Linux, Anyone?

[DocClox]

Well, I created a club. It's still private at the moment - I'd wanted to do an initial post and didn't get the time I'd wanted over the weekend. I'll open it tonight when I get home.

[vaultbait]

14 hours ago, User39042 said:

Well yeah, that and it's command line driven. I use to think command line was uber l33t, but now I know that GUI is superior with keyboard shortcuts unless you are trying to do something extremely specific.

 

Maybe it's a generational thing, but when I first learned to use computers there were no graphical interfaces, so actually using a keyboard to tell a computer what I want doesn't feel "uber l33t," just natural. In fact, the first "hobby computers" I used as a child didn't have keyboards, just banks of dip switches and an "enter" button.

 

The last version of Windows I used with any regularity before abandoning it for Linux in the mid-90s still had to be started from a MS-DOS command line. The default startup executable didn't get changed to win.com until Windows95 (unless you count Windows NT, but that was mostly relegated to DEC workstations and servers at the time, not consumer grade "home computers"). Mice or similar pointer devices were really only common for Macintosh computers and Unix workstations in the 80s, so by the time I had one for my home computer I was already pretty well accustomed to using computers entirely through a keyboard.

 

This probably makes me old, but I don't feel it has hindered my ability to take advantage of newer technologies, merely influenced my preferences for how I interact with them.

[Guest]

I tried to use Linux several times in the past, but driver issues are very common. 

Last time I tried to run Elder Scrolls Online on it (through Steam), and it gave me a black screen. 

This after days fixing driver issues. Because in Linux you can't install stuff by just clicking on it, you have to type a entire text of console commands, which can only be found in obscure websites. Else nothing works.

It is impressive that after all these years, Linux still don't have a plug and play solution, you can only use those pre-installed bloatware and that's it. 

But I was in a VM, so maybe this was the reason why I got the black screen.

I was not able to fix the equalizer stuttering as well. Again, might have been a issue related to the VM. 

In any case, I'm sticking to my Windows 7, until I need new hardware. Might happen in some years. Feels so good to be outdated, instead of enjoying the "last exciting npc thing". 

Edited August 14, 2023 by Wolfstorm321

[krzp]

1 hour ago, Wolfstorm321 said:

Because in Linux you can't install stuff by just clicking on it, you have to type a entire text of console commands, which can only be found in obscure websites.

This has been my experience around 2015 and earlier, but the recent versions have been much better, imo - at least the new Ubuntu was able to pick up almost everything I've thrown at it, even the more obscure devices like the usb guitar pedal and the cheap wi-fi usb-sticks. The only thing that I had to search for in google was the dock drivers for the laptop, but even with those I had to just copy-paste two lines into the terminal, and it started working without much input from yours truly, which isn't that much harder than downloading an exe and going through all the prompts. 

 

So, for what it's worth, it has gotten a lot more user-friendly in this regard.

 

But, naturally, everyone's experience can be different - Linux still somewhat lacks widespread support from a lot of manufacturers, so if you've got an unlucky device that has some known problems, it might turn into a headache pretty fast ?

Edited August 14, 2023 by krzp

[Uthan The Perverse]

One thing that I think would really enhance modding on Linux is if MO2 had a fork that used OverlayFS instead of USFVS.

 

While USVFS works adequately, OverlayFS drivers are in the kernel, which would remove a lot of overhead that USVFS running on Wine has.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Uthan The Perverse

[vaultbait]

54 minutes ago, krzp said:

So, for what it's worth, it has gotten a lot more user-friendly in this regard.

 

As was often said of Unix, and then eventually Linux, it's user-friendly but picky about who its friends are.

[zapotek2034]

Looking forward to the creation of this club.  Although I have not switched over to Linux as my daily driver as of yet, I have been using it on and off on some older hardware and in VMs since RedHat 7 (pre-IBM).

 

For the most part, I've found that it's worked mostly without issues, except for the occasional driver issue I had with a few of the older versions, where I had to use NDSWRAPPER to install the Windows driver for the WIFI adapter.

This issue eventually went away once hardware support was added into the later Linux kernels.

My current "driver" issue is with the Nvidia card that's installed in my older laptop running Linux.  Nvidia dropped support for the proprietary driver used by the card (340.108) once the Linux kernel upgraded past 5.4.
https://9to5linux.com/nvidia-legacy-linux-graphics-drivers

 

Although I'm able to use the open source Nouveau drivers, you may run into an issue where some games either stop working, or performance is degraded.  In my case, Fallout 3/New Vegas stopped working; however, Oblivion works fine.
 

