GNU/Linux

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Fri Jun 21, 2019 10:29 am

The usual "use Ubuntu or Mint" advice for new Linux users has hit something of a speed bump, as Ubuntu 19.10 is dropping 32-bit support. (That's 32-bit Intel. I assume 32-bit ARM will still be supported, but that's not really relevant to where I'm going with this.)

The move makes sense -- 32-bit app support is completely unnecessary for most Ubuntu users at this point; it's an added expense with little return.

But it's going to be a problem for Linux gamers.

The most immediate but most easily fixable problem is, the Steam client for Linux is 32-bit. I'm not worried about that as much -- I think Valve can release a 64-bit version within the next 4 months.

But support for older, no-longer-supported 32-bit games is going to be a problem. I think Valve can help a lot with this, but support from Valve only goes so far; I expect a lot of older, no-longer supported games are just going to break on Ubuntu even if they still work on other distros. Plus, "let Valve fix it" is already the de facto answer to everything about gaming on Linux, and while I appreciate what Valve's done, I think relying so heavily on one company is problematic.

There are other projects, like WINE, that are looking at some real trouble here.

And this also affects Ubuntu-based distros like Mint.

So my advice to people starting with Linux now is "I don't know; we'll see how Ubuntu 19.10 goes."

User avatar
mharr
Posts: 1583
Joined: Tue Sep 27, 2016 11:54 am
Location: UK

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby mharr » Sat Jun 22, 2019 7:06 am

I don't have a clear idea of where the gaming space is in the transition to 64 bit, aren't a lot of those titles old enough that running them under DOSBox style emulation is viable?

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Sat Jun 22, 2019 11:25 am

It shouldn't be an issue with recent games (once Valve ports the Steam client to 64-bit); most games have been 64-bit for the past few years. But you don't have to go back too far to see 32-bit games.

DOSBox, as the name implies, only handles DOS games (which are 16-bit). Playing Windows games requires WINE, which isn't actually an emulator (Wine Is Not an Emulator), it's software that translates Windows API calls into Linux API calls. And in order to do that for 32-bit programs, it relies on the 32-bit libraries that Ubuntu has announced it won't be supporting anymore.

And then of course there are 32-bit native Linux games, which don't use emulation at all; they just need the 32-bit libraries. They may not be the most recent games, but there are some fairly recent ones, like Braid.

Canonical Developer Tries Running GOG Games On 64-Bit-Only Ubuntu 19.10 Setup

Alan Pope tested a few representative games of GOG today to see how they would work put with a 64-bit only Ubuntu 19.10. With three games they failed to install without Wine32 support, the GOG version of Braid meanwhile refused to launch after installation due to being 32-bit only, and two other games launched but with black window (this may be the result of using VirtualBox for testing).


So even if Valve comes up with a fix for this (which is entirely possible), people who bought 32-bit games from other stores are likely to have a problem.

If you're okay with a bunch of old-but-maybe-not-that-old games not working, then Ubuntu might still be a good choice. Of course, it's possible that there'll be a decent fix ready by October, or that Canonical will change its mind since this has made a lot of devs unhappy.

Alternately, there are other distros. Pop! OS is Ubuntu-based and, from what I've seen, pretty similar to mainline Ubuntu, and I heard they're planning on keeping the 32-bit libraries. It's possible that other Ubuntu-based distros (like Mint) might make a similar decision. There's always Ubuntu's parent, Debian, too; it's a little less user-friendly but it's reasonable to assume they won't be abandoning multiarch any time soon.

Again, it's too early to make a specific recommendation; it's more something to keep an eye on over the next few months.

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Mon Jun 24, 2019 9:39 pm

The Ubuntu/32-bit libraries story continues to change.

Valve announced it would end support for Ubuntu.

Canonical responded by saying they're not actually dropping 32-bit libraries, they're just not going to update them anymore, which is not really better. Now they're saying well, maybe they'll update some of them. Who knows what they'll say tomorrow.

A couple of things are going on here. One is that, while Ubuntu revolutionized desktop Linux 10-15 years ago, over the past couple of years it's shifted focus to business customers (servers and IoT devices). Red Hat went through a similar shift in priorities between the mid-'90s and the early aughts. It happens; there's no money in desktop Linux.

Canonical's also big on making decisions without talking to anybody -- its users, its community developers, third-party publishers, etc. This certainly appears to be one of those cases. There's been some backpedaling in PR, but whether there's going to be any backpedaling in actual policy remains to be seen. I think Canonical's seen that this is a bad call for the desktop Linux market, but it's also unclear how much of a priority the desktop market is for Canonical anymore.

