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Comment by cyphar | Hacker News Reader

> Now, you can buy a Windows laptop and have Windows manage all the tricky bits like power management and graphics while having a bona fide Linux distro for development.

I know I'm being "that guy", but I've never personally had a problem with Linux's power management or graphics. And I really like my tiling window managers and free software stack. I understand that some people have, but usually it's the fault of proprietary drivers and not Linux (and I don't purchase machines that require proprietary drivers to use).

But again, whatever floats your boat. I've personally started playing OpenMW (a free software implementation of "The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind" engine) which works excellently under GNU/Linux.

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I second that, I've never had a PM or major GPU driver issue on Linux. I've always found that battery life improved from Windows to Linux on a given machine. Granted, you could call this unfair since I run a lot fewer daemons on my Linux boxes than run by default on Windows, but I'd call that a strength.

The Nvidia Optimus support doesn't work and forget Wayland.

This.

There is Bumblebee that works on Linux as a replacement for Nvidia Optimus, getting it working isn't trivial but Nvidia is to blame here not Linux.

SATA Active Link Power Management is or was broken on my laptop. Too bad, it is required for the CPU package as a whole to reach the lowest power state and dramatically improved battery life.

It also ate a ton of files on day 3 or 4 of me using it (not even files that were open, it just randomly corrupted ~5-10% of the drive). Probably wont be checking to see if that is fixed anytime soon.

OpenMW is insane. I am totally floored by entirely reverse-engineered game engines like it and OpenRCT.

I didn't know MW has an implementation. I'm gonna try this and I'm gonna follow this and I'm gonna play this all day long. Morrowind really needed some reimplementation of graphics and let's face it MGE was slow and that too in a system that runs skyrim just fine. Hope it gets completed successfully. Thanks to you I know about it.

It is superior in many ways to the original MW engine, and they recently implemented distant terrain[1] in a way that makes it efficient.

From people who've played the original (I haven't) the load times are infinitely faster and the graphics are significantly improved. The module system is also far better than the original (and most mods are compatible with OpenMW). At the moment, all major features have been implemented and they are working on bug fixes in preparation for a 1.0 release (which is going to be the "fully compatible" release) after which they plan to add a wide series of improvements to the functionality engine.

They also have created a game editor that can be used to create entirely new games as well.

It's an amazing project from both a technical perspective as well as in terms of longevity (it's been in development for almost a decade).

[1]: https://openmw.org/2017/distant-terrain/

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