Comment by kentonv
21 hours ago
I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore.
(I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)
I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive. GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pcie lanes available, so if you already got a gaming PC with many slots and dont need top performance it could still be worth it to get two more cheap gpus and use multi seats - for those building a mini lan gaming room at home.
One annoying thing is that linux cant run many different GPU drivers at the same time, so you have to make sure the cards work with the same driver.
Properitary 3rd party multi seat also exist for Windows, but Linux has built in support and its free.
This is awesome!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration
I am super curious about your setup. I played with MS years ago, but I lost the need. It is a super cool tech that I'd love to see its efficiencies embraced in some way.
Install an old GPU, Connected a monitor to the extra GPU, connect mouse and keyboard, Use the loginctl command to list available devices/usb ports and attach them to a seat.
I suggest using Arch linux although loginctl should be available in all distributions using SystemD now.
If you don't have enough USB ports you can use a USB hub, some monitors comes with USB hub. And some with built in sound, or you can use wireless headset.
My main issue was that driver support was dropped for my oldest GPU card. So one day when I upgraded the OS it just stopped working. So to be on the safe side get another GPU like the one you already have.
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On a similar note, performance is sometimes better. As a direct comparison, the steam version of the Lenovos Legion S handheld is significantly more performant than the windows version. Like 20% better FPS and double the battery life. Literally the only difference between the two is the OS.
Though from what I've read, Microsoft could fix that relatively quickly, if they made some tweaks to Windows (and called it a special 'handheld gaming edition' or so).
For some reason, the Lenovo Legion S's Windows still comes with a lot of baggage and background services etc.
If LTT is to be believed, this is in the works Maybe SteamOS managed to ruffle enough feathers to start moving the inertial colossus that is Microsoft, not that I have much trust on their willingness to leave a good idea remain good in the long term
It's called Xbox Full-Screen Experience and is marketed as Xbox PC.
It's available now, but nobody's been impressed yet. Gives you a gamepad-compatible launcher (although the gamepad PIN to login is buggy). Doesn't seem to actually save resources.
Microsoft is a big expensive oil tanker. They have the resources to turn the ship around, but they need to feel incentivize to do so. I love using Linux and won't go back to Windows, (it's been quite a while for me) but they could blow the performance problems out of the water if they really cared to.
I might have to look into this for my ROG Ally X... it already runs pretty beastily but I'm never going to complain about better performance...
Edit: though, I'd have to give up my Fallout 4 with mods. (Don't judge me I know it sucks but it makes the dopamine go brrr)
FYI, you can install Vortex on Linux systems and mod games via that just fine: https://github.com/pikdum/steam-deck/
(Edit: their native version appears to be in-development, but doesn't currently support non-native titles: https://nexus-mods.github.io/NexusMods.App/ )
It keeps surprising me how many people don't care about some of the most popular games today. I mean I don't care about Battlefield or League of Legends neither, but in earlier decades of PC gaming, almost everyone had some of the most popular games. Doom, Half-Life (1 + 2) and such.
The games market today seems more similar to music in its fragmentation.
There are simply too many games, and many genres are underserved by AAA studios.
Strange things are happening regarding genres served by AAA studios. Some of them come and go fairly quickly. There was a brief resurgence of strategy(!!) games because of XCOM.
Well yes.
The addressable consumer market is just a lot bigger and more diverse than it used to be. You go back to the early late 90s and its a market dominated by teenage boys. Go back and look at some of the 00s and early 10s E3 presenations from the big three and its very cringe inducing how focused they are on a teenage boy demographic and appearing edgy and how blatantly sexist they are in their language. For example, at the E3 conference where MS announced xbox live (2004?) they explictly said that girls don't play games (there were actually plenty of girls that did play games at that time), but they might want to use xbox live to design t-shirts to sell to boys on their online marketplace. This was also still the era of booth babes trying to pull in men to booths with barely dressed women. Nearly every game ad was just a wall of exposions and violence or just the latest NFL game.
Today you have fully grown adults in their 30-50s with very different tastes and you have a lot lot more women and girls playing.
