Operating Systems

Linux Continues To Make Big Headlines

by

I know I’ve been talking about Linux lately, with the latest install, Steam’s Proton,, Vulkan among other things, but I’m not alone. Even someone at Forbes has been getting on the bandwagon. This is the second article I’ve seen there, and this time he interviewed the owner of Gaming On Linux, another website that I read quite frequently. They discuss the myths, pros and cons of using Linux vs Windows and its a really interesting read.

So how many games are actually available to play on Linux today? “That’s a little tricky, considering the amount of different stores that actually sell Linux games like Steam, GOG, itch.io, Humble Store and so on,” Dawe says. “Take Steam as an example, specifically looking at just games for Linux it shows me right now there’s 4,800 whereas Windows has 23,882. So on Steam specifically, we have about 20% of the library, which is incredible when a few years ago that was a big fat zero.”

In the last five years I too have seen a multitude of changes. I still remember when I made it into the Steam Linux Beta (I still wear my official TF2 Linux shirts with pride), I remember when there were only a few GoldSource games in my library and not much else, there was no way to really record your gameplay… but it was a starting point. As things progressed we soon found more and more games being ported, game recording programs such as SimpleScreenRecorder came onto the scene and eventually OBS started developing for more than just Windows; known back then as OBS Multi-platform before being known as OBS Studio as it is today, and now we have programs like PlayOnLinux and Lutris for us to play and use our non steam games. Wine has made great improvements over the years, we have DXVK now for running DirectX 11 and 12 via Vulkan, proper audio and video software to showcase our games just as we can under Windows. It isn’t perfect, and they even say that in the article, but Windows wasn’t always the godly OS for gaming. There was once a time when Direct X sucked, and eventually when it did improve they ignored PC users for several years in favor of their precious XBox.

The unofficial Steam Play Compatibility website has been tracking the testing of every Windows game now playable on Steam for Linux. To date, more than 3200 titles have been tested. Of those, nearly 1300 have received “Platinum” status, meaning they not only launch with the simple click of the “Install” button on Steam, but they also have Windows-level performance and framerates.

If you go with a distro like Mint, Ubuntu or a few others they make it really painless for you to get set up compared to how it used to be. This isn’t the case for everything under Linux, after all I did have to research what PPA to download my graphics drivers from, fortunately that information has become easier to find.

I’m seriously considering doing some video tutorials for people who might be interested in playing games on Linux, and Linux videos in general on top of the other videos I crank out. More people need to know that an alternative to Windows might be waiting for them, or at the very least to try dualbooting between Windows and your Linux distro of choice to see how you’ll fare under it. As I’ve stated quite a few times I’ve been staying more in Linux lately, in fact I only went into Windows once this week to do some Photoshop and play a couple games that don’t quite run well under Linux. Am I ready to ditch Windows 10? Not even close, but with the way things are going we may get there someday, or at least scare Microsoft enough to pull their heads out of their asses and make another Operating System that’s on par with WinXP or 7. :trollface:

These are the websites that probe your virgin Windows 10 booty hole with gusto

by

For transparency purposes Microsoft recently released a list of websites your fresh Windows 10 install connects to… should go without saying I have all of this shit turned off, and I’m not just saying that because I’m using Linux at the moment. :trollface:

But yeah, that’s quite the fucking list. The sad part is I know people that are perfectly content with everything Windows 10 wants to do… with their only complaint being that Microsoft’s assistant Cortana being named Cortana. :zorak: He dares call himself a fucking nerd too…

xfce doesn’t like forced shutdowns

by

Ran into a problem earlier under Mint; when I turned my monitors off and turned them back on I found the system didn’t really like that. I’m not sure if this is related to the mesa drivers or if it just doesn’t like monitors on Displayport being turned off, but this left me no choice but to do a forced shutdown, and when I returned to my xfce desktop environment I found that my panels were not wanting to show up unless I went under the xfce panel settings. I did a quick search for the problem and found someone had a similar issue under Xubuntu. So I’m going to post the command I used just in case someone else has this issue in the future (or if I forget and want a quick reference).

