it’s not there yet but in a few years from now there is hope, a vulkan driver is in the work and the nvidia signed firmware would allow power management for newer gpu, but it’s not ready yet…
Why has a submission about nouveau’s website devolved into Gnome/gnome devs bad, gib upvotes lol
Man I couldn’t be a Linux dev. Giving up your time to do highly skilled work for free, then you get roundly hated for it and called a piece of shit by the very people who are benefitting from your free work lol. It’d burn me out pretty quickly.
E: the other comments appear to have been removed. It was just a circlejerk about Gnome devs being evil, and mocking the dev here for having mental health struggles related to the amount of hate they receive.
I feel for that the default Linux DE will need to have an UI closer to Windows, due to user familiarity with the traditional desktop metaphor. Maybe Cinnamon or even KDE are more suited in that respect. Neither need hours of configuring either. Personally, Cinnamon with Wayland support would be perfect for me (and I suspect a whole lot of Windows migrants as well).
Gnome is nice of course in it’s own minimalist way for many,but the workflow is very different from other OSes and I think many find it too minimalist requiring extensions to improve usability therefore. However, there isn’t a stable mechanism for extensions causing breakages between versions, which can be very irritating. I don’t know if that’s now changed now though, because I have been reading about a major change in the extension mechanism in Gnome 45.
I think that’s what makes it great for newcomers though. If you show them something pretending to be windows they’ll think why not just use windows, if you show them something better they might be more impressed
Coming from Windows gnome was pretty intuitive for me, it’s got much of the same workflow still even if buttons are in different places
They absolutely do not. Their UX is based on actual usability studies, rather than just copying the Win95 UX paradigm.
You should look it up, it’s actually quite interesting.The attention to detail and the thought process of pretty much every UI element is pretty crazy.
Gnome is amazing so long as you’re not trying to use it like Windows. It’s not Windows. It’s not trying to be.
If you want to use Linux with a Windows UX, then use Plasma or Cinnamon.
Personally I find it quite refreshing to have a different choice, and IMO it’s worked out better. Even when I use Plasma, I now get rid of the taskbar/panel, use the activities view, etc. change it to the Gnome workflow, in effect.
It’s childish to call a UX bad just because you personally like things to work like Windows.
Homie. there is no thought given on how background apps should behave other than “just dont have any background apps”.
If you’re just going to make up blatant lies then I’m not even going to engage with you. Nobody ever said that, or anything like it. Nor is the statement before that true, either.
Im not even gonna mention how there’s a dang bar at the top already blocking my view, but it wont tell you which apps are open. Unless you get an extension for it.
Oh no, a bar. At the top. That’s not how Windows does it! I don’t like it!
I don’t want a tiny slim bar that gives me the Activities button, workspace indicator, workspace switcher, date, time, calendar drop down, notifications, media control, volume control, battery level, quick settings, etc. what I really need is this bar, that I’ve already said is “blocking my view” to be 3x thicker and constantly show me what I have open, despite me already knowing they’re open, because I opened them, and they’re right in front of me.
Look, if you prefer the Win95 UX paradigm, good for you. Have a gold star ⭐. Lots of people do, it’s what people are used to. There’s nothing wrong with using it.
But guess what? Not everyone wants the Win95 UX. To me, it seems archaic, clunky, the workflow is bad, it wastes space, it looks bad, and constantly makes me fight the DE whenever I have to use it.
I think several DEs could see mainstream adoption.
If the team that works on Cinnamon got a little bit more manpower and were able to implement larger changes such as adopting Wayland, I think they’d have a chance. Wouldn’t hurt to make the default theme a bit nicer too. I think the main thorn in Cinnamon’s side is the development pace and the fact that it would probably be viewed by the average person on the street as a weird Windows clone.
Plasma’s largest obstacle to mainstream adoption is bugs and instability, but in fairness it has improved a lot over the past couple of years. Seriously, compare 5.27 to any Plasma 4 release or any Plasma 5 release before like 5.16 - it’s night and day. Kwin still crashes and takes all your programs down with it, though. That’s a showstopper, but will be fixed in Plasma 6.
