2024 is NOT the year of the linux desktop
And I dont really have any faith in it ever being the "year of linux"
Published: 10/4/2024, Originally written: 7/1/2024
It's nerdin' time! It's no secret to those that know me that I'm a bit of a Linux fan. While yes I daily drive Windows not only on my Gaming PC but also on my Laptop and even my home Server, along with having an iphone, my heart truly belongs to the open source community. The idea that software should be made by the people, for the people, free and open for use and modification by anyone, is just so so appealing. It feels like I'm a walking contradiction, but the main reason I don't daily drive linux is just the same as everyone else's. I have things that I do that either dont work on linux or dont have good alternatives. Or that's what I thought until some time ago.
Even though I've had my steam deck for a while, it wasnt until recently this year I started heavily using the desktop environment. Steam OS comes with the very nice KDE Plasma desktop, very feature complete and relatively mature. It also helps that steam OS is an immutable distro, which contrary to the name, does NOT mean the filesystem is set in stone. It just means that you need to enable write mode to be able to change core system configs which for a dumb stupid dummy like me is a blessing. What first started as curiosity later turned into "This feels pretty normal". I had grown accustomed to the file structure (at least that of the Home directory) as well as I knew how to get apps by using the discover store and generally everything I needed was kind of already there. I honestly can't remember the last time I had to open the terminal for anything other than getting decky loader working again after forgetting to update it before doing a system update. So on the last weekend of June I decided to spend my time using Linux on my desktop PC.
Before I start, here's a quick disclaimer: Basically all of this is either user error or me picking the wrong software to run and/or lack of knowledge on said software.
I wanted something stable, so when picking out my distro, I went with LMDE. What's LMDE? It's a separate version of Linux Mint based on debian rather than ubuntu. I figured this would be a better pick for me since I'd assumed that it would be a decent experience since at the time of writing everyone is complaining about how shitty ubuntu is and how the snap format is the worst thing in the world. I figured I'd avoid all that and go for a debian based distro. LMDE was the perfect pick. I installed it with no issues and set everything up perfectly fine, also with no issues. Then it's time to game... my God I love nvidia. So I booted up some indie games and they ran fine, but then I wanted to play Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, a game that I play on my steam deck all the time. SURELY an RTX 2080TI can handle this game no problem right? After all, it runs great on windows! I boot it up and... IT CANT EVEN STAY ABOVE 40FPS??? I couldnt really comprehend but then I remembered that NVidia are kind of special and they seem to have their own driver independent from the kernel, sure enough when I checked I was using the Nouveau drivers. So I go to the terminal and I sudo apt install nvidia-driver as one would. It didnt work because nouveau was installed or something. WIth my patience running thing I took the most sane course of action someone does when they run into any kind of issue like this. I went to bed.
It is sunday, half of my time for this linux experiment is gone. I decided it would be easier for me to just, go with regular linux mint since ubuntu has a driver manager app. So I do that again. After I finished installing NORMAL Linux Mint. Everything seemed in order. I set up my browser, online accounts, steam, made sure to be on the official driver. Life's good. I was playing PSO just fine until I noticed something weird. Even though Vsync was on I was getting mad screen tearing. Not just in games. I quickly realized I was getting screen tearing EVERYWHERE. I'm the kind of person to get EXTREMELY hung up on tiny little details not working so immediately I got into looking into my settings. Vsync seemed on in the nvidia control panel, and everything looked normal on my display settings. Remember this is a test on whether or not linux is ready for the average user, which means no messing with system files and no terminal. While up to this point everything had been fine, I could never resolve the screen tearing. The only thing I did find in my troubleshooting is that if I turned off my second monitor, the tearing would stop. What I think is happening is that my second monitor is rated at 75Hz and my main monitor is 144Hz and something about that trips up X11. So I tried enabling the experimental Wayland session. It did not work. At all. System would just hang on a black screen unresponsive to anything I did.
While it pains me to say this because its just such a simple thing. It's because of edge cases and weird shit like this that I don't think linux will ever get to a point where most people will be using it. Maybe more than MacOS sure, but windows has to fucking break EVERYTHING and supremely fuck up for people to consider other solutions, and frankly I dont see that happening during my lifetime. Maybe this is more of a Cinnamon issue, since I dont get this kind of tearing on my deck in desktop mode, but I genuinely dont know. While I do plan on figuring it out the hard way, it's suffice to say that as a "average user" I am extremely disappointed that I hit such a stupid roadblock like this.
Screen tearing woes aside, I think this experiment showed me a lot of stuff I was unfamiliar with, mainly the fact that everyone needs to hurry up and adopt wayland as their compositor. But also the fact that a lot of the shit I do on windows already works on linux. Sure some tools may be different, but ultimately it all kind of works. Hopefully these edge cases become fewer and fewer becuase windows 11 is becoming a dumpster fire I dont want to endure. I'm tired of being spied on and feeling like my PC isnt mine.
|