Nvidia’s Linux drivers support HDMI 2.1 and CUDA, AMD’s don’t. That matters for some hardware configs and tasks.
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I have had no issues running rolling releases like Arch and OpenMandriva.
The Nvidia driver ate my Xorg config back when.
Aside from that, pretty even I’d say.
It’s really sad the delta for Witcher 3. It’s incredibly poor.
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True, but it is still playable. I go from 90 in town to 70 and the moment I am outside a town it hovers back to 120. Same thing goes for cyberpunk, but you don’t spend that much time in the desert.
That’s where a lot of the cool stuff is tho. 
As a matter of fact, you rekindled my desire to romp around the periphery of Night City again. Well done sir.
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ok, so I’ve been using Linux daily since 2004.
fedora core 4 was my first distro. I’ve hopped around, gentoo, Slackware, pclinuxos, Debian, Ubuntu, mint, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, damn small Linux, Arch, and for the past few years POP!
things that definitely got better:
drivers
b43-fwcutter haunted me for fucking years.
the the Broadcom STA driver came out. it worked with less cards but was faster.
it’s been at least a decade since I’ve seen a kernel panic from installing an Nvidia driver.
not having to jump through hoops to get multimedia codecs is nice
having video games available other than the old id software games, supertux, emulators, bastard tetris, and a few dozen ASCII (or tiles if your lucky) roguelikes is really nice.
dependency resolution for installing packages has gotten infinitely better. untangling a ratsnest of broken/interdependent packages is frustrating and stupid.
the things that are still bad:
ultimately, a lot of it is integration hell. the first 90% of the work and 10% of the time involved is getting everything functional. the remaining 10% of the work and what’s gonna eat up 90% of the time is fit and finish getting shit to work together seamlessly .
everything basically works, it’s getting everything to work together seamlessly and as expected where the work is gonna be.
- distros probably need a configuration prompt after installing.
option a. I am a normie and or lazy, give me basic configs that are similar to Windows/mac os. maybe not the most secure or optimized, but behaves as expected by the average “User”
option b. a wizard that will configure common shit (file sharing etc) by asking questions
option c: distro defaults, I’ll config shit myself.
example: samba/windows file shares.
all I want is a folder I can throw shit into so anyone on my network can grab those files like you could do on pretty much any Windows PC in like 2 clicks.
because it’s built around the bigger business class with different users and access control samba for just simple file shares is a pain in the ass
there’s local system users, and samba users and they both have to have access to the directory the files are in and the permissions all have to line up.
there should be a lazy ass mode or script that mirrors local interactive user accounts into samba so that you can just make a folder, go into properties with a tick box for share and allow anonymous users.
I know it’s not as secure but if someone can jack into the non internet connected lan these 3 PCs are on they probably deserve access to my shit.
2.chasing the new software dragon
having to build from source the underlying libraries that glue your desktop environment together just to run new software that has an awesome feature you need is fucking annoying.
Even better when that nightly build of GTK makes the new software work but 2/3rds of everything else on your machine either crash or look fucking crazy
rolling custom kernels for new gfx drivers or performance improvements
this is at least partially a “you” problem.
you have the crack (new software) and the pipe (the ability to jump through hoops to make new software work) it is up to you to smoke the crack, or just wait until your distro rolls it out.
- attempts at vendor lock in and bloated ass containerized packaging.
snap ™, flatpak, app image
I don’t have a lot of experience with snap but here’s my flaming hot take from the half an hour or so i fucked with it:
snap added Mount points for snap packages I installed.
It reminded me of alcohol 120 running iso images of pirated games with cd checks on them.
it honestly looks like canonical is trying to work a convenience feature into being a way to try to do some soft vendor lock-in. I don’t like it.
app image: basically the program shipped with its dependencies into one big binary blob. seems to be most like Windows. download an exe and the shit just runs.
except when it doesn’t because some low level package on your system is too old and it shits the bed.
pretty sure I had an outdated glibc that broke some appimages at one point.
also, almost noone builds appimages because it’s probably a pain in the ass.
flatpak: my bloated “new software crack pipe” of choice. not only do I have my video driver locally installed, im pretty sure flatpak also has a few different versions of my video driver installed.
for some fucking reason a few times my ~/.flatpak directory has ballooned up to 90gb because I guess steam got installed via flatpak
also, even with flat seal I’ve never managed to get flatpak installed development tools to pick up locally installed development libraries worth a damn.
fucking linker errors forever, where art thou libSDL?
it’s inefficient in terms of storage, there’s probably deduplication that could be done, but flatpak seems to work consistently and well enough which pretty much makes it the gold standard in my book.
