1 Year Linux Challenge

Rocket League is the only game I play continually.
I like to play new single player titles that comes out, like firewatch is my next title. I know both these games are available on Linux, but I have an AMD gpu and Free-Sync monitor, and performance on Linux is horrendous with AMD drivers and openGL. I do believe in Vulkan and that both AMD and Nvidia will make decent drivers this year for Linux.

AMD have literally just released new beta drivers with vulkan support http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDGPU-PRO-Beta-Driver-for-Vulkan-Release-Notes.aspx

Not sure if your card it supported. It says its "validated" for R9 289 and above, might work for others.

FYI, Rocket League is coming on Linux. It was delayed after a supposed release last year, I'm hearing summer now. Gonna try and find an article I read on it.

Coming Q2

I did that. The tearing wasn't really noticeable, but the performance was still bad.

That's one thing that really blows my mind. I can understand tearing on minimalistic distros designed to run fast on old hardware. But for bigger DEs like Gnome and KDE to have tearing is just simply unacceptable.

2 Likes

Yer but they tears like a beast.

Realistically, I failed the challenge. I was using Linux as my OS at work, which is how I was entered in this challenge. However, due to the requirement for GoToMeeting (trust me, there's no budging on that) I changed to Windows 8.1 (then later Windows 10) as the primary OS and had Ubuntu running in a Hyper-V VM.
Why Hyper-V? Well, it was the easiest method that I had for having the VM boot with Windows.

So, Apache and MySQL was running in the VM and all of the frontend work was done through Windows itself. I then installed a piece of software (I forget the name) that allowed me to open PowerShell in a drop-down "terminal" and I ran a command-line SSH tool to SSH to the VM. I also had another piece of software that allowed me to open the Command Prompt from any folder, which worked the same way as "Open Terminal Here" so I could drop to command line for Git commands.

I recently discovered that they have been improving the functionality of GoToMeeting - when I last used it on Linux it was possible to join an existing meeting and use VOIP but that was about the limit of it; I couldn't even start a meeting! When I looked the other day, however, I found that it works well with Chrome (and only Chrome, sadly) so I'm back on Mint as the primary OS.

I still use Windows as my main OS on my home PC for multiple reasons:

  • The splash screen won't load at boot unless I turn off the PSU, let the residual power fade then turn it back on. It doesn't stop Windows from running but it does stop Linux from showing.
  • Windows-only games. Currently, I'm playing through Fallout 4 and Warframe. I also use Nexus Mod Manager on a few games and CBA to do it all manually. I could work around these if it wasn't for everything else though.
  • MS Office. Yes, I could drop this in favour of Libre Office and Thunderbird but I do favour them.
  • I use Adobe CS6. Yes, there are alternatives but it's a lot of money to wave goodbye to.
  • I do programming in VB.Net that I'm working on porting over to C#.Net in Windows Forms, which usually communicate with an MSSQL DB. Mono's a steep learning curve when you've been spoiled with the simplicity of Visual Studio's visual editor GUI.
  • I watch Blu-Rays on my PC.

So, yeah, at the moment it's a lot to change to change the OS at home. At work, however, I use Apache, MySQL, Libre Office, Thunderbird and once every now and then I need to look for an alternative piece of software (like when opening Open VPN connections), which are generally pretty easy to find.

I know XCOM2 is in Linux, but performance was shitty, even in Windows, at least the first days. In Windows it ran better than Linux, that was my reason to play it on Windows. I played it for 56 hours and then forgot about it. I will play it again some time in the future, probably when more mods come out.

This is the usual issue with the crappy AMD drivers, it has forced me to play a game on Windows instead of doing it on Linux. I hope this will improve now that the new AMDGPU driver is being improved every new kernel release.

Also, this is one of the major reasons for me to probably switch to arch (Antergos) for a more up-to-date software and also probably buy a nVidia GPU for improved driver performance.

We will see. For now I will keep booting into Windows to play a game if I see better performance in that OS.

For all other stuff, Linux. (Don't want to do my activities in MS spyware OS)

I really want to support AMD GPU's... just can't justify them at this time. Hopefully things change with AMDGPU drivers.

2 Likes

I want to give AMD a few bucks as well to keep them in the game. Completion is good.They need to get the new driver solid and support steam etc so I can game on linux.

Hopefully Open Sourcing the driver will help...

Still using Linux. After ubuntu unity, i went through opensuse, arch and Debian. I am now in a University so I went back to Ubuntu Gnome for safety, but I still have an alternate drive which I plan on installing Debian to this weekend.

The experience has been nice, especially with the whole Win10 fiasco, I am glad I made the choice

Pretty sure you can't watch Blu-rays on PC regardless of OS. I hear it has something to do with licensing. I have the latest HITMAN moive on BD and the laptop wouldn't even recognize the disk let alone play it.

Oh. So, what actually happened each time I inserted a Blu-ray disc, opened a media player and it started playing the film that was entitled on the disc?

What optical drive are you using? And how old are those BD movies? If it works on Windows then it should work in Linux too.

BD-RW drive. It's not the drive that's the solution, it's the software. Linux doesn't have the playback capabilities (codecs I think?). I had a good scout round at the time and there was one solution that was hit-and-miss. Regardless, there are still the other aspects.

Also, forgot to mention that I use a Creative Sound Blaster Z card, which isn't compatible.

Im sorry @oaken I failed you. I had many horrid driver failures and issues that caused me to lose hope. I plan on attempting again later to do it, but I am working on Sys admin stuff and learning with a home lab, so I am playing domain god right now. Doing this is a ton easier on windows. I am about to build a pf sense firewall though. And if it helps I am running an ubuntu server to host a quake live server. Keep faith in me as I will be back I promise.

Today marks my 1 year anniversary on Linux (Kubuntu) and two days ahead of joining @oaken thread. I have learned much & look forward to learning more. I found the ubuntu forums and man pages helpful when stuck. I have also found @nixcraft on twitter to have many helpful tips and some good sysadmin humor. Happy nix-ing no matter the distro flavor you prefer.

2 Likes

Hey no worries here man, while driver support does seem to be improved on Linux from the first time I tried Ubuntu in 2004, there are still black scars. AMD gpus are basically a kill point in trying to get it to be a good experience. Hopefully AMDGPU changes this.