Recent updates to the Nouveau drivers and WINE have allowed FO3/NV to launch once again, but the "main menu" (where you can load a saved game/start a new game) is not responsive.

 

I did not have this problem with another old laptop (which recently died,) that had an AMD APU (AMD E1-1500), since AMD has provided better support for their open source drivers.

 

Newer hardware will likely work "out of the box"; however, as was noted by others, your mileage may vary.

 

For anyone looking to try Linux, testing via a Live CD/USB should give you a good idea on compatibility with your hardware.

 

The other piece I recommend to test are the different desktop environments, to find one that feels right to you and seems to be responsive for your hardware.

 

With regards to those people who note that most fixes require the usage of console commands, the reason for this that unlike Windows/Mac, (which only have one "desktop environment",) Linux has several to choose from (such as KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, LXDE, OpenBox, Gnome and LXQT to name a few.)

Because most Linux distros are based on Arch, Debian, Fedora, or SUSE, the person providing the fix will potentially only have to give a few commands rather than screenshots for each desktop environment.

One example is installing an application:
Debian based: sudo apt install package_name

Arch based: sudo pacman -S package_name

Fedora based: sudo dnf install package_name

SUSE/OpenSUSE based: sudo zypper package_name

To do the same using the GUI/Desktop environment, the person providing the fix would need to provide screenshots from each of the desktop environments as each GUI may have different naming schemes for their respective graphical package managers and menu locations.

 

It is also possible, (depending on the type of issue,) there may not be a GUI equivalent to implement the fix.

[Deboch]

Been a *NIX fan for a long time. Probably one of the few that had a SS20 pizza box at home as the daily driver (still have it in storage). Made the switch to Linux with Slackware my go to distro. Currently running Garuda Linux with the occasional journey in to Fedora. Gaming in either is great, and in a lot of ways better than WinBlow$. Between Lutris, and Steam Proton playing games is so much easier now than many, many years ago when I finally celebrated a fully modded Warcraft running in Slackware. Proton also has removed one of the major roadblocks to many-a-game with Proton BattleEye Runtime and Proton EasyAntiCheat Runtime. PlanetSide 2 anyone?

 

Currently my Skyrim AE build is the GOG version running in a bottle designed for GOG stuff. MO 2 installed in the bottle easily (I'm sure  Vortex will as well). I get 144 fps with all chosen LL mods and a great Reshade.

 

Gaming life isn't all roses for us *NIX types yet, but there are far less briar patches to deal with.

[vaultbait]

3 hours ago, Deboch said:

Probably one of the few that had a SS20 pizza box at home as the daily driver (still have it in storage).

 

I had a lot of strange beasties in my menagerie, not just Sun Microsystems, but did have a stack of Sparcstation 5 pizza boxes at work as a makeshift lab at one point (also my main workstation at the time was a dual-headed Sun Ultra 60 Creator3D). The Debian SPARC ports ran great on them, and that was pre-Y2K when Linux was still relatively young.

[Deboch]

54 minutes ago, vaultbait said:

 

I had a lot of strange beasties in my menagerie, not just Sun Microsystems, but did have a stack of Sparcstation 5 pizza boxes at work as a makeshift lab at one point (also my main workstation at the time was a dual-headed Sun Ultra 60 Creator3D). The Debian SPARC ports ran great on them, and that was pre-Y2K when Linux was still relatively young.

 

Loved the variety of toys I had in my shop back then. From the old DEC 2400 to the dual processor SGI's, which ran Linux quite nicely BTW. Linux has come a long way since then and has outlived a lot of major companies OS products. Sun Solaris, OS/2 or HP-UX anyone?

 

For gaming on Linux, Ubuntu is falling behind for gaming with Arch and surprisingly Fedora taking its place. For those thinking about coming to the TUX side, I would give Fedora Workstation a shot. There is a lot of excellent documentation out there to get people started; and Fedora Workstation is very close to Ubuntu for entry level Linux users as you can get.

[vaultbait]

2 hours ago, Deboch said:

Loved the variety of toys I had in my shop back then. From the old DEC 2400 to the dual processor SGI's, which ran Linux quite nicely BTW. Linux has come a long way since then and has outlived a lot of major companies OS products. Sun Solaris, OS/2 or HP-UX anyone?

