6 Years ago I went all in on Linux, Now I'm just basically an AMD fanboy

Lets go all the way back to my first PC. Intel P4 with an ATI X1300 (AGP Slot) Played so much Half Life 1/2 on this baby. Also Command and Conquer Generals. After this It was all Intel/Nvidia up to the GTX 1080. This is when I switched to linux because finally Proton. Quickly did I realize Nvidia GPUs on Linux were a problem. Especially once I wanted an HTPC with Holo ISO. This is when I went to the 5950X and 6900XT. Fantastic experience, has aged like fine wine. Just being part on the Linux community and looking at the Nvidia situation... Worse performance compared to Windows, tons of game specific bugs, Wayland issues, taking months to get driver issues fix, driver updates seem to break as much as they fix. So other than the HDMI 2.1 situation with AMD it has been smooth sailing. HDMI situation is more problems with HDMI Forum and TV makers not putting DisplayPort on TVs so I don't blame AMD for this at all. New GPUs just came out and I am not even considering or looking at what Nvidia is doing. Now lets talk about what is making me realize I am basically just an AMD fanboy at this point. I also have a TrueNAS server I have been running for over a decade (FreeNAS 9.2). Which other than a short period of time I was using an AMD Opteron CPU has also traditionally been Intel/Nvidia. That leads us to today. I am about to go out and upgrade a perfectly working Nvidia Quadro M2000 with an AMD Radeon Pro W6400 only because Nvidia driver (reoccurring theme) has issues with locking up SPICE remote desktop instance. Now while I was trying to find a fix for this problem I decided to do a little research for a motherboard/CPU upgrade and low and behold The best price to performance and power savings is a used 2nd gen AMD EPYC to replace my dual socket E5-2680 v3s (I need a lot of PCI-E). At this point the only Intel/Nvidia parts I have is a Quadro P4000 for Plex transcoding and an Intel Atom C3758R in my pfSense box. I also have a Framework 16 and guess what, all AMD.

So TLDR, Nvidia sucks on Linux by pretty much every metric other than video encoding and decoding. Intel GPUs are not as fast as AMD for gaming and maybe one day Intel Arc Pro (A60?) will replace my Quadro P4000 but that day is not today. Intel CPUs just are not as good as AMD right now as far as I am concerned or maybe I am truly a fanboy at this point.

Also if anybody is wondering by current distros of choice are...
TrueNAS SCALE
Bazzite (KDE, until COSMIC is stable) (Desktop, Laptop, HTPC) BIG Pop!_OS fan, just not a good distro right now. Also I have kind of fallen in love with immutable fedora.

https://redd.it/1j91f84
@r_linux

CLI latin/Catholic bible reader with an interactive mode.
https://gitlab.com/gee.8ruhs/writteninc/-/raw/main/latinbible.c

https://redd.it/1j8zkg6
@r_linux

Does anyone know if it's normal for thinkpad (or other) audio with Dolby systems to sound like crap on Linux?

I mean, it's really horrible. I read that the situation is terrible on all laptops that use similar technologies... I didn't think there was such a big problem that relatively few people are talking about

https://redd.it/1j95id1
@r_linux

New ARandR alternative for X11 display settings
https://github.com/bossadapt/Display-Settings-Plus

https://redd.it/1j96s11
@r_linux

I'm frustrated, but positive about the future - my experience with Linux

I recently decided to take a deep dive into Linux and its many distro's. Due to the rapid degrading of the Windows experience; I wanted something clean, free of bloat, and most importantly, able to run my video games without hassle.

I spent many minutes researching and deciding which distro to go with and landed on Nobara. It was love a first site. The interface was kinda like Windows, the default package manager was simple, and the system felt quick and snappy.

I had previously tried Linux 5-8 years ago, and my experience back then was pretty negative. Some of my devices were not properly working (due to Pulse Audio) and I could not get them to work. Believe me, I really tried to get into it and fix the issues. With Nobara, everything worked right out of the gate and worked well.

I was super hyped with this and was loving Linux. Then came the games.

I had recently been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 on Windows and that was the first game I tried installing. I grabbed the latest GE version of proton from Proton Plus, enabled the settings in Steam, and went about downloading the game. It launched great and framerates were smooth. However, upon loading into my save, I started getting firefly artifacting (tiny white boxes randomly appearing and disappearing in the game. I scoured forums, downgraded Mesa drivers, change cpupower governor's, and even went as far as flashing my BIO's. Nothing worked. According to forums, this is likely due to my AMD GPU (7900xtx) interacting with Linux (My card is not bad as it worked great in Windows).

Fed up with all the troubleshooting, I decided to try other distro's thinking it might have been Nobara causing the issues. I went to Bazzite: same issue. I went to Ubuntu: same issue. I even built my own Arch install: same issue (this step took a while to build and figure out).

I came to the conclusion that it must be something with the drivers. At this point, it felt like Windows was calling out to me, asking me to come back to it. The main reason for my computers existence is to play video games and play them well. If it cannot do that in Linux currently, then I feel like I am almost being forced back to Windows. This is post is not throwing shade at the driver developers for Linux or at the amount of work people put into making Linux better, massive kudo's to all of you. However, it just does not feel like an out of the box experience yet where my games just "work".

