What magic incantation are you using? My OBS either crashes with the ffmpeg setting or uses software enc, and is always blurry. Firefox does all video and audio enc+dec on CPU. Am on all-AMD NixOS and so far gave up on any hw accel for media.
Absolutely +1 for flakes. It’s got some annoying UX sometimes (make sure you git add any new files before building!) but absolutely makes up for it by its features.
NixOS is indeed probably the safest way to run an “unstable” distro. No matter what you do or mess up you can always reboot back.
I (maybe) ended distrohopping last year when I gave NixOS a shot. I can’t recommend it for beginners but once you understand generally how things work on Linux (and have an interest in programming) it’s a superpower to be able to define your entire setup as a single git repository. If something ever breaks, I can reboot into an older commit and keep using my computer, or branch off in a different direction… I’ve only scratched the surface of NixOS and yet I can already make a live USB containing my setup with a single command, or deploy it (“infect”) to another machine and manage e.g my work desktop and my personal laptop sharing most settings. Also it taught me about Nix (the package manager, which also runs on any distro and macOS independent of NixOS) which I now use to set up perfect development environments for each of my projects… if I set up dependencies once (as a flake.nix shell), it’ll work forever and anywhere.
Ah I see, haven’t been on “stable” distros for a long time so I wasn’t affected. I’ve enjoyed the good support and the video stuff is definitely nice. On the AMD side, still no idea how to encode or decode anything on my Framework 16, meanwhile Intel is acing it.
Hmm, I run an Arc GPU at work without any issues. Just using plain mesa on NixOS. The Intel devs were quite responsive when we ran into issues as well.
Peeeeck… neeeeeck!!!
Ah, yes… if only. I’ve upgraded internally SLR 1.0 -> SLR 3.0 but we can’t deploy it until a bug is fixed in the Steam client that causes, when we enable SLR 3, all Steam Decks to run the Linux build. Yes, Steam Decks run the Proton version, solely because the save file has different letter casing (yes I know it’s so annoying haha). We’ve spent quite some time on this and there’s no way to fix this without some folks losing their saves, and that is absolutely not an option. Soooo for now desktop Linux is stuck on runtime 1.0, and Steam Deck users are stuck on Proton. “fun” :/
At my studio we maintain a native Linux version with a custom game engine, and it indeed takes a lot of time. I don’t consider Proton a viable option as we lost the ability to integrate with Linux-specific stuff such as Wayland APIs or better input, but I can definitely see the appeal of switching to Proton… if your team uses Windows. If you have some developers on Linux, you naturally get a Linux build (if using cross platform APIs ofc) and it’s actually faster to cross-compile a Windows build every once in a while (skip the slow ntfs I/O) and ship that. But it requires getting more of the team on Linux :)
Really cool to see more WINE Wayland support, I ought to try it out and see games running natively on my system!
Thanks. I’ve successfully “upstreamed” some of my patches to some courses, but sadly still most of the education is Visual Studio-based. It’s good to see more people in the new years contacting me after asking teachers about Linux and being given my name for help, but of course I want this to be a base part of the curriculum!
I did a bachelor of videogame programming in Belgium 99% on Linux (minus exams), but it was definitely a huge struggle. All the courses and assignments were Windows-only, and 90%-ish required Visual Studio (non-Code) and Windows-only libraries like DirectX or Win32. I got by writing my own tooling to auto-convert these to CMake projects and convincing each teacher to allow me to hand in CMake projects. I wrote SDL backends for most of the win32 assignments, falling back on clang’s excellent cross-compiling for stuff that requires e.g Windows.h. I wrote a blog post about this: https://blog.allpurposem.at/adventures-cross-compiling-a-windows-game-engine And using e.g DirectX natively on Linux, easier than expected: https://blog.allpurposem.at/directx
I also wrote a small wiki on my general experience + a summary of courses and main problems encountered… Windows was non-negotiable during exams: https://dae-linux.allpurposem.at/ I maintain tools, converted assignments, and information on this for future students who want to attempt something like me, but it’s hard to recommend the Linux challenge if you are totally new to programming!
Hope some of this is helpful!
Found out just now he made a video about it and explained his actual experience using it, it’s really cool! Glad to see more folks sharing this stuff.
Awesome! I hope he will help share this with more folks, the friends who I’ve talked into finally giving modern non-Ubuntu Linux a shot love it, but there’s a lot of work to get over the damaged image created by the countless “linux user installing a browser” memes. I’m sure someone with his reach can help though :)
I dual booted Ubuntu originally, but I never used it. Had to really make the jump when I installed Arch on my desktop in ~2020 because I heard it would run games better. I’ve stayed 100% on Linux since! After trying quite a few distros (Fedora, Debian, EndeavourOS, Garuda, Archcraft, more I’m forgetting) I have finally settled on NixOS… it’s been over a year and I still haven’t switched, that’s gotta be worth something :)
I like this picture of a cat that shows up every time this repo is linked. Good things are to come when this cat appears on my feed.
Awesome! I now know the next show we’ll watch when we finally coordinate to finish Breaking Bad off my Jellyfin instance :)
(unrelated to piracy, though I agree with the main point of the post) I loved Le Bureau des Légendes! Are these shows well-subtitled/dubbed? That’s what prevents me from sharing them with my English-speaking friends usually, the language barrier is too great and it’s not as usual to watch a subtitled French show than a kdrama f.e
The “immutable” type of distros could be worth a shot. They don’t let you break the system and if anything does break, you can undo it with a reboot, so they tend to be pretty stable. My family runs a few flavors of Universal Blue, which are based on Fedora and hasn’t broken for them, but I don’t know the exact hardware. I’ve been running NixOS (also immutable) on a Framework 16 since the laptop came out, I can’t count a single hardware issue I encountered. However, NixOS does come with a steep learning curve, so it’s hard to recommend, and it also has trouble running software that hasn’t been already packaged for it.
I had a ROG Zephyrus G14 “AMD Advantage” laptop with a AMD GPU in it that suffered from these “ring” crashes (according to dmesg). They came and went every few months sometimes with several weeks between crashes. When it would happen, audio kept playing but the display was frozen (can’t even go to tty) and I had to force poweroff. The crash could also happen on Windows (I installed it just to test repro) but Windows handled restarting the GPU so it wouldn’t freeze unlike Linux. The conclusion, at least in the community of people with that laptop, is that it was a hardware defect and the laptop needed to be RMA’d. ASUS wouldn’t do anything for mine though despite explaining the issue to them and showing it happening on Windows.
Either way, I now own a Framework 16 with a 7000 series GPU and am very happy :)