Right click on your desktop and open up a terminal, then type or paste the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xfce4-panel

Log off and log back in, if your panels are still acting up you can try the other commands they suggest in the link I provided. This is kind of a weird bug, don’t remember this under CentOS 7 or any of the Fedora distros I’ve used in the past. Then again I’ve had quite a dramatic change in hardware as well as graphics drivers since then (Open Source vs Proprietary), hence why I’ve had to go with Mint 18.3 instead of CentOS… I’m not going back to Fedora unless some serious changes are made.

You can expect to see more Linux related postings again, in fact it’s been about three days since I last went into Windows 10. I’ve been having fun. :v: I might even make some Linux related videos. I’m not abandoning Windows 10 completely, but if I can get by on Linux with most of the programs I use under Windows everyday I figure why not? Even when I had other distros on my machines I always considered it a fun challenge to see how long I could go before booting back into Windows. My current game count under Linux at the moment is 162, and I haven’t even gotten started on DOSBox games and sourceports yet. :v:

Getting my Tux in a row

by

I’ve been contemplating a Linux reinstall for quite some time, but wasn’t sure if I wanted to run it in a VM or as a dualboot. I’ve decided on the latter as I want to see how it performs. Linux ran awesomely on my old Xeon setup, crummy AMD GPU drivers aside. But now with Vega and Ryzen, and better drivers under Linux I want to see how things perform from general use to gaming. Most of the software I use under Windows is Open Source or able to run under Linux (how far we’ve come) and this includes my recording and video editing software. 😀 Perhaps I’ll do some side by side comparisons once I get established, and maybe even some videos. I wonder if they have the AMF H.264 codec running under the Linux version of OBS? That would make recording soooooo much nicer, it was one of the reasons why I pretty much did all my work in Windows instead… well there was that and the fact I couldn’t find any video editing software that could compare to Premiere, but with Shotcut I don’t see that as a problem.

So far my transferable list of programs consists of: OBS Studio, Shotcut, Krita, Audacity, VLC, Waterfox, and I recently reinstalled Pidgin (got fed up with Chatzilla). Then of course there’s Steam. :v: It will be great to go between OS’s again. Should be easier now too that I’m using the same audio equipment between both now, my old audio setup had crap Linux support which was why I had to purchase a Digital Analog Converter to get full support for my Shure SM58.

I’m not sure when I’ll start on it, but I’ve already downloaded the latest ISO for CentOS; Now I just need to pick a day to do the deed. :zorak:

Running Ubuntu on Windows 10 will be a thing

by

Winbuntu

I thought it was already a thing if you bothered with VM’s and were curious to see what Ubuntu was like, but apparently Canonical and Microsoft are partnering together to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10, no VM required.

With this new addition, Ubuntu users will be able to run Ubuntu simultaneously with Windows. This will not be in a virtual machine, but as an integrated part of Windows 10.

Ok, so why exactly are they doing this?

Canonical and Microsoft are doing this because Ubuntu on Windows’ target audience is developers, not desktop users. In particular, as Microsoft and Canonical continue to work more closely together on cloud projects, I expect to find tools that will make it easy for programmers to use Ubuntu to write programs for Ubuntu on the Azure cloud.

So is this MS-Linux? No. Is it a major step forward in the integration of Windows and Linux on the developer desktop? Yes, yes it is.

BS. People have been saying for years that Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux, this just confirms it. 😛

It also seems unlikely that Ubuntu will be bringing its Unity interface with it. Instead the focus will be on Bash and other CLI tools, such as make, gawk and grep.

lol yes. Unity and Microsoft’s new definition of the desktop would go hand in hand actually In the sense that I hated Unity with a passion, and despise Microsoft’s hardon for tiles. ffs they still exist in Windows 10’s start menu. I think I know why they’re saying this will be the last Windows, they’re going to call their next OS Microsoft Tiles, and Ubuntu will be there to help make it shittier with Unity.

Windows 10 will become a recommended update in 2016

by

Windows 10 Wallpaper HD

In an attempt for Microsoft to become the new Borg, next year Microsoft will be adding Windows 10 to the recommended list of updates for Windows 10. They have done this recently as a “fluke” but have since moved the goalpost until 2016.

Adding this upgrade to the recommended list will automatically download it to your system if it is capable of running Win 10. It’s a waste of space and bandwidth to do it this way, but Microsoft really wants people to flock into their Garden Of Eden Cortana.