I plan on trying Linux again in the future. I really enjoyed by time with both Nobara and Bazzite, and I wish to use them full time in the future if the drivers (or whatever was causing the issues) allow. I love open source and everything it stands for. Linux developers: I hope you will keep on putting the effort into making Linux a great place to be, I truly look forward to the Linux future.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

https://redd.it/1j99ybp
@r_linux

What is the LOWEST requirements to play 1080/720p footage ?

Soo i got a bunch Of CRTs for free (fixed them 8/15 are working flawlessly now) i kinda want to use them are "advanced picture frames" (i have solar and i produce soo much more than i need so why not have some cool decor also free heating lol ) basically play Some content in loop (lets say a season of anime on loop) what is the minimum specs to make it work ( i want a bit of headroom to make sure it would run smoothly (i will be running mostly old animes in 4:3 format (ripped from DVDs pretty much 480p content ) but who knows might throw some of the newer stuff on it , i saw some company is throwing away a bunch of pentium 4 era PCs might salvage a bunch of em , will they be enough to play this content ?
what distro would u guys recommend (thinking of Void since how light/familiar it is) .



https://redd.it/1j9bc1d
@r_linux

Zorin OS keeps duplicating Cut files somewhere

I've begun noticing that Zorin OS leaves the memory footprint of a cut file after the action is done. As an example, if I have a file that takes up 100GB, and I try to cut it and paste it somewhere else, 200GB of space will be taken up, even though it no longer appears where it originally was.

Does anyone know what's causing this? Is there some method of me freeing up the old space?

https://redd.it/1j9d7jg
@r_linux

Roblox, SC2, and other Games

I know gaming on Linux has come farther.
I feel it still needs help in that area.

About a year ago I tried again to run Roblox for my kids, only to find it still broken in wine and the various alternatives such as POL, snap, flatpak, etc.

Similarly, SC2 works in wine but with known bugs.
Other games also have varying ratings on winedb. There's not as many gold ratings as I'd wish.

Proton and Steam don't solve it either.

How can I tell others that gaming on Linux is great, when the ability to choose any game you want isn't there? There's quite a few that just aren't worth trying to get to work unless you install Windows or dual boot etc.

https://redd.it/1j9ac20
@r_linux

"For our next release after 2025030800, we've added support for...Android 15 QPR2 Terminal for running...operating systems using hardware virtualization." "Debian is what Google started with...we plan to add support for at least one more desktop Linux operating system...and eventually Windows 11..."
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114132940314692519

https://redd.it/1j9fg30
@r_linux

Newelle 0.8 Released

For those who don't know Newelle, it is an AI Linux assistant that perfectly integrates in the Gnome Desktop Environment. It supports extensions, basically any LLM online/local and has many advanced features.

This release brings in Long Term Memory, Chatting with local documents and much more!

https://github.com/qwersyk/Newelle

https://redd.it/1j9gjhm
@r_linux

KDE Plasma 6.3.3, Bugfix Release for March
https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.3.3/

https://redd.it/1j9hn5a
@r_linux

Swiss train info display running Debian Linux
https://redd.it/1j9n4ra
@r_linux

Atomic distros are the future for everyone except hobbyists and enthusiasts...

BTW, there is a new sub exclusively for discussing and criticizing these new class of distros: r/LinuxAtomic
A few posts and mods needed; The sub is yet to gain traction...

I personally use Fedora Kinoite.

Atomic "immutable" distros like these have quite a few safety functionality, making them more usable for the average user.

You can install packages just as usual, but flatpaks and containers are recommended.

You can even modify the immutable parts with a simple unlock command, for oddball cases... You aren't fully locked out

Yes, a reboot is required, but not an explicit reboot like windows... Updates occur in background, and the reboot is only to remount the rootfs to the new set of packages; Just power cycle your system as you use it.

Even on mutable distros, to avoid implicit breakage and to provide full support latest most stable version, it is recommended to use toolboxes/distroboxes/containers along with flatpaks.

Yes, you can't change the kernel/bootloader, but why would a non-enthusiast want that? A non-hobbyist wants it "Just Works", and defaults usually do.

NVidia support is (almost) flawless with the nvidia-open drivers... Some kinks are there but they're being ironed out.

Trust me, I am a enthusiast-hobbyist but I have real work to do too.
I switched from gentoo to Kinoite.

If a traditional distro works for you, enjoy.
If it doesn't, try the atomic distros.

I have never touched the terminal for anything except for testing toolbox and to replace the fedora flatpaks with flathub.

Printer driver needs to edit config in /usr? As I mentioned, you can make selective changes to the immutable parts.

Some software doesn't work, but rest all do. Things are being ironed out. Improving.

If a traditional distro works for you, enjoy with it.