User avatar
IGNORE ME
Woah Dangsaurus
Posts: 3679
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 2:40 pm

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby IGNORE ME » Mon Jun 24, 2019 11:37 pm

Well, Valve is a business customer in this case. Possibly a fairly profitable one considering what Ubuntu actually sells and what Valve was trying to do with it (a money-flush corporation trying to backport thousands of third-party Windows applications onto your platform? Charge support by the minute.). It's also more than likely that that partnership had dried up a long time ago, but even then, Ubuntu's business interests aren't really served by really publicly crumpling up and binning years of a strategic partner's hard work.

But realistically, pretty much every enterprise is going to be running on some percentage of 32-bit libraries, desktop or not, and whether they should be or not. Valve's the only customer desktop users care about getting blown up, but I'm sure AT&T and Cisco have sent some pretty nasty letters already.

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Sun Nov 10, 2019 12:19 am

I've realized that most of the framerate issues I've been having in games recently are down to the CPU frequency regulator; if I set it to performance, they go away.

I haven't circled back to Rise of the Tomb Raider yet to see if I can get rid of that 30fps workaround, but I'll get back to it one of these days.

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Sun Nov 24, 2019 9:55 pm

I've been thinking of getting a 2-in-1 for awhile -- if not necessarily to replace my laptop or my tablet, at least as something I can use when I travel so that I don't have to bring a laptop and a tablet.

I got to talking with Mazian back at Brontokon and he got me thinking a used Surface 3 might be the way to go. So I grabbed one cheap on eBay. I've spent the weekend futzing with it, trying out different distros and, as is often the case, the tl;dr is "Ubuntu. Just use Ubuntu." Ubuntu is default Linux. It's the one that works.

Other distros I tried:

Deepin: This may be the prettiest goddamn desktop I've ever seen. Touchscreen works. Onscreen keyboard works. Screen rotation works. Fractional scaling works, though its default zoom was pretty much perfect. The main problem is that it's poorly documented (at least, in English; it's from China, so maybe the Chinese docs are more thorough). I couldn't figure out how to make gestures work, and the installation isn't configurable; it just bundles a bunch of shit I don't want (WTF is WPS Office?). Default browser is Chrome (not Chromium, and, y'know, a nonfree default browser in a base Linux install feels wrong); I tried YouTube and it didn't work, the video played at double-speed even though it said it was at 1x, and there was no sound. Couldn't get disk encryption to work, either; the password prompt comes up but won't recognize input.

Fedora: Wifi works on the installer but not after the OS is installed. Pity, because I really liked the look of this one too.

KDE Neon: KDE is fast; it's a lot less resource-hungry than GNOME these days. Touchscreen and on-screen keyboard work out of the box. It's also got fractional scaling (GNOME doesn't). Its Wayland support is still poor; you don't want to use scaling with GTK apps under Wayland. Which is a problem, because its default browser is Firefox (even the flagship KDE distro doesn't use Konqueror or Falkon). No auto-rotate, and while you can manually rotate the screen, it doesn't work right with the touchscreen; the place you touch is not the place where the click registers.

Kubuntu: Everything that's wrong with KDE Neon except the touchscreen doesn't work at all out of the box.

Ubuntu: It Just Works...very slowly. I don't know if the bottleneck is the RAM, the processor, or the onboard graphics, but GNOME is not a good DE for this machine. It is vexing that this is the option that works best, because it doesn't work very well. But, y'know, it took about 20 years for desktop Linux to become a smooth experience, so it's not altogether surprising that tablet Linux is lagging.

(ETA: Specifically, Ubuntu LTS. Don't use 19.10.)

ALSO NOTE: Do not do any of the shit they tell you to do on /r/SurfaceLinux. All that information is out of date. You do not need to use a modified kernel. You do not need to disable suspend and use hibernate instead. Do not do any of those things on a Surface 3; they will fuck your shit up.

(I got mine without a pen; it's possible that the modifications to make the pen work better are still a good idea.)

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Fri Nov 29, 2019 3:21 pm

Never mind that part about Ubuntu 18.04 Just Working; I discovered some audio problems after that last post.

I decided, just for the hell of it, to try upgrading to 19.10 instead of doing a clean install. But then when I ran do-release-upgrade, for some reason it upgraded to 19.04, not 19.10. Not sure why, but it seems to have worked out pretty well for me, as 19.04 is working (so far).