Speaking of Plasma 6, the fact they keep pushing it back probably means they want it stable from the beginning. KDE are doing a good job putting the “KDE is buggy” statement to bed.
I guess I agree that Gnome as it stands is the most appropriate for widespread adoption. It’s extremely polished and beautiful, it has comparatively decent accessibility features, it’s extremely stable despite being a frequently updating distro, it has amazing gesture support (better than MacOS even, imo), it’s decent in terms of touch support, the GTK4/Libadwaita app ecosystem is healthy, etc. but it’s not completely without issues.
Unfortunately this is all academic though until big laptop OEMs start actively pushing for Linux on their devices.
Counterpoint: I don’t think any Linux DE will ever see mainstream adoption.
It has nothing to do with how good they are. It’s not related to software support either. They could support every piece of software ever made; Linux supports 90% of games for Windows and emulators for dozens of other platforms and it still hasn’t attracted more than like 2% of gamers.
It’s related to what OP said: to gain mass adoption you need to put up with a lot of bullshit. It takes a company with some financial gain to do that, and paid developers. Volunteer contributors will eventually say “screw this” or go mental like Torvalds.
There’s no company that can do this. They tried and failed, because Microsoft. Apple and Google had to create their own platforms from scratch to get away from it.
ChromeOS is Linux, and it has pretty decent penetration.
And I know what you’re going to say: “But ChromeOS isn’t proper Linux”. But it’s a desktop OS based on Gentoo, built on the Linux kernel and, GNU coreutils and bash (although not GCC, as far as anyone can tell). It certainly has all the hallmarks of being GNU/Linux (or something very close to it).
The fact that it doesn’t really resemble any “mainstream” Linux distro is kind of the point. It’s a locked down corporate product with a minimalist front-end locked into a bunch of commercial web services, and that’s exactly the kind of device that sells volumes.
Mainstream Linux is a tough sell. It was a tough sell 15 years ago when PCs were still the king of personal computing. In the post-smartphone, post-iPad world which we’re in now, we have to accept that that’s never going to be the device your grandma uses to check her email.
Plenty of Linux distros aren’t just volunteer-based, and are instead made and supported by for-profit companies. Red Hat/Fedora is made by the big blue, IBM themselves; it doesn’t get much bigger than that. Ubuntu, SUSE, Manjaro, all for-profit commercial outfits. None of these are failures, it’s just that their products aren’t targeting the market for cheap commercial laptops. You can buy Ubuntu preloaded on a laptop from Dell or Lenovo, but they’re targeting IT professionals and data scientists and people who work with Linux servers. Or they’re targeting fleet deployments of 100s of devices in municipal organisations. There’s a good market there, it’s just a different market.
Maybe I’m missing some of the nuances between KDE and Gnome, but I’ve enjoyed the out of box experience with KDE far more than Gnome. That said, perhaps I’ve simply timed my switchover to Plasma such that I missed its teething pains. I say this as someone who used pretty much exclusively Gnome over the years.
The launcher is quite nice to use, fast and search oriented (I never used any of the start menu on windows besides the search bar anyway so the fact it’s the main focus is nice)
Virtual desktops (only on Wayland) are very well implemented and feel very smooth, three finger swipe works a charm, with the forge extension it tiles servicably as well
Also just one of the nicest looking DEs imo. I have since switched to hyprland because I wanted first class tiling support but I have my system UI looking very similar to gnome’s, using mostly gnome’s applications
Having used gnome on Ubuntu a couple years ago I have to say it has come miles recently (also Ubuntu’s gnome in my opinion is not as good as vanilla gnome) - it feels very clean and intuitive out of the box
The launcher is a fair point. Though for me at least, not having the spotlight-esque search hasn’t been a problem. Appearance is an odd one, since the best part of Both Gnome and KDE is the wonderful flexibility in visual customizability. At the end of the day, I suppose I’d happily use either. Right now, I think Plasma’s big features for me has to be window snapping and, once 6.0 releases, hopefully HDR support.