- 1-800-TUX-HELP
Ubuntu forums and mint forums used to be decently useful, but it feels like the users that posted useful stuff left.
it’s a stack overflow type site, can’t remember the name. for odd uses of shit like DD and command references there’s still some golden nuggets
Arch wiki for the longest time felt like the gold standard. command/config references along with common use case scenarios. this may have changed.
if you use a Thinkpad, thinkwiki if I’m remembering correctly has been useful
“fringe tech enthusiast forums” such as this one.
there’s less centralized repositories, but tbh having seen early 2000’s Linux it’s not as badly needed as modern Linux is insanely good compared what it has been
-edit-
further pondering. valve has done a fuckton that I feel has helped Linux. unironically praise Gaben.
I think steamos might actually be a good model for a general purpose normie user Linux.
being that valve is a software as a service company …that 10% of the work but 90% of the time thing is sort of their specialty.
containerized/wall off the important os bits so the user can’t fuck it up bad enough that a reboot or new user account can’t get them back to a working machine.
software is installed in userland and containerized (flatpak)
then if any issues crop up, it’s the userland software that’s the issue.
a 128 core multi GPU system with terabytes of ram is a fancy space heater without software. people are there to run software. so the goal is to get a functional system up, then get out of the way and let the customer run their software.
-further thoughts-
there are ideologically pure Linux users: only foss software/etc
if that’s you, you’re gonna struggle with lots of stuff.
then there are users that just want stuff to work: go with the path of least resistance to get from a to b. it might be ugly, but it works.
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Still being a newbie, devs need to think more logically about how their apps should be installed:
- Compile it locally should never be the first option (and frankly shouldn’t be an option in general)
- If you are a dev, and you know there are prerequisites and dependencies, then just build that into your install process automatically - it is silly to have a 50,000 word thesis about what the user needs to do (that they don’t understand because they aren’t professional programmers) when you can just implement detection and installation directly
- Folder access restrictions (especially due to Proton) are a nightmare and remain the largest reason why installing and getting mod managers working is still currently nearly impossible without accidentally doing something (that is probably wrong) that will bite you later on - that is if you are lucky enough to even accidentally into ‘success’
Disgree on the second part. It should always be an option, but never a requirement.
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On:
A) No, compile is a useful option, it probably shouldn’t be the default for larger things, but it should always be an option.
B) Most package managers do pull dependencies automatically, if you’re installing things from github you should be comfortable reading the manual. Linux is hyper fragmented, asking a hobbyist dev to massively increase the complexity of his installer to save you reading a couple paragraphs of text is neither reasonable nor fair.
C) What file permission problems does proton create? It’s just WINE, it creates a fake c drive for the windows folders, you can find the fake c folders easily enough. I was able to mod all the bethesda games without issue, even reshade and fps+ mods for dx12 games work under proton without issue.
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if wine is installed via flatpak it’ll likely be a newer version than most distros ship which is attractive to users (particularly gamers) but flatpaks are sandboxed and often can be prevented from accessing stuff in the regular user folders without modifying permissions.
the containerization is nice, but adds some headache’s and complexity.
so I instead of unzipping a mod for a game in /home/user/.wine/drive_c/programs/my/game/ it’s like /home/user/.var/app/org.wine.winehq/.wine/drive_c/programs/my/game/
or like in the case of gzdoom you can drag and drop a custom wad onto the gzdoom launcher icon and it’ll automatically run it. but a default flatpak install of gzdoom won’t because the permissions are scoped to only allow access to the gzdoom container folder so you’re supposed to put your wads in there instead
I get there are security concerns, but lazy/ease of use focused default configs would really help smooth out the rough edges most new users struggle with
Yeah - like trying to install mod managers is a nightmare, even with steamtinker launch (which itself is in a container walled from from the actual game, which is walled off). So when you try to find a staging folder, you can’t because it is in a different container. So then you think you can create a new folder, but you can’t do that within the prefix. So then you have to figure out where the hell is the right location to put a folder that will some how be visible to whatever prefix nightmare you find yourself in.
As for the rest - if Linux wants to grow up as an alternative to Windows on the desktop / laptop (of which Windows is getting worse all the time and people are now actively looking for alternatives) then yes, developers are going to have to start thinking like end users and take UX seriously. I mean, they don’t have to, but the first dev who does will lock up that part of the app market because ease of use is highly valued.
