Comment by loufe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by loufe | Hacker News Reader

I installed Manjaro Linux as my primary OS (Windows on a secondary M.2) on the gaming PC I built earlier this year. I found the compatibility excellent, especially for the grand strategy titles I tend play (Paradox, Total War, etc.). The only thing that pushed me to change boot order back to windows is the abysmal tab-out performance Linux experiences for full screen applications. Even playing Valheim, a relatively light game for a 3080, the system UI would glitch, move very slowly, and freeze frequently whilst tabbed out. If I understand correctly from my research, it's caused by the OS UI not being bundled into the kernel like it is in Windows.

Which is a shame. KDE's Plasma is an absolute shoe-in for me coming from Windows daily-driver place. I can't imagine any distribution being able to inject its UI into the kernel downstream from Linus. It sounds stupid to be so turned off for such a simple reason but I often would tab out of games to jump to Discord, Spotify, or Terminal and it would be easily 10+ seconds of waiting for things to render.

Does anybody know what the future looks like for this problem? Will there be some reimagining of desktop rendering in the near future on Linux? Or maybe I misunderstand the problem?

Yes, on Linux each application has it's own graphics buffer, including all of it's window borders and controls. These are rendered to by GTK or Qt (likely using OpenGL). The OS just splats them all into the framebuffer and displays them. So in essence, a fullscreen window (such as the desktop background) can be nearly as GPU intensive as a 2D game. Swapping which buffers are composited into the framebuffer can be time-consuming. However, I don't think that this is enough to explain the poor alt-tab performance. I think it's due to modern desktop environments using lots of shaders and bitmapped graphics, which render fine when they're the only thing on-screen, but when a game starts eating up (and fragmenting) VRAM, this overhead becomes noticeable. Switching to a simpler desktop environment like i3 or dwm may help.

You could try Ctrl+Alt+F* to get another session/terminal. Or if you use Steam, use the Steam overlay browser.

Could also try another Window and/or display manager.

At home I have set up multi seat, meaning multiple graphics (GFX)/sound cards, separate screen keyboard and mouse, connected to the same PC. The only problem is that one of the GFX cards goes to sleep when inactive for a few hours, so I have to restart the display manager to wake it up, but the performance is excellent, we play games simultaneously, watch Youtube or what not - without any performance issues, on a several years old PC.

I'll give some of these ideas a shot. I felt bad giving up on it so quickly. I guess sometimes habits need to be adjusted as well to make a move work. It would be a small price to pay for being able to love the OS I'm using. Thanks, z3t4.

I haven’t used KDE in a couple years but what you describe sounds like what I encountered with its compositor. When launching fullscreen applications it turns off the compositor for better performance. Tabbing out doesn’t always (or at least didn’t for me) turn the compositor back on. Add to that weird, seemingly Nvidia-specific bugs (again just my experience) and the whole desktop experience falls apart.

Thanks for the tip, cluoma, I looked into what you were describing and I think it may be that! I'll have to check out the quick-fix I found online (Alt+Shift+F12 to enable/disable the compositor) when I'm at my tower the next time. Much appreciated!

Well, at least you assume that everyone has the same problems you do with Linux. If that was the case, I don't think it would be very popular. Linux runs games better than windows for many of us. Try PopOS, it may work better for you, but otherwise it's just your computer that runs poorly on Linux.

> Try PopOS, it may work better for you, but otherwise it's just your computer that runs poorly on Linux.

Wow, this feels like a blast from the past, the bad old days of people pushing Linux Desktop and blaming all issues on the user or hardware.

You are recommending an obscure distribution that is unlikely to be supported by anyone. You are claiming to know that their computer is somehow unable to run 'Linux' in such a way that... Alt tabbing takes a long time to re-render the system UI. You are entirely ignoring their own research into the topic with a 'works for me!'. You don't even have the courtesy to claim that you've tried their exact use case to say that it works for you, you just claim a generic 'it works better than Windows for many of us' (while of course ignoring that the Linux gaming community is two orders of magnitude smaller than the Windows one, typically because Linux and Games are not good friends, for many reasons).

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