[juusto]

Starting at Win7 the telemetry and invasive advertising ramped up to the point where I don't feel I can customize the Desktop to what I want without heavy tweaking.

And if that amount of tweaking is necessary why not go Linux instead.

So got rid of my Win10 install, went with KDE Neon+Steam. And now I wonder what took me so long.

I haven't tested my entire Steam library yet but my top 10 games run perfectly, some times with some changes to the Proton version but beyond that even workshop mods are available.

I am seriously impressed and can't imagine myself going back at all.

If only Adobe would release their software in Linux, then, I could ditch MacOS too.

[christophilus]

Been running Fedora + Steam for over a year, now. The experience has been great. It’s hard to imagine going back. I do miss Mac hardware, though. My 1.5 year old Dell XPS already has a bad key, and a faulty WiFi card. It’s complete garbage.

My next laptop will be the Framework 15” 4K option whenever they make one…

[amcoastal]

I like how your first thing when complaining about a non-Mac laptop is a complaint about the keyboard. Oh, you sweet summer child :)

[christophilus]

I've had plenty of Macs, including the butterfly keyboard (which did go bad on me). But. It took that butterfly keyboard longer to go bad than the Dell XPS. The Dell is honestly a steaming pile of crap.

[thathndude]

Unpopular opinion: I miss my butterfly keyboard. I never had any of the flaky-key issues. And I loved the crisp feel of the keys.

I don’t need key travel. I like the futuristic (and unrealistic) idea of typing on glass. In some ways, the butterfly was just a step away from that, but with the slightest bit of physical feedback.

At the least, I definitely did not loathe the butterfly like mini.

[rbanffy]

Same here. The butterfly felt much better than the Magic Keyboard. I also liked the way it sounded.

What I didn't like is that it went bad after 2 years of not very heavy use (I have an external keyboard). If Apple could make a reliable butterfly keyboard, I'd love to have it.

OTOH, I appreciate the new ones having a keyboard that feel closer to the pre-Magic ones (same feel as the pre-butterfly laptops). It's OK, if not a revolution.

[throwaway17_17]

Just curious, but do you use the laptop’s keyboard when playing games? Even for the limited style of gaming I do I can not imagine not using a full sized wireless keyboard and mouse.

[christophilus]

I mostly use a real mouse and good mechanical keyboard for work, and a PS3 controller for play. This is why the laptop’s keyboard failure is even less excusable.

[raxxorrax]

The way that Blender is developing they could get into trouble. Might not yet fit perfectly into the toolchain of many artists, but I guess it will make ground in a professional setting. I haven't missed photoshop either, I only paint and model as a hobby though.

[buovjaga]

Adobe is sponsoring Blender at the second-highest level: https://fund.blender.org/ So they don't seem very worried about it yet :)

[raxxorrax]

That is standard business practice by now if you want to influence competition or use it to further your own goals.

MS in Linux Foundation, US in Wuhan Labs, etc. pp.

[tetha]

I've also had a really suprising experience with my linux gaming setup: Playing old retro windows game has become easier, because wine can run a suprising amount of things. I recently itched to play Civ2 and after some wrangling with the setup file, I can now run Civ2 entirely transparently on my linux box. Same for a bunch of other Win95-era games - no need to fiddle with compat settings on windows and hoping, a lot of them just work in wine. That's pretty amazing.

The only thing I've found so far that just doesn't work is Tiberium Insurrection, because it does some weird things I don't understand. But with the way Win11 is going, I rather take that kinda problem.

[2Gkashmiri]

Interestingly, I have windows software that were working with wine previously but new versions don't seem to work for some reason. I used the new bottles thing. Compared to a copy of among us which played seamlessly.

[dotancohen]

  > If only Adobe would release their software in Linux, then, I could ditch MacOS too.

Have you written to them that you would purchase their software anew on Linux? Without a financial incentive, Adobe will not support Linux.

I do not use Photoshop, but I would purchase a copy for Linux just to encourage and support development.

Adobe support: https://www.adobe.com/about-adobe/contact.html

[Grakel]

Unfortunately you can't purchase a copy of Photoshop on any platform. You can only buy a subscription, and what's more starting Photoshop starts 5 or 6 other programs that slow down your system and does who knows what. Fuck Adobe, just another company that doesn't care about users.

[juusto]

No I have not.

Will do it right now, thanks for the heads up.

[smusamashah]

How is the performance of games? What I understand is that proton is a layer/adapter to run windows games and should create a FPS hit. Or do you get the same performance of running on widows?

[washadjeffmad]

Modern games can be run on Linux three ways: with native Linux builds, with Proton/dxvk/d3dvk or SteamPlay, or with VFIO.

The Linux native builds tend to be a version behind or have poorer support than the Windows ones. It's based on the devs, of course, but the take away is that it's historically been a crapshoot.

SteamPlay/Proton provides native or better performance over Windows for what I play. I've been using it so long that I actually don't know which games have native Linux versions anymore. It 99% "just works".

VFIO is virtualization where hardware is passed through to the guest OS. I use KVM+qemu on Linux and attach PCI devices like GPU and storage to the VMs. This is a native Windows game build on a Windows VM on a Linux host. It performs within a tight few percent of bare metal Windows, and the host is fully functional while in use.

Linux gaming options range from direct and inflexible, to feature parity with native performance and compatibility, to complex but guaranteed native support. I've relied on the first and last less and less over the years as Proton has improved.

[atq2119]

> VFIO is virtualization where hardware is passed through to the guest OS. I use KVM+qemu on Linux and attach PCI devices like GPU and storage to the VMs. This is a native Windows game build on a Windows VM on a Linux host. It performs within a tight few percent of bare metal Windows, and the host is fully functional while in use.