I don’t think gnome is particularly customizable visually, you can change theme and use extensions if you really want to buy their main focus is making one really good UI and I’ve gotta respect that
At least in my opinion gnome looks far better than KDE out of the box, KDE just looks like windows to me
Gnome has fairly good window snapping as well I think and stuff like pop shell and forge for tiling
What’s wrong with it? I’m currently using nautilus as my file browser on hyprland and it’s more than servicably
I don’t really use a file browser that much anyway so I might not be the best person to comment though. Tend to find it quicker and easier to move files around from a terminal then any file browser for everything except choosing a file for something
Tbh there’s been a known issue for like 10+ years where the file picker doesn’t allow for gallery/thumbnail viewing, or really any kind of file list viewing options aside from the absolute basic file list. So like if you’re someone who is uploading images to a website, hope ya named the files in a very specific way cause wooooh. XD
Above anything else, that was the primary reason I switched to KDE Plasma.
If that’s the only reason for switching couldn’t you just install kde’s file browser on gnome though? Or any file browser for that matter I don’t think it forces you into Nautilus
I tried that but flatpack apps kept using the Gnome file picker anyway, there were some flags for some of them to change it but having to do that for each app felt like too much of a pain ^^;
Got anything to back that up? I highly doubt the people here that were circlejerking about hating devs and even saying it’s good if they suffer mentally from abuse they receive are devs themselves.
That’s the kind of brain-dead childishness, immaturity, and lack of empathy that I’d expect from 15 year olds trying to act edgy in front of their mates.
Are you using Linux at work without systemd? Seems unlikely. All our 400+ nodes run RHEL and consequently systemd. This doesn’t seem to impact our researchers’ use of CUDA in the slightest when executing code on the nodes or in any kind of container.
The fact your comment here is at -1 really underlines the immaturity of many users.
I can understand your previous comment getting downvoted because it was a little inflammatory, but your statement here is entirely factual with a neutral tone. So there’s really no reason to disagree with it, let alone pepper it with downvotes.
Bills?! Bills?! How very dare you suggest that people require compensation for their work.
You’re in a Linux community here. Open Source development is about freedom. All work should be made freely available for users and corporations to enjoy as they wish without having to consider such frivolities of whether anyone should be compensated.
I don’t think so. I can’t find any good information about those new ‘open-source’ kernel modules in any of the Linux wikis. Just news articles from 2022. Something isn’t right there. It’s either a marketing stunt and nothing changed or something else. I would dig deeper if I were you.
Concerning NVidia’s history: Don’t rely on them making user-friendly decisions. Especially when it comes to Linux. The usual drivers work. They have some hiccups and you’re going to have some annoying issues with things like Wayland, if something major changes in the kernel you have to wait for NVidia but they’ll eventually fix it. It’s not open source and you have to live with what they give to you. It mostly works though and performance is great. I’d say this is the same with the newer ‘open-source’ drivers that just shift things into (proprietary) userspace and firmware.
The true open-source alternative is the ‘Nouveau’ drivers. For newer graphics cards, expect them to get only a fraction of the performance out of your GPU and having half the features not yet implemented, including power management. So your game will have 10fps and fans on max while it empties your battery in 20 minutes.
On my laptop Nouveau started to be an alternative after several years when development kept up and it got comparable performance and battery life to the proprietary drivers. But you might replace the laptop at that point. Waiting for NVidia or the open source drivers to keep up hasn’t been worth it for me in the past. I did that two times and everytime I had to live with the proprietary drivers instead.
So my advice is: Be comfortable using the proprietary drivers if you want to buy NVidia.
Intel Arc got really bad performance reviews. It’s not worth spending lots of money on them. But fortunately they’re cheap because the gamers don’t buy them (for that reason). I live with the iGPU that’s part of my CPU. It’s alright since I don’t play modern games anyways.