If it doesn't, try the atomic distros.
They will work 96% of the time extremely well, but fail for the 4% oddball cases including `make install PREFIX=/usr`; `/usr/local` is free for you to tinker with.

https://redd.it/1j9n87t
@r_linux

State of support for Geforce 970m & switchable graphics

Since it is not a new card (pre-Turing), i imagine the community have the time to come up with something?

Proprietary linux driver should exist, but i want to .. try to not have to use those.

Does it work? 3D acceleration? (DX 11 ish). Does switchable work? Or will it not turn off and the laptop die in 2 minute?

XPS 9550 or something.

I do have a Ryzen 4650U system that straight up runs SteamOS and don't need patch. But I don't like using that computer. So.

https://redd.it/1j9tqv4
@r_linux

I switched from Windows 11 to Arch Linux, best decision ever!
https://redd.it/1j9upxy
@r_linux

I customized my terminal for a class project
https://redd.it/1j9wgf1
@r_linux

Breathe! Giving life to my first laptop

https://preview.redd.it/1u67pziqhcoe1.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0cab0bddcc94f304a1b427f51f04df5b687bd557




(This post is to elaborate the face lift of an old HP stream; neofetch image posted for reference)


My first laptop, this little HP stream, I was so happy to get when I was around 8 years old.

specs:

Celeron N3060
4 Gigs of ram
32 gigs of EMMC storage


Yeah... It was already terrible when it was released, and as I progressed into the computer hobby it dawned on me how terrible this laptop was. It was slow, loading up browsers took an agonizingly long time, and trying to play even IO games was sluggish. I eventually ditched this laptop in favor for an upgrade and bought a dell XPS 13 7390, and having both a real nvme and more than 2 cores, it was blazing fast, leaving this laptop to quickly be forgotten on my dusty bookshelf.



This later changed when I was cleaning out and saw it sitting on the shelf. Powered it on with a charger, and saw that it still in fact works. Earlier this year, my first distro, Fedora, had been more than pleasant and seen how easy Linux was to install and use, so I decided that even though it was definitely lighter than windows, I might as well look around for a lighter OS. Lubuntu on paper seemed great. It was most importantly extremely cut down out of the box, simplistic (albeit basic, LXQT is fine) UI, and was in the ubuntu camp, which would be great for a noob user.




Boot times? halved. load times? halved. just browsing still felt like jello, but after I updated it and I played around, this could successfully play back 1440p youtube (4k saw some dropped frames) and having more than 3-4 tabs wouldn't cause the system to keel over and have a heart attack. definitely wasn't a super pretty DE, but literally being able to actually browse instead of waiting an additional 8 seconds for reddit to load was crazy to me.



Right now, my hardware has gone way beyond the pathetic celeron (7600x/7900GRE rig), and I will continue to dual boot (or even triple boot) as time goes on, but gone are the pessimistic days of looking down on Linux, and now I even just default to considering it as a way to breathe life into my old hardware.

https://redd.it/1j9yd2h
@r_linux

Subject: Unofficial Claws Mail 4.3.0 AppImage (Built with GLIBC 2.38)
https://old.reddit.com/r/AppImage/comments/1ja26cq/subject_unofficial_claws_mail_430_appimage_built/?

https://redd.it/1ja2oh7
@r_linux

Longtime Windows gamer(, etc) looking to take the plunge, but...is it for me?

I've used Windows pretty much my whole life and even scoffed at devout Linux gamers some 20+ years ago for foregoing what seemed to me then to be the convenience and universality of Windows. I probably knew I was wrong then, too.

I'm not a fan of the direction Windows will be going when they drop support for Windows 10, and my experience using Windows 11 at work has been lackluster. While I'm looking for probably the most "Windows-like" experience I can get with Linux (and am aware that a bunch of options exist for this), I'm mostly concerned about:

- Will all my games run? I have thousands across a half dozen or so platforms (Steam, GOG, Battle.net...), and some of the ones I play the most are older and run in DOSbox.
- Will all of my software work? I use Office a lot for work, but I can just use 365 online and Libre for offline, so that doesn't matter a ton to me. However, I use lots of stuff for productivity and general tomfoolery, from racing pedals and a DDR pad bound to functions in Adobe Captivate to an XBox Kinect set up with Simplode Suite to (admittedly poorly) enable drag-and-drop functionality with my frickin' hands like I'm a wizard or an officer in Minority Report.
- I also use a lot of little "specialty" programs that enable me to create macros and the like - from Macro Commander and my Ultimate Hacking Keyboard (with its specialized software) to AnyCase, which is literally just a program that lets me switch text selections to lowercase/ALLCAPS/dRoPcApS (I actually use this a TON for work). Is doing stuff like this made easier in Linux through functions within the OS?

Regarding Windows programs (games and otherwise), it's my understanding that the answer is WINE, about which I have only a passive understanding.

However, it does seem like not only my background with it but the things I like to do might best be suited for just sticking with Windows. Am I wrong? Is Linux for me?

https://redd.it/1ja3e3w
@r_linux

My first time!!
https://redd.it/1ja4y1n
@r_linux

Goodbye Windows!!!
https://redd.it/1ja60wv
@r_linux