 

Yep, I had a DEC AlphaStation running the Debian alpha port instead of Ultrix, SGI Indy running Debian mips64 instead of Irix, Cobalt RAQ with Debian mipsel instead of Cobalt Linux, HP K-series with Debian hppa instead of HP/UX, Sun UE2 with Debian sparc64 instead of Solaris... even a Mac Quadra which used MacOS 7 as a makeshift bootloader to launch Debian m68k. Serial consoles for all of them were wired  back to a DECServer 300 acting as a remote terminal server and backup dial-in modem gateway over DEC LAT (had to use DEC MOP to netboot it since it was so ancient it pre-dated PXE or even tftp/bootp). Also OpenBSD sparc64 on a couple of Sun Netra T1 rackmounts serving as firewalls.

 

Eventually I moved to the beach and no longer had a dry basement to run all of it in, not to mention the power all that old hardware sucked up and excessive waste heat it pumped out. I tried to give it away, but most of the systems sadly ended up in electronics recycling or the landfill. These days the only non-amd64 Debian port I use with any regularity is arm64 (and previously armhf) on embedded projects and, soon hopefully, risc64 when I make some decisions on which boards I want to order. Oh, I may still have an imported SuperH based laptop under a pile of other junk on my workbench which has the Debian sh port on it, though I'm not sure it still boots (it was very cheaply-made).

Edited September 2, 2023 by vaultbait

[BluemaxDR]

If you are going to use Linux for a gaming system, do yourself a favor and use an AMD graphics card. Nividia uses proprietary drivers whereas AMD's are open source. Most Linux distros are shipped with AMD drivers.

[Guest]

On the topic of linux, has anyone tried running Skyrim (or one of the other Bethesda games) in Docker?
With how complicated mod configurations can get, it would be neat to have a containerized image of a working mod setup.

It's probably not worth the effort but I am curious how feasible it would be.

[Deboch]

The AMD vs Nvidia discussion can get as nasty as the old Winders vs Mac argument. I run a Nvidia RTX 3070 just fine and the drivers installed without any problems in any distro I've used. Like Linux itself it comes down to your personal preference. But yes, Nvidia did turn its back on the Linux community where drivers are concerned. Still, if you currently have Nvidia it will install and run just fine.

[Agramon32]

Its probably way too early to ask this question, but here I go:

 

Did anyone tried to run Starfield on linux ?

[myriad]

Running Skyrim on Linux is still on my to do list...The only reason I have Windows on my computer is for gaming (read Skyrim)

[Agramon32]

You guys have more experience with this, and i have to ask about your thoughts about linux mint ?

Or should i look for other distros while i'm getting mint to try out ?

[spoonsinger]

1 hour ago, Agramon32 said:

You guys have more experience with this, and i have to ask about your thoughts about linux mint ?

Or should i look for other distros while i'm getting mint to try out ?

 

It really only takes time to try different distro's. That may or not be important but you can learn somethings by trying them and usually they run fine from a stick or external drive. Got Mint on a five year old laptop and it's fine. There are a couple of things with Cinnamon, (Mints desktop), which slightly annoy me. First is that you can't have different wallpapers and desktop icons on different work spaces like in KDE.  Useful if you want a work workspace and a gaming workspace. The second is really annoying. Open file dialogs don't allow you to show, (when displaying files in icon view), the actual picture in the list - not helpful if you want to open a file in a particular application and know what the picture looks like. This apparently is down to underlying GTK functionality and has been requested for more than a decade but Gnome adjacent peeps are going to be gnome peeps. However those things might not annoy you and it's seems a perfectly good distro. Good things about it, (but not inclusive), it runs better than it ever did when it had Windows 10 installed. Touch screen works, wireless works with no issues and Mints file manager, (Nemo), allows you to free place icons so that you can order them yourself, (functionality Windows removed after Vista and which Dolphin, (KDE's file manager), doesn't allow you do do either).  Have Steam running on it, but only Baldurs Gate 1 and Tangledeep. They work fine. 

 

(Laptop is an HP Envy something with an i5 and only 128gb SSD - which is why I got it because the person I was working for at the time wanted more disk space and said it was less hassle for me to spec him a new laptop and I could have it in exchange. I like working for people like that ?) 

Edited September 3, 2023 by spoonsinger
Thoughts,.,,

[spoonsinger]

4 hours ago, myriad said:

Running Skyrim on Linux is still on my to do list...The only reason I have Windows on my computer is for gaming (read Skyrim)

 

Zaric Zhakaron - He started with Kubuntu, but I believe he swapped to Neon part way through and still uses that because he did start a "No Man Sky" run yesterday and mentioned it. (I think this run, starting in 2020,  was 500hrs plus on a Legacy Of The Dragonborn build)

 

 

 

Edited September 3, 2023 by spoonsinger
Proof reading is such a pain.

