I was gifted an SSD upgrade for Christmas!!!
Because it's such a huge upgrade in performance from the cheap drive I've been using till now, I'll be looking at moving my OS to it
The easiest way to do that is a fresh install (especially as there are a few issues with my current Win install) but it does also mean it's time for the tradition!
What is The Tradition you ask?
Well every time I have to reinstall my operating system, I try to use Linux as my full time operating system for a week!
Now... I've done this before many times and I'm currently on Windows because there is usually some "deal breaker" that prevents me from switching full time (I used Linux as my main OS for 2 years back 2010-2011, as I had no issues)
The last deal breakers I had where just:
- Screen Sharing on Linux through Discord has no Audio
- Clip Studio Paint didn't have full compatablity
- Some games I couldn't play
Since then though,
I no longer use CSP as my main drawing software as I've moved to Krita for 90% of my work. Also CSP for the version I'm stuck with (I'm not going to upgrade to 2) has genuinely good compatability on Linux now for everything but it's cloud services (that I don't use)
With video games, 100% of what I actually play regularly works great on *nix now thanks to Proton and the efforts of Valve. This is now a non-issue as the only games I occassionally play that won't work on Linux now (Fortnite, Valorant) I can honestly live without
As for the Discord thing... this is my biggest concern and may still be a deal breaker through my test. It's been YEARS and has been the most requested feature in Discord's support forums for 2 years now. I understand that the community has some work arounds, but all of them seem rather complicated to setup or use through Mic streaming, which is terrible for QoL. This is all 100% on Discord btw who for some reason don't want to support the *nix market segmant EVEN WITH the Steamdeck now exisiting and a lot of new users wanting the feature. We have screen share on Mobile(iOS/Andriod), ChromeOS and Mac, but not the Linux desktop...
I'm still going to try The Tradition as there are a LOT of things that I greatly appreciate about Linux that I've missed being on Windows, but ultimately I only have the one computer and I need it for getting not just work but also relaxation done with
Ultimately I'll choose what's right for me and I'm likely going to post updates here for those interested!
But if it's still Windows after all this time I'm going to be very sorely disapointed
I did some prelimenary testing in VMs to figure out what distro etc I'm going to be going with for this round of The Tradtion and have settled on openSUSE tumbleweed with Gnome Desktop
Now starting the labourius task of house keeping before it gets installed.
Backing up all the files, settings, logins etc from my current install and making sure I have everything I may need in place before I perform the hardware swap & new os install
Aiming to be done & into a Linux desktop by tonight!
I got Linux intalled and it's all nice and lovely but...
I can without a doubt say now that Nvidia is my most hated tech company
(they where already in my top 5)
Everything so far on my Linux install is honestly working pretty great, except for a whole heap of small nausences with the nvidia drivers (no display audio & odd boot bevahiour) and one