That's not an ideal solution, since 19.04 is EOL come January. But hopefully I'll have time to find another solution before then. (Both 19.10 vanilla and the third-party kernels should see some updates by then; maybe that will fix the issues I had with them. If not, maybe try Fedora again; I found a guide for Fedora 31 on the Surface Go that might work on the Surface 3.)

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Fri Dec 06, 2019 3:09 pm

I've been playing with Linux on the Surface 3 for a couple of weeks now and ultimately I got what I wanted out of it: something that can sort of work as a laptop and a tablet so that I don't have to pack a laptop and a tablet when I travel. That was my main criterion in buying the thing, and it succeeds at that. Not bad for $100 on eBay.

But short of the "less shit to throw in a backpack when I'm traveling" use case, it's not a fit replacement for either. It runs a lot slower even than the Celeron in my laptop, and its touch controls, while good enough to get the job done (with a boatload of caveats which largely consist of "use GNOME software, not third-party programs"), sure ain't as polished as Android. To the point where I'm seriously considering swapping Ubuntu out for something based on Android or ChromiumOS and seeing if that works any better for me.

But there's one problem that's unfixable. Even assuming that, say, the next release of Ubuntu or KDE Neon or whatever comes out and fixes all the performance and interface issues, the thing's still heavier than my old Galaxy Tab S. It's just not as comfortable to hold in my hands for long periods of time.

I'm still glad I bought it, and mostly glad I've invested as much time in it as I have. It does its job, and does it adequately. And it at least indicates that maybe someday there'll be a 2-in-1 convertible that's performant, comfortable, and cheap enough to actually replace my tablet and laptop. And that GNU/Linux is slowly catching up to make that possible on the software end.

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Sat Jan 04, 2020 1:56 pm

Say Mazian, if you happen to be lurking and looking for a "what kind of mess has Thad gotten himself into that I've never seen in all my years of using Linux" story, here's how I spent the last 4 days.

Near as I can tell, a video locked up my system in the middle of an update. And while I take regular snapshots to ensure that I can recover from things like botched updates, the most recent snapshot I could get to work was from June.

I am back up and running now. Sort of. Grub got fucked up somewhere along the line, has not unfucked itself as yet, and at the moment if I want to boot I have to start from a memory stick and then type my boot path into a command prompt.

So I guess I can turn the "Number of catastrophic failures I've dealt with on Manjaro" counter over to "1".

So mharr, did you go through with switching to Linux? You probably won't have to deal with the kind of messes I do. I'm just spectacularly unlucky. "A video somehow crashed my system while updates were running and rendered my system unbootable, and also my 36 most recent system snapshots aren't working" unlucky.

My advice is still generally "start with Ubuntu or Mint." There was some flap a few months ago about Ubuntu discontinuing 32-bit packages, but that appears to have died down.

If you want a more detailed rundown of different options and what they all mean, I think I've got one mostly-written around here somewhere.

User avatar
Mazian
Posts: 517
Joined: Sat Jan 25, 2014 3:47 pm
Location: Lullaby Supermarket

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Mazian » Mon Jan 20, 2020 10:39 pm

I got a Pinebook Pro. Think of it as a recent-model Raspberry Pi strapped into a laptop case. It only usefully runs Linux on its ARM processor and 4GB RAM. (Yeah, you can technically put ChromeOS or *BSD on it, but I said usefully.)

Hardware-wise, it is remarkably nice - this is a $200 machine, and is better built than some $800 Windows laptops I've used; metal case, good keyboard, good screen, good battery life, can be opened up with just a regular Phillips screwdriver. Its real competition at its hardware specs are Chromebooks, but even there it's a strong contender against the mid-range models up in the $400-500 range. Really impressive work.

Software-wise it still sucks. The default OS is a variant of the previous stable release of Debian (stretch), coming up on three years old, and you get system updates by pulling from someone's personal Github. Anything else you want to install involves jumping through a lot of hoops and then figuring out what's broken. The good news is that it's an interesting enough device that a number of people are working hard on it, and within a few months it ought to be supported out-of-the-box by the regular installer for one or more mainline distributions. As soon as you can drop a regular Ubuntu/Mint/Debian installer on a microSD card and go from there, it'll be a nice device for people that miss netbooks and aren't as goddamn nerdy as me or Thad.

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Tue Jan 21, 2020 12:32 am

Pine64 is doing some damned interesting stuff. I'm keeping a close eye on the PinePhone (which is now shipping, though it's still the early alpha devices) but from what I've read it looks like it probably won't work on Sprint. After that there's a PineTab coming.