But you missed AMD. There are some laptops available with the Ryzen 7040 series and it seems to be a fast CPU. They also made the integrated graphics way faster than before, albeit probably still not on the level for proper gaming. But I bet there are desktop replacements out there that combine it with an AMD GPU.
I didn’t miss AMD. The dedicated GPUs just aren’t available new in my wide area, unless they’re put into mediocre plastic shells of a budget laptop, and the integrated GPUs don’t work for my use case.
I just sold an AMD laptop (with RX 6800s) because I wanted a bigger screen. I don’t need top-tier performance, most of the games I play are fine on mainstream gaming hardware. The software experience was perfect but I didn’t use the laptop very often because it was 14" and uncomfortable to use in the couch because of the screen hinge design.
I already have a perfectly fine 2021ThinkPad X1 Nano that does everything I want from a portable computer and I noticed I just never had a reason to use the gaming laptop unless I was gaming. I just want something with a bigger screen and better GPU that will only be moved on our living room table and the storage rack, and the occasional car trip. If the 18" Alienware with RX 7900M was for sale here (for a reasonable price) I would buy that, but that is not going to happen.
Thanks for writing this! Getting bcache set up the first time can be confusing, so this certainly helps.
I’ll just drop one warning in here. With a setup very much like described here I’ve had severe data corruption and loss, so please make sure your data is properly and regularly backed up. To me it seemed like almost any unexpected or untimely power off would cause some data loss or significant corruption.
That’s sort of how herbstluftwm models it. Workspaces are called tags, and are areas windows can be arranged. Monitors are like SVG viewports, with dimensions; Herbst auto-manages physical monitors, but lets you define virtual monitors with arbitrary dimensions. Workspaces (tags) are displayed on monitors and windows are adjusted to the dimensions of the monitors as tags are moved around. Monitors can be overlayed… the terminology is counterintuitive (windows have tags, but can only have one tag at a time, and monitors can overlap, etc), but it’s a really nice way of approaching things IMO, and is one of the main reasons I’m sticking with X.
What makes you say Intel sucks? The A730M should be somewhere between an RTX 3060 and 3070 but with 12GB of VRAM. From my experience with Intel iGPUs, the software experience is very nice, so I just expect the same thing but with faster performance.
I’ve tried an A730M laptop last year when they were new, and the drivers worked fine, everything was working out of the box. The only issue was that performance was not stable and power usage was high, but I’m assuming performance will only have improved with 12 months of driver engineering from Intel.
The Intel discrete cards are fantastic value for money. There’s plenty of folks on the internet who can attest to this. Intel’s support story in general (so not just graphics cards) on Linux has been nothing less than sterling. If you’re using any Linux kernel you can expect Intel stuff to just work. It’s been this way for at least a decade.
When is the last time you tried Intel hardware and with what software? I ask because your links do not really tell the same story as your post.
The first link says that Mesa got “more Intel optimizations”. That sounds like a good thing. It basically says the same thing about AMD and NVIDIA. The only GPU “crash” that was addressed was for AMD which is widely regarded as the best option for Linux. I would not read that article and come away with any concerns about Intel.
The second link says that kernel 6.2 added “full Intel support”. We are now in kernel 6.7. I use a rolling release and how a much newer kernel than 6.2. A brief Google leads me to believe that 6.5 ships with both Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora 39.
I have not used these cards myself so I do it know but others have said the experience was decent now. The OP does not seem that demanding. If it ok now and actively improving, he may be quite happy. It sounds better than nouveau for sure. Is it really as bad as you say?
It looks like it’s in a binary format and is printing control characters because it isn’t a format intended to be viewed/edited. You could try opening it in a hex editor and see if you can make any sense from that.
it’s certainly more streamlined. I think ‘better’ is a more reletive term here. Certainly for non-problem games that will simply work under proton GE, it’s better.
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