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Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

Linux drivers are now first class and are faster and easier to install than any Windows drivers. There's no bullshit extras with them. They just work. Plus steam launches games in containers so there's zero configuration. If you don't know what you're talking about it is in fact better to say nothing than to just make shit up.

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It's great that gaming on Linux has gotten a lot better over the last several years but let's not pretend like Windows still isn't far ahead on this

Also how can drivers be easier to install than on Windows when updating my GPU driver is one click?

Here's a pre-configured Fedora based distro that is zero clicks. You sign into Steam and go. Drivers are preinstalled. You literally sign into steam and hit play.

https://nobaraproject.org/

Your answer to "GPU driver updates on Windows are one click, how can Linux be easier" is "here's another distro, install this instead"? This is ridiculous

He wanted it pre-configured and I pointed him to the one distro maintained by a Red Hat employee based on one of the most popular and supported distros.

Ya'll will complain about anything.

It is a live USB you can game on. You don't even really need to install it.

What? You need to _download_ drivers? They come pre-installed in modern distros.

I'm obviously referring to upgrading drivers. Important especially when playing new games since they come with specific optimizations.

It's also usually automated.

It can be automated on Windows too so I don't really understand what your point is here?

It's easier than windows (generally) because it'll just update with your OS. It's in the repo (sometimes) or a third party repo. It's automatic.

Oh yes, I distinctly remember having to use an outdated driver from a third-party repository to fix some sort of compatibility issue. Never had to do that on Windows

Well, my integrated GPU has a hard time with external 5k screens on Windows fairly often. I need to manually install the Intel drivers, which work for a while, but then Windows helpfully updates them to the earlier, borked version.

At least now this sometimes works if I turn the laptop on with the screen plugged-in. If I go to the toilet and the screen turns off, it's back to some low resolution. When my computer was new 5 years ago, it never did work in 5k, so... baby steps, right?.

Worked perfectly OOB on Linux.

I, who has to professionally support installs running Linux with Nvidia hardware, would personally say the situation is very far from ideal on Linux. I dislike this 'my dad can beat yours' kinda competition when it's very clear Linux still has significant issues to resolve.

Out of interest are they running OKM or proprietary driver?

Proprietary for now, not sure how good the open source one is. But the proprietary has many quirks/bugs and limitations especially when i comes to things like Linux specific Vulkan extensions.

I don't know the full story, but afaik, AMD/Intel Mesa based drivers are fully open source and are built in a much more Linux-native way. But unfortunately hardware choice is out of my jurisdiction.

I’ve run the open kernel module for some time and it seems to work well although I had to patch it to fix support for some VR hardware until upstream fixes it properly. What Vulcan extensions were you having issues with?

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