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Tue Feb 04, 2020 1:14 am

I really like Manjaro as a distro but I'm about six seconds away from finding another one because my experiences asking for help have been absolutely fucking abysmal. It's ranged from people pimping their unsupported pet projects to bad advice for partition sizes to bad advice on how to set up regular snapshots to, most recently, scolding and mocking me for doing what that last guy suggested I do, all by people whose native language is clearly not English.

I chose Manjaro because it was supposed to be Arch without all the Arch bullshit. If I've got to deal with all the bullshit after all, I'm not entirely sure why I wouldn't just use Arch in the first fucking place. Christ knows whatever hours I saved by not doing the Arch install have gone down the sinkhole of trying to fix my Btrfs snapshot problem.

I'm also increasingly of the opinion that Btrfs is goddamn bullshit and if I want backups I should just buy an external hard drive and use...whatever the name of the backup program that comes with Mint is.

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 09, 2020 10:21 am

The Pinebook Pro is out, and Jim Salter at Ars has a review that's fascinating mostly as a peek behind the curtain at what can go wrong with a niche company working with foreign manufacturers, a language barrier, and travel restrictions. He got a laptop that shouldn't have shipped: screen burn-in, wifi disabled, and the touchpad not properly attached to the case.

What's fascinating, I think, is how positive the tone of the review remains despite these glaring issues, and I think it speaks a lot toward what Pine64 is, who its audience is, and what their expectations are. I remember an article about the PinePhone a few months back; somebody in the comments asked "Do they really expect this to compete with the iPhone?" I responded, "No, Pine64's competition isn't Apple, it's Raspberry Pi."

That changes the context fundamentally. The sort of manufacturer's defects and QC issues that would scarcely be imaginable from a major manufacturer are more of a "Well, that sucks, but I reached out to the company, they responded at length, and they're sending me a new one" scenario here. These are niche devices for tinkerers and enthusiasts and, per Pine64's response, they don't even turn a profit on this particular device; it's sold at cost.

Not for nothin', when I mentioned in the comments of a PinePhone article that I'd be interested in getting one of the phones, Pine64 rep Lukasz Erecinski reponded and advised me not to order the initial "Brave Heart" batch, which was basically a beta test and likely to have hardware issues. So people who order newly-released Pine64 hardware are well-advised of what they're ordering and what the risks are.

I'd still like to get a PinePhone to tinker with one of these days. But it's pretty much guaranteed it won't work with Sprint; I couldn't even get Sprint data to work on an Android phone without Google Services installed.

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Tue Aug 18, 2020 7:41 pm

I'm taking another look at setting up an emulation box to hook up to my CRT TV. In the past this has usually consisted of looking at a bunch of obscure Linux distros and finally saying "Fuck it, I'm installing Xubuntu."

There are a number of distros that specifically target console gaming or HTPC use, but most of them are Raspberry Pi-focused and often have some kind of major flaw that prevents them from being good general-use picks. LibreELEC and Lakka don't seem to allow for arbitrary software installation, and RetroPie doesn't appear to have a 64-bit version.

Recalbox seems like a maybe. It includes Retroarch, EmulationStation, and Kodi, which is damn near everything I need -- if I can get Kodi to play YouTube and Amazon Prime videos. (The YouTube plugin used to work but now it requires you to set up a personal developer key. I've never gotten Amazon Prime Video to work. Netflix works fine.) A browser so I could browse arbitrary video sites would be handy, but not entirely necessary.

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Tue Sep 15, 2020 6:43 pm

Recalbox was unusable. Severe lag, to the point where I couldn't even navigate the menu; it would be like 5 seconds between a keypress and a response.

Lubuntu is really coming along nicely but I'm having a few issues with it. 480i works but there's some serious overscan. Also there's some weird issue with the colors when I set the 480i resolution, and I don't know why it's happening -- the resolution changes, the colors look fine for a second, and then they change. No idea what's going on there. Probably going to need to learn more about command-line xrandr to get it fixed.

Booting is slow. Could be because of the old SSD I'm using.

I got the Kodi plugins for Netflix and Youtube to work. YT isn't so hard, though it takes a few extra steps setting up a developer API (which also means Google can map what you're watching to your account). The main speed bump was I couldn't get the HTTP server to work to enter my keys remotely; eventually I realized I could use SSH and edit the configuration file manually, and that worked fine.

Retroarch's CRT switchres function works pretty well, though I'm having trouble with overscan there too. Wonder if there's anything I can do to fix that.