Most people coming from Windows are ‘one-click, it works’. You can expect them to do a little, but spending 20 - 30 hours going deep into why a dependency’s dependency dependency isn’t working because of bad, incomplete, and obscure direction is bad practice for amateur as well as professional developers.
And this isn’t to say Linux is terrible, it’s fine. But it can be so much better and I hope it gets there.
flatseal lets you poke at the permissions and stuff for flatpaks. it has solved most of my issues with flatpaks except the dev tools not finding locally installed headers and shit.
I think it ultimately kind of boils down to money. businesses want safe secure defaults, and businesses are putting money into Linux so that’s how it is.
consumers/users typically value convenience and ease of use, and while there are distros that have some sane-ish kinda easy to use default configs out of the box, they’re passion projects and money isn’t always there to drive development forward.
Why have you installed everything via flatpak?
I would argue that most linux distros have better UX than windows for most things, though yes I agree when you go too far off the reservation and hit the terminal wall it can be pretty ugly and intimidating.
Extreme hyperbole, if you are taking 30 hours to sort out flatpak permissions that’s a you problem, it isn’t that complicated. Is it a pain point? Sure, but it’s not any larger than any of the stuff you learned to do while using Windows past the baby user level, you’ve just forgotten how frustrating that stuff was too.
It sounds like you installed a bunch of shit specifically via flatpak because someone on youtube or something told you it was a good idea, and now you’re wondering why the containerized packaging thing has packaged everything in containers.
IMO a good solution would just be a big warning banner the first time you run flatpak reminding you to read the FAQ if you have issues with not being able to access things. Really I think this is an information environment problem, people get told to use things by community “ambassadors” that tell you things are great but don’t tell you how they actually work.
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part of it is an information environment problem, it’s almost like there should be a crash course or some user training.
I had to learn to favor platform agnostic stuff. example: vlc or gimp. it’s available for the big 3 desktops (win, mac,linux) and works basically identically on all 3.
investing time in getting used to a software and then not having it on another machine is frustrating and adds more mental load. or having a different program between win, Linux and there’s a feature missing on one of them.
learning to “lower expectations” and settle on software that does what you need and works anywhere definitely eases the transition.
“shopping” for software is time consuming and I get why most people don’t like it.
I’ll install 4 or 5 things that all do roughly the same things and fiddle with them. whichever one allows me to do what I wanted to do with the least hassle stays, everything else gets uninstalled.
if I find multiples that are all about the same, I might look into other features that might be useful in the future or whichever seems to run faster or looks nicer, if it runs on multiple platforms it goes to the top of the list
Yeah, seems like Linux is still small enough that there aren’t a lot of helpful and consolidated guides out there. I’ve spent 50 hours so far trying to get mods running with some very limited success. It really is that difficult on Linux. I’m ahead of the curve because in most of those support threads the OP gives up and goes back to Windows. I’m a little more stubborn 
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Why would you install Wine via flatpak?
I said it before, and I’ll say it again: don’t use flatpak unless you have to. For example, it’s a closed-source third-party software with no native package, or the flatpak adds some other benefit (default sandboxing of a browser may be a benefit, for example). For the overwhelming majority of software, just use your distro’s package manager; it exists for a reason.
Sure about that? What businesses most want is paid support that’ll help them resolve issues, and possibly configure stuff. Most commercial software, even Windows, comes with insecure-as-heck defaults that companies like the one I work for have to spend a lot of time and effort on to mitigate using e.g. group policies.
Unfortunately, companies have long since presented computers as appliances that are easy to use without any training. Ever noticed that a new PC comes, at most, with a pamphlet showing how to turn it on, and a URL to the manufacturer website? Long time ago, a new computer used to come with several printed manuals, providing the impression that you should read them in order to do something useful with the computer.
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Gotta be real here, I went between Linux and Windows, back on Windows again as I was wrong on many levels about Linux.
Only usefulness Linux has for me as a gamer is some old ass games run smoother, which is not much to go on.
So ran into a bug with Bazzite. VRR/FreeSync will flicker on OLED when the refresh rate is at 240Hz. Flickering mainly occurs when moving the mouse while at the desktop, but occurs in games as well.
So far only fix I have it to set it to 180Hz. I did not encounter this issue on windows.
Also HDR is buggy mess. Some games it will work fine on, but most it either has a blown image or simply will not work/enable.
Not a “woe”. But more of a Hurray! Finally one thing, that was missing and didn’t really have a replacement, has finally been planned by the developer of AIMP (a really really good music player).