[Deboch]

9 hours ago, Agramon32 said:

Its probably way too early to ask this question, but here I go:

 

Did anyone tried to run Starfield on linux ?

Reports on ProtonDB look good so far. I can't play until the 5th  (sad panda)

 

https://www.protondb.com/app/1716740

Edited September 3, 2023 by Deboch

[Deboch]

4 hours ago, Agramon32 said:

You guys have more experience with this, and i have to ask about your thoughts about linux mint ?

Or should i look for other distros while i'm getting mint to try out ?

 

Some distos I would suggest are Fedora Workstation as it is becoming really popular with gamers of late. I'm playing with it on a separate drive and pleasantly surprised with it.

I used Linux Mint for a while and it was a solid performer. Currently I run Garuda Linux (Arch based) and love how it performs. Kunbuntu is another one to look at.

 

You should also look at how you want your screen to look (Desktop Environment). There are so many to choose from, and some are more of a resource hog than others. I like Cinnamon, but XFCE is very fast and uses less resources.

 

Almost all the distros have a live disk. I suggest downloading a few and booting into them and see which one fits your needs the best.

[Deboch]

8 hours ago, myriad said:

Running Skyrim on Linux is still on my to do list...The only reason I have Windows on my computer is for gaming (read Skyrim)

 

Here is an excellent PDF tutorial on how to set up MO2 to run a modded Skyrim, Enderal, etc. This can be done for Vortex as well. This is for games through Steam.

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/91500

 

GPG version is a tad easier. Install Skyrim AE GOG through Lutris, once configured, install MO2 or Vortex in the bottle. Attached is a screen shot of my close to 1,000 mod (included merged mods) play through with the GOG version started with MO2; and a SS from the Steam version started with MO2.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 3, 2023 by Deboch

[Agramon32]

How does it handle multiple Hdds/SSds 

My system has 2 Hdd(remained back from my old pc and i didn't wanted to throw away newish hdds) and 2 ssd.

One hdd is set up to general junk xD and game installers and some programs, my other hdd is for games that doesn't need a ssd to run good (as silly as it sounds),

one ssd(250G) for system and the other is for games that needs to run from a ssd.

 

If i change from windows to Linux , do i need to reset/reinstall those "files" or they are going to run after a lot of trouble shooting?

 

As i said never used Linux so this is going to be new to me.

[Deboch]

3 minutes ago, Agramon32 said:

How does it handle multiple Hdds/SSds 

My system has 2 Hdd(remained back from my old pc and i didn't wanted to throw away newish hdds) and 2 ssd.

One hdd is set up to general junk xD and game installers and some programs, my other hdd is for games that doesn't need a ssd to run good (as silly as it sounds),

one ssd(250G) for system and the other is for games that needs to run from a ssd.

 

If i change from windows to Linux , do i need to reset/reinstall those "files" or they are going to run after a lot of trouble shooting?

 

As i said never used Linux so this is going to be new to me.

 

I recommend installing Linux on a separate hard drive. Windows does not like sharing its real estate with other OS's And Linux can read/write to NTFS just fine. But as was mentioned before, try before you buy so to speak. You can test drive as many live versions of linux as you wish before even installing it. See what works best for you and your hardware. Once you find what you like, check out their forums as they all have a newbie/help section.

[ToxicAegis]

13 hours ago, Agramon32 said:

Its probably way too early to ask this question, but here I go:

 

Did anyone tried to run Starfield on linux ?

I've been running it just fine, with Proton Experimental in Steam and no other special settings/tweaks. I can't comment on any potential performance delta between running natively on Windows, as I've not tried it. It has a few small issues, but I've not encountered anything overly problematic or game-breaking thus far, and nothing that would give me any indication they are Linux/Proton-specific. It does seem to be a rather "heavy" game. I'm currently running a R7 2700X and RX 6700 XT and bouncing around between 50-80 FPS most of the time, with dips into the 30s in busier parts of the game like New Atlantis, running mostly High settings at 1440P 80% render scale with FSR2. From previous experience with BGS games, and content from Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed, it's likely more CPU intensive, so my Zen+ CPU is likely the bigger cause of frame dips, especially since lowering quality settings doesn't seem to help much. All in all, really enjoying it so far though, and am excited to see what the modding community can do with it, though vanilla content-wise, there seems to be a *LOT* to do already.

Edited September 3, 2023 by ToxicAegis
Forgot to include resolution and render scale.