the opportunity to properly partition the boot drive (500Gb Evo, 470Gb available after provisioning) into a 70Gb /. and a 400Gb /Home

    What I like about Ubuntu:
    'Just click yes until it's done' install process
    Everything just working
    Lots of help resources online, although the sheer amount of sometimes contradictory advice could be confusing.
    Very very stable for day to day use

    Which distribution would you recommend as my next one? Probably none of the Ubuntu derivatives will have more up to date kernels but idk if any are routinely used with them? I'm not afraid to do a little bit of terminal work or fstab editting on a "once it's set up, it's done" basis. KDE preferred btw.

    EDIT: EDIT: I'm aware that I can get most of what I want by eg: switching to KDE Neon and forcing the kernel version. That's my fallback. But that seems to potentially tread on the "everything just working" and "very stable day to day" scores? Basically I am happy to put in the effort to get $DISTRO up and running, but then I want to be able to be goddabm fuckn lazy about keeping everything just humming along. Clicking "Yeah, sure, update the things if you want?" is about my speed.

    V1m on
  • FremFrem Registered User regular
    edited August 2020
    The biggest thing you're gonna run into switching off of Ubuntu is that there's a lot of third party software that assumes Linux == Ubuntu. There's always a workaround, but, for example, you'll probably run into random Steam games that complain about missing libraries because Windows developers don't understand static linking on Linux.

    All that said, I like Fedora a lot. It's got a similar setup process as Ubuntu, it doesn't seem to randomly break, there's a decently large community, a good breadth of software in the repos, etc. I've upgraded between major releases a couple times without major issues. I haven't used the KDE spin.

    I'm not currently using Linux as a daily driver though, because I can't get the closed source NVidia drivers working in any distro to save my life.

    Frem on
  • SoggybiscuitSoggybiscuit Tandem Electrostatic Accelerator Registered User regular
    V1m wrote: »
    Because reasons, I will be rebuilding my PC at the end of the year, and I'm thinking of switching away from Ubuntu
    Partly because I'm targeting a Navi2 GPU (pending availability, reviews, etc), but also because I dislike their stance in regards to snaps, and because I want to try out a different DE and maybe something more customisable.

    It's going to be a clean install, and I'm going to take the opportunity to properly partition the boot drive (500Gb Evo, 470Gb available after provisioning) into a 70Gb /. and a 400Gb /Home

    What I like about Ubuntu:
    'Just click yes until it's done' install process
    Everything just working
    Lots of help resources online, although the sheer amount of sometimes contradictory advice could be confusing.
    Very very stable for day to day use

    Which distribution would you recommend as my next one? Probably none of the Ubuntu derivatives will have more up to date kernels but idk if any are routinely used with them? I'm not afraid to do a little bit of terminal work or fstab editting on a "once it's set up, it's done" basis. KDE preferred btw.

    EDIT: EDIT: I'm aware that I can get most of what I want by eg: switching to KDE Neon and forcing the kernel version. That's my fallback. But that seems to potentially tread on the "everything just working" and "very stable day to day" scores? Basically I am happy to put in the effort to get $DISTRO up and running, but then I want to be able to be goddabm fuckn lazy about keeping everything just humming along. Clicking "Yeah, sure, update the things if you want?" is about my speed.

    If you need "if it aint broke dont fix it" kind of stability, CentOS is pretty decent. I kinda got pigeonholed into at school since that is what the nuclear lab folks standardized on, and it seems super stable. CentOS 8 (Im on 7) just came out, so it should be fairly modern for a couple of years. You can pretty much choose any GUI but I think it defaults to gnome.

    At home though, if I need linux, I do default to Ubuntu however. My experience with centos is only at work basically.

    Steam - Synthetic Violence | XBOX Live - Cannonfuse | PSN - CastleBravo | Twitch - SoggybiscuitPA
  • mightyjongyomightyjongyo Sour Crrm East Bay, CaliforniaRegistered User regular
    I will say that Fedora is now using Gnome Desktop which I think is what Ubuntu uses as well? Or, well, they had their Unity(?) stuff and then I *think* they discontinued it in favor of just using Gnome. So it may not be the new DE experience you're looking for.

    My only experience with full-time linux was on a laptop environment, which KDE was (is?) notoriously bad at due to lack of support for constantly changing monitor configurations, so I just stuck with Gnome.

    fake edit: I see you're saying KDE preferred but then you also mention wanting to try a new DE so I'm assuming you mean distro instead of desktop.

    I would still recommend Fedora, I've used Steam on it before with little to no fuss and it runs Discord and Spotify as well. Recently they've been supporting things like flatpak as well so there is actually a decent amount of options.

    While there are different naming conventions between yum/dnf and deb packages, usually you can find the replacement by using `dnf provides` or a quick google search.

  • augustaugust where you come from is gone Registered User regular
    The thing is that I'm not sure "I want it to be super stable" and "I want newer kernels" really go together.

  • mightyjongyomightyjongyo Sour Crrm East Bay, CaliforniaRegistered User regular
    I think Fedora manages to do both, in my experience - or at least it has reached a "stable enough" where I feel things are usable and haven't had any major hiccups. I don't think it's truly bleeding edge kernel, although I haven't checked that in a while, but it's definitely modern enough where I don't feel like I'm missing out on major features.

  • augustaugust where you come from is gone Registered User regular
    Is it newer than what Ubuntu has in whatever their latest release is?