How about displays, though? It doesn't seem like you could have a proper integrated desktop between host and VM when using VFIO.

[yissp]

I haven't tried it personally, but I believe the Looking Glass project https://looking-glass.io/ is attempting to solve this.

[washadjeffmad]

Lookingglass, as another user mentioned, peers directly into the framebuffer for an effectively latency-free display experience on the host.

You can also connect the graphics device that's passed through to an external display.

As an example, my SO and I can both play a multiplayer game from the same computer this way. I can use a VM with lookingglass on my Linux host while she uses a monitor connected to the GPU her VM has attached, along with a passed-through hub with mouse and keyboard.

It helps that Threadripper has two NUMA nodes, but it's possible on any system with good IOMMU grouping.

[MayeulC]

> As an example, my SO and I can both play a multiplayer game from the same computer this way. I can use a VM with lookingglass on my Linux host while she uses a monitor connected to the GPU her VM has attached, along with a passed-through hub with mouse and keyboard.

You could also run regular multi-seat Linux with such a setup.

It should also be possible to do it without multiple GPUs, but that's unfortunately more involved (if anyone has a simple way to do this in wayland land, I'm all ears!).

[foxfluff]

> What I understand is that proton is a layer/adapter to run windows games and should create a FPS hit

Your understanding is wrong. It's largely a reimplementation of Windows APIs. Those implementations can perform better or worse than the real thing depending on quality of implementation and the underlying OS.

Some games will perform better on Linux. Some will perform worse. Some are about equal.

[Delk]

Well, it can be a layer as well. If a game makes DirectX calls, and those calls are translated on the fly to corresponding Vulkan (or in some cases perhaps OpenGL) calls, that adds a layer. That is, unless the calls are AOT or JIT transpiled or something similar -- I don't know if they are.

System calls are also something that would require an additional layer, as the required Linux system calls need to be made in addition to intercepting the Windows system calls in Wine code. Some other APIs in Wine may also be implemented on top of corresponding Linux APIs rather than just being standalone replacements for Windows code.

The majority of code in Wine is probably just reimplementations of Windows APIs, which could be thought of as being parallel to the Windows implementations rather than layers between a Windows API and a Linux one, so you're correct there.

I'd generally expect there to be a performance hit on average, but as you said, it doesn't always happen, and it's not as large as one might expect if thinking about an emulator or something similar.

[juusto]

Very good, I am not a 4k-120fps-highest-detail kind of gamer so anything over 60fps at 1440p with high detail is quite enough for me.

I run RDR2, Fallout 4, TW series, and some indie stuff at those specs and I have no problems even with mods.

I see no difference from Windows but, ofc, you mileage may vary depending on your HW and what you want from your games.

[gameswithgo]

most games the performance hit is going to be not noticeable when to some, mildly annoying to others, and totally unacceptable to o a few. Like if you were trying to be competitive in a modern AAA fps, prolly won’t be ok. But big non twitch 3d games are still very good!

[rightbyte]

> But big non twitch 3d games are still very good!

What do you mean?

[kevingadd]

'twitch' in games typically means latency-sensitive, like a competitive FPS where being 10ms faster to shoot than the other guy means you win the round. Many games can handle 100ms of latency no problem, so running at 50fps instead of 60fps is no big deal. On consoles those games typically run at 30fps to begin with, which is at minimum 16ms more latency than playing at 60fps on a linux or windows PC.

[smoldesu]

Pretty miniscule. Putting things into perspective, it's still fully possible to hit 120 FPS on my GTX 1050ti in Overwatch. A more direct comparison can better elucidate the tradeoffs though: https://youtu.be/voXc1nCD4IA

[ajvs]

I've got a few hundred games and the only one I noticed was noticeably worse on Linux is Star Citizen, and that's a game still in alpha so the optimisation in general is awful anyway.

[deadbunny]

IME it's not that great a hit in most games, maybe 5fps. Admittedly I have super high end hardware so 5fps isn't as large a hit someone might take on low-mid end hardware so YMMV.

[charcircuit]

A 5fps hit has no meaning. 6fps->1fps is much different than 1005fps->1000fps please use mspf (milliseconds per frame) or at least a percentage of the fps lost.

[robotnikman]

I wonder if Wine can be used to run Windows versions of adobe software on linux. The adobe software is the same thing preventing me from switching to using a linux distro full time.

[controlledchaos]

I’m not sure which tools you are referring to exactly, but I’ve had success with Adobe Reader/Acrobat using Wine.

[lambdaba]

Aren't Wine / some virtualization like VirtualBox seamless mode viable options?

[em3rgent0rdr]

Proton is a fork of Wine. Just more tailored towards steam games.

[brnt]

actually, proton is two things: wine+dxvk. dxvk is a windows (!) program that translates directx to vulkan. between the two of them theyre all thats needed to run games.

proton is in addition funded and tested thoroughly by a critical audience, linux gamers ;)

[tobz1000]

I've had no luck with Photoshop in Wine or VB seamless mode (PS's custom window decorators are probably the reason for the latter). A full-desktop Windows VM is still good enough with guest extensions though, so I can easily resize the whole Windows desktop with just a maximised PS window inside.

[kevingadd]

VirtualBox is a horrible way to run games of any kind. The driver support for graphics is miserable.

[underscore_ku]

WINE is an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator"

[Le_Dook]

Some software are hit and miss, or just fail to work on wine. Big one for a lot of people is the Affinity suite.

[juusto]

From what I saw only old versions of the software I need run and when they run lots of little things are missing.

I would call software with that amount of quirks and performance issues pre-alpha quality.

So, I can use my MacBook for Adobe for now until they come to their senses.