Hacker News Reader

Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

And then you go into the Linux world where fractional scaling doesn't work properly yet, your XWayland apps interact differently than your Wayland apps, Chrome doesn't support hardware accelerated video decoding, and using Nvidia still requires you compile a kernel module and hope for the best. Oh, and you can't play most shooters since anti-cheats won't trust Linux.

The grass isn't always greener. I just treat my PC as a dedicated gaming machine. Though these days the PS5 is becoming the more appealing option.

View on HN

Good points but YMMV:

- fraction scaling: I don't need it

- Wayland: still using X

- hardware accel: I think that's true for chromium but IIRC there's a package with it and widevine (google-chrome-stablevon Arch AUR)

- nvidia: the AMD drivers are great and well supported (I've even been using ROCm to play with stable diffusion on my 6750XT)

- shooters: I mostly play strategy, puzzle, sim and 2D games. Haven't run into multiplayer issues yet but I'm sure there are some in the FPS genre with heavy DRM

Not for everyone but when I got my AMD card I stopped using my qemu virt-io VM w/ GPU passthrough and started using native steam with proton - much better experience all around and haven't booted windows ever since

Yea but it's not a company shoving hostile features down paying user's throats.

> using Nvidia still requires you compile a kernel module and hope for the best

There's nothing inherently wrong with having an out-of-tree kernel module; a lot of software has, including software that is open source but has an incompatible license.

As far as I remember (I'm not on Nvidia anymore, but I've been for many years), the Nvidia module was one or two minor versions behind the latest release kernel, which is very reasonable support - for example, stable distros like Ubuntu LTS, or OpenZFS, are always a bit behind as well. I've actually changed filesystem because of this, but I certainly don't blame the OpenZFS devs.

> fractional scaling doesn't work yet

Sway/wlroots and KDE support the fractional scaling extension. Seems to be an experimental setting in Gnome for now.

> your XWayland apps interact differently than your Wayland apps

How I can't wait for old legacy X stuff to no longer be a question. I feel like it's mostly Zoom & other randos holding me back from never seeing X again. https://arewewaylandyet.com/ is looking generally pretty excellent.

> Chrome doesn't support hardware accelerated video decoding, and using Nvidia still requires you compile a kernel module

Vendors gonna do what a vendors gonna do. Chromium does have fine support. ChromeOS has been slowly ticking along adding their own support, which hopefully rolls-forward. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/ozone-reviews/c/y...

Nvidia people say things have gotten better but also you bought a card from a company that has forever been adversarial.

At least those are not intentional, just lack of development time/resources. Knowing that somewhat brings me peace of mind. (and for the kernel module thing, the distro usually does it for you when the kernel is updated)

> The grass isn't always greener

I'll take "slightly less green" over "looking to subvert every choice you make".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com