  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    edited August 2020
    august wrote: »
    The thing is that I'm not sure "I want it to be super stable" and "I want newer kernels" really go together.

    Yeah that's the basic dilemma I'm running into.

    On reflection: after a while, the problem will kind of go away; once the kernel tree gets past Navi2 being a new thing, even the more lackadasical distros will eventually support it.

    Perhaps I should just go with some non-snap-using Ubuntu-derivative flavour, upgrade the kernel to 5.9 (or 5.10 by then, perhaps), and then just wait for the distro maintainers to catch up to the required version, and then switch back to the LTS HWE track, if that's a thing?

    It means a bit more setup work, which is fine, and probably a bit more maintenance until the intersection date which is less fine, but it's looking like the compromise which scores the highest on my requirement list.
    august wrote: »
    Is it newer than what Ubuntu has in whatever their latest release is?

    Currently 5.4.0-42 - so basically the November 2019 LTS Kernel.

    V1m on
  • mightyjongyomightyjongyo Sour Crrm East Bay, CaliforniaRegistered User regular
    edited August 2020
    Fedora doesn't use the LTS kernel - so I think it should be on the 5.8 or 5.9 release. Unfortunately I don't have a running system with it right now so I can't verify.

    mightyjongyo on
  • FremFrem Registered User regular
    edited August 2020
    I will say that Fedora is now using Gnome Desktop which I think is what Ubuntu uses as well? Or, well, they had their Unity(?) stuff and then I *think* they discontinued it in favor of just using Gnome. So it may not be the new DE experience you're looking for.

    The default image ships with Gnome, but they have several different preconfigured "spins"; install images with various different default desktop environments. I didn't even know that Sugar (One Laptop Per Child) was around in a major distro until I saw their spin list.

    Frem on
  • augustaugust where you come from is gone Registered User regular
    @V1m I'm not sure that a non-snap Ubuntu derivative exists but I think you can uninstall snapd. I did that at some point because I was annoyed that Ubuntu wanted to install Chromium as a snap - which meant Chromium took a while to load. I think uninstalling snapd allowed me to pull Chromium for repo by default, and I don't recall any problems arising. However there was a specific third party app that was only available via snap so I ended up reinstalling it. There should be a beta of Ubuntu 20.10 in a month that might have a kernel new enough for you.

  • augustaugust where you come from is gone Registered User regular
    Apparently Firefox 80 has vaapi support now.

  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    august wrote: »
    @V1m I'm not sure that a non-snap Ubuntu derivative exists but I think you can uninstall snapd. I did that at some point because I was annoyed that Ubuntu wanted to install Chromium as a snap - which meant Chromium took a while to load. I think uninstalling snapd allowed me to pull Chromium for repo by default, and I don't recall any problems arising. However there was a specific third party app that was only available via snap so I ended up reinstalling it. There should be a beta of Ubuntu 20.10 in a month that might have a kernel new enough for you.

    snaps aren't an immediate problem for me, but the deceptive and arrogant attitude that Canonical are displaying in regard to them is one that I find increasingly similar to the attitude from Microsoft that permanently soured me on Windows. As long as I'm reinstalling anyway, why not take warning from that red flag?

    I know System76 has made snaps actually optional rather than "I'm sure you didn't really mean to say no" optional, and if there isn't a good KDE option I like, I'll probably end up going with Pop.

  • ThawmusThawmus +Jackface Registered User regular
    V1m wrote: »
    august wrote: »
    @V1m I'm not sure that a non-snap Ubuntu derivative exists but I think you can uninstall snapd. I did that at some point because I was annoyed that Ubuntu wanted to install Chromium as a snap - which meant Chromium took a while to load. I think uninstalling snapd allowed me to pull Chromium for repo by default, and I don't recall any problems arising. However there was a specific third party app that was only available via snap so I ended up reinstalling it. There should be a beta of Ubuntu 20.10 in a month that might have a kernel new enough for you.

    snaps aren't an immediate problem for me, but the deceptive and arrogant attitude that Canonical are displaying in regard to them is one that I find increasingly similar to the attitude from Microsoft that permanently soured me on Windows. As long as I'm reinstalling anyway, why not take warning from that red flag?

    I know System76 has made snaps actually optional rather than "I'm sure you didn't really mean to say no" optional, and if there isn't a good KDE option I like, I'll probably end up going with Pop.

    A fine choice.

    I haven't found a reason to look back thus far.

    Twitch: Thawmus83
  • evilbobevilbob RADELAIDERegistered User regular
    Insert shilling for Mint here.

    l5sruu1fyatf.jpg

  • SeidkonaSeidkona Had an upgrade Registered User regular
    Mostly just huntin' monsters.
    XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    I don't understand a lot of what I just saw but I do know that I kinda really want it.

    Anyone know if (1) this will work with 3.38 and (2) is Ubuntu getting 3.38 any time soon?

  • SeidkonaSeidkona Had an upgrade Registered User regular
    edited September 2020
    It should work with 3.38.

    If it works well I think you just saw the future of, for me, modern UI design.

    Seidkona on
    Mostly just huntin' monsters.
    XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
  • ThawmusThawmus +Jackface Registered User regular
    I'm kinda swamped at the moment with all sorts of stuff, and will be for a couple months, but I'm hoping to try this out before the end of the year. I just take a long time to adjust to new UI's

    Twitch: Thawmus83
  • V1mV1m Registered User regular
    Well I note that it's an extension that one can toggle on or off, so if I get lost with it, I can just un-extend it.

Sign In or Register to comment.