Emulation seems slow. That could be a problem. Once I get everything else working I can try some tweaks and see if they help. This GPU doesn't seem to support Vulkan; I wonder if there's an AMD card with VGA output that does.

I think the next thing I'm going to do is try Recalbox again, this time put it on a USB 3.0 stick instead of 2.0 and see if that makes any difference. Nice thing about booting from USB is I can test it without getting rid of the Lubuntu installation I've already spent some time setting up.

ETA Recalbox isn't any snappier on a USB 3.0 stick, which I didn't really expect it to be. Could try installing it on an HD or SSD I guess, Lord knows I've got a couple of them. Otherwise I can poke at that Lubuntu installation and see if I can figure out how to fix the screen geometry. Probably need to do it in xrandr (for Kodi) and also in Retroarch.

ETA Batocera is a Recalbox fork that, near as I can tell, exists because this bug was first reported in 2018 and Recalbox still hasn't fixed it. Batocera seems to work okay so far. Not crazy about the part where it runs everything as root. Wonder if I can firewall it so that I can still watch videos on a few streaming sites but otherwise don't grant it any Internet access.

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Fri Sep 18, 2020 8:11 pm

Poking at Lubuntu again.

Color display issues seem to be caused by color "bleed" from other objects onscreen. The reason the colors look fine at first and then change is that there's a second or two between the wallpaper coming up and the icons appearing. The icons are causing the discoloration. I think. Anyway it doesn't happen in Retroarch.

I've got the overscan partly mitigated in Retroarch. The picture's still slightly off-center -- if I fire up Super Mario World, the wooden border on the righthand side is cut off. There are a couple settings for dealing with this in the CRT Switchres settings; I set X-Axis Centering to -3 (the farthest-left setting) and Porch Adjust to 13 (the highest I can put it before the picture starts rolling). It's still a little cut off on the right but I don't think it's likely to be noticeable outside edge cases like, say, scenes with evenly-sized borders around the edge of the screen.

Not going to use this for playing SNES games anyway, given that I've already got both a MiSTer and an actual SNES hooked up to the same TV. It's more for 32-bit and early 64-bit consoles. PS1 is unplayably slow at this point, but N64 works, so I think PS1 (and Saturn, and maybe less-demanding games on PS2 and Dreamcast) might be salvageable if I tweak the settings properly.

Clock speed may be part of the issue too. PS1 emulation worked fine on the old Pentium, so I figured it would work on a newer Sempron, but then I actually compared the specs and nope! The Sempron's more efficient but it's a way lower spec. Could try overclocking it. Or I could go back to the Pentium and see if I can find a cheap graphics card with VGA out; it consumes a lot more power than the Sempron, but OTOH this isn't one of those computers I intend to run 24/7.

There's also that old laptop with the cracked screen that I don't want to use as a laptop anymore. It's got a VGA port so it could work. Only problem is that one of the major reasons I don't want to use it anymore is it doesn't have an SSD and its HDD is not easily replaceable; it takes forever to do anything.

Anyway. Getting closer.

User avatar
mharr
Posts: 1583
Joined: Tue Sep 27, 2016 11:54 am
Location: UK

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby mharr » Sat Sep 19, 2020 7:01 pm

No optical drive slot on the old lappy?

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13169
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Mon Sep 21, 2020 12:18 pm

Nope.

Though I looked it up again and replacing the hard drive actually is simple (not old-Thinkpad remove-one-screw simple, but take the bottom off and there it is), so I'll probably do that; I've got an extra SSD around here somewhere.

Doesn't solve the problem that the screen is cracked, I can see the wires in the hinge, and it makes crackling noises every time I open it. I'd really just as soon be rid of the thing. But it's here, I've got it, and maybe I'll do something with it.

User avatar
mharr
Posts: 1583
Joined: Tue Sep 27, 2016 11:54 am
Location: UK

Re: GNU/Linux

Postby mharr » Wed Oct 14, 2020 9:54 am

Okay hi my newbie ass may have tried to install Arch on an old lappy with a view to having a simple command line based file server and maybe a shared Minecraft world. (It might not have enough speed for the latter.)

I followed this guide https://itsfoss.com/install-arch-linux with reasonable success except I skipped the Gnome bit at the end because I don't want to stress the hardware with anything beyond a single text command line. It boots to command line now, but apparently one with zero network tools and of course I can't get online to add them. No netctl, no dhcpcd, the only hammer in my toolbox appears to be ip. Am I screwed, do I need to start over from square one, or can I somehow install the missing parts via usb or boot from the installer disk again to steal its network access?

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 6 guests