On top of we have a lot of diversity in who creates games and the kinds of games they can create and still be commerically successful. Lots of interesting narratively focused games, puzzles games, platformers, and more artsy games. But if you want your multiplayer shooter battlefield and CS2 are still there for you.
This apparently is something that came about after the Atari days where games were social activities in bars and home console advertising features boys and girls. When the NES came out, it was marketed in the US as a toy so had to mold itself to the retail store layouts and pick a toy aisle and they picked boys. In the mobile era and perhaps as early as The Sims beating MYST as the bestselling game, started to develop a more balanced marketing approach.
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Let us say Star Wars. Until someone has a daughter and suddenly found out there is no nothing between them and then he should we say now we have one then very annoying girl Jedi forced onto the team.
It's not surprising to me.
The reason some of the most popular games are popular isn't because they are fun, it's because they've built an esports industry. Those popular games get spectators which in turn makes the games more popular.
As an aside.. I went down a mini-rabbit hole learning about the LAN Party House, read your website and about Sandstorm[0] and how that ended up with you at Cloudflare leading Workers. That’s a really cool and honestly inspirational path. Would love to learn more if you’ve written elsewhere…!
[0] https://sandstorm.io/news/
I was also impressed by his wife's Chez JJ work. I suspect that she has done much more impressive stuff, but that kind of thing is a dime a dozen, in SV. The hacker housing stuff speaks to her humanity, and I like humans.
I've been down this rabbit hole too. I quite enjoyed Kenton's two episodes on SE Daily:
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/12/18/protocol-buf...
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/02/06/serverless-a...
I see not being able to install invasive kernel level anti-cheat as a positive. I uninstalled all Riot games before they rolled it out. I would’ve been pretty miffed if I had accidentally gotten their kernel modules simply because I wasn’t reading tech news before the auto update.
"And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore."
I don't understand this - and I'm not being a Windows defender here, I use Linux when I can (and promote its use).
But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads and zero "crapware". And it's a Dell!
Everything that I didn't want on the machine was removed when I purchased it (two years ago). I see no ads. If I did, this can be fixed easily by even non-technical users with OOShutUp10 or similar - or just edited with a registry change.
I've been using Windows since 3.1 and there were some ugly years but that is not the current state-of-the-state. I'm just calling it like I see it at this point.
The UI is full of Bing and Copilot tie-ins that I consider to be essentially ads. Recommended content in the start menu. The weather widget that shows you news headlines. The lock-screen-of-the-day with the text description that if you accidentally click on it, you open some Bing page. The Edge default home page. Everything is trying to push me towards engaging with Microsoft's online services, which I have never used and have no desire to use. These are ads.
It's probably the case that I could turn all of these off by hunting down the right config options, and if I used Windows as my primary desktop I'm sure I would. But it's just on my game machines which I don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining, and new crap keeps popping up in updates. It's exhausting.
A Debian Linux desktop, in comparison, is not trying to push you to anything. It's a breath of fresh air (not a term I use often but really fits here).
Note: I never made it to Windows 11, only Windows 10. But my understanding is that these things are getting worse, not better. And while not exactly the same thing, there has been a lot of talk lately about how the file explorer has become so bloated and slow that they have to preload it into memory at startup so that it can respond quickly when you click it... omg, I do not want that.
I'm surprised to hear that you were talking about Windows 10. Windows 11 is MUCH worse than 10 with the ads and seems to be the first one where people are complaining en masse. It also comes with a start menu that's both dumbed down and has performance issues. Yes, the start menu. It's slow.
I just know it from a new laptop where I'm keeping the preinstalled Windows for occasions that require it (very rare these days).
The real problem is with trust and encroachment. I think a lot of people that spend a fair amount of time on their computers start to feel like their OS is their home and they go on excursions through apps. Previously, ads were limited to apps you had to go to yourself. Ads showing up as wallpaper in your house would be unsettling, and it reveals that your homeownership was illusory from the start: you never really controlled anything.
Yes, you can use cleanup software to fix the symptoms, but that's not the real issue here.
Edit: further research revealed my original first point was a false assumption.
We must be using different Windows 11 then. Last I booted up Windows instead of shoving Cortana everywhere now it's shoving Copilot. The telemetry sent would make spyware jealous.
The "current" state does not matter. What matters is that MS can shittify your experience at any time. Your machine can stop working if you don't agree to MS "updates". On Linux you have the assurance that the state of your machine can be preserved and you know exactly what's being installed on it.
> The telemetry sent would make spyware jealous.
FTFY: Windows is spyware. The fact that you paid for spyware or it came on your computer or it has useful properties (like Bonzi Buddy) doesn't make it not spyware.
> But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads
I did a clean Windows 11 install a few months ago. I expected to be bombarded with ads and all of the other things I kept reading about in comments here, but it’s been fine.
I do find it interesting that so many of the comments about how bad Windows 11 is are coming from comments that also admit they aren’t using Windows 11. Not everything in Windows 11 is my favorite design choice, but the anti Windows 11 comments have taken on a life of their own that isn’t always based in reality.
DO you see messages or icons for Teams, cortana, AI, onedrive accounts? These are ads.
I never used Windows 11, but with 10 they had craps like Candy crush etc that comes back after large updates.
They don't have annoying bundleware with Windows 11?
You can turn them off, but the start menu definitely shows you "recommended" content by default.
Did you ever get those local SSDs as copy-on-write overlays on Linux? I imagine it'd be easier with btrfs support for seeding device: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Seeding-device.html
Yes, on Linux I was able to move the copy-on-write overlays to use local disks, which is one reason it performs much better (admittedly not a reason that would affect most people).
I am just using dm-snapshot for this -- block device level, no fancy filesystems.
Yep, I've been gaming exclusively on Ubuntu (mainly because I want my desktop to match my servers) for several years. If you aren't playing the latest AAA FPS, then everything pretty much works.
How much work is it to get snaps out of your way? Canonical seems to be going all in on them as their business strategy.
I just did this yesterday after my Kubuntu system got buggered up by snaps:
https://gitlab.com/scripts94/kubuntu-get-rid-of-snap
Up until now I didn't care how my software was installed, but snaps REALLY don't play nice, so it's time to retire them. Canonical has lost this battle, and the sooner they accept it and move on, the sooner they can recover their reputation and put this madness behind them.
Not that much. TO be honest, I have a few installed (Heroic Games Launcher for one), but the main one I wanted to avoid was Firefox - which is easily doable. It is annoying that we have yet another way of packaging apps - would have been better if they just supported Flatpack
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Just use Linux Mint
I also game on Ubuntu and snaps have never been in my way. I actually like them and wish more non-game software was distributed this way, but Canonical has a brown thumb when it comes to growing their weird little side projects.
Honestly snaps are fairly painfree nowadays.
Setting up `apt` to pull from a different repo (to say install firefox.dpkg instead of snap) requires like 3-4 commands which are easily searchable.
I'd had effectively zero issues avoid snaps.
> How much work is it to get snaps out of your way?
If you don’t want what makes Ubuntu Ubuntu, why not just run vanilla Debian instead?
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I’ve used Ubuntu since 7.04 and recently jumped from Ubuntu to Debian. It feels more like home than ever before.
All the things you’re used to without the corporate “sugarcoating”.
Yeah, recently moved from ubuntu to ultramarine plasma - more responsive, more features, smoother, really good.
That's an amazing website, I just spent 30 minutes reading all of its content. Thank you for sharing ! I haven't been to a lan party in probably 20 years and made me jealous !
I recently heard that Star Citizen of all things, still in eternal development hell, runs really well on Linux.
Also, amazing house, my friend is enamored of the cat-transit. I used to live not too far from you :)
cat-transit
You cannot say such things without more info. I envision cats sitting on small trollies.
https://lanparty.house/#catwalk
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That is literally the coolest house humanity has built this side of the Industrial Revolution, if not ever. Congrats on envisioning and executing such an amazing project!
Pretty sweet setup. Mine is a bit simpler, one laptop on a spinny taco table with HOMM3 from GoG
> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)
If every PC gamer would finally just hop into Linux for a year, no Windows, don't buy games that don't work. Just hard boycott, we could actually do a drastic change for PC gaming as a result. As they say "vote with your wallet" well I've been using Linux as my main OS with all my Steam games for about 3 years now? I only use Windows on work computers, but I'm increasingly only going to apply to work at places that either let me use Linux or will give me a Mac to work. I'm voting with my wallet full force. Windows has been turning into a steaming pile of trash.
I've repeatedly said, if Microsoft would release "Windows for Gamers" without all the bloated BS on it, I would consider using it.
I spent 2 grand or more on a prebuilt gaming system and it came with Windows Home which didn't let me add new users, so I was stuck with a Microsoft account user. Jokes on Microsoft, that and their AntiVirus sending files to their servers without any audit log was the last straw for me. I'm not supporting Microsoft, I say this as someone who is a "fanboy" for Microsoft (.NET is the only good thing they have going, but they can't even stick to one GUI stack they have to reinvent it 1000 more times).
league of legends is basically the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux for myself :/ really want to just swap over to linux fully. love your website + house!
Some would consider not being able to play that game a feature!
You might be saying it in jest, but I think there may be something to this line of thinking. Whenever I read about anything on HN and bazzite comes up, it feels like the beginning of a new holy war is approaching. I am starting to wonder if the concern from the 'older' linux crowd is that the gamers will introduce changes to linux that will corrupt it more than systemd ever could ( like kernel level drm in games ).
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Moved everything over a few months ago, and I still have a game or two that requires Windows... but so far dual-booting has been more than enough.
In some ways, the minor barrier is almost beneficial, in terms of clearly separating work-time and play-time.
Great excuse to start learning DOTA. You won't regret it (until a few thousand hours of gameplay later you realise how much of your life you wasted on it).
I mean, of course he'll regret it, as he probably regrets learning LoL. But yes, DotA is the better game of the two, according to my objective opinion.
The only game I tried on Steam that didn't work was Slave Zero, a game from the 90s. Unfortunately, I still have to use Windows for VR games. It is too troublesome on Linux (at least for the Meta Quest 2).
VR on Linux is probably going to be the main reason the Steam Frame is going to be a day one pre-order for me
Hey man can I be your friend? That is a super sick setup and I love how you've done it!
I'm sorry if you hear this a lot, but your house is so cool, and I must admit I am more than a little jealous.
I've also said it here before but I will just give up on PC gaming wholesale before I go back to Windows. It's crazy how much gaming on Linux has improved in just the past couple years.
Wow this is amazing!
Battlefield 4's anticheat runs fine on Linux, if you end up needing one. It definitely slakes my BF fix, in the same way Deadlock is filling the LoL-shaped hole in my contemptible subsistence.
Does this mean the GitHub repo linked with the scripts now include up to date linux versions? Last time I looked it was all windows specific, but I'd love to setup something similar with stations for (much lower power) versions.
Sorry, I haven't gotten around to updating it yet, although it basically works to follow the same instructions except replace Windows with Linux and skip all the workarounds for Windows-specific bugs.
what stability and performance? yeah, i dont see bsds but bluetooth doesnt work and it doesnt wake up after sleep 85 percent of the time. kind of crap really
Bluetooth is admittedly less snappy than on Mac or Windows, although it absolutely does work. As for wake after sleep, I've not had a single issue in five years of daily driving Linux. No idea what you're talking about.
A lot of hardware does have problems with properly resuming from sleep, but that is pretty much universal, not OS-dependent. People report just as many problems on Windows.
> I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work
I consider this a feature, not a bug
> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)
As I've said elsewhere, Battlefield 6 has got a far better user experience on Linux than Windows and I would recommend it to anyone.
What distro?
Debian... mostly just because it's what I'm most familiar with. I don't have strong opinions on distros.
I find that Fedora hits the right balance of stability while being up to date for anything desktop and specifically gaming focused, Debian has different priorities and packages can be a bit too old. And it’s less of a faff than Arch.
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But you use it for games, right? So I figured you'd pick one based on how well it runs Steam. (And maybe for GPU drivers.)
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Your house sounds like a great place to hold a fighting game local tournament (or something like the old Smash Summit series for Smash Bros Melee and Ultimate before Beyond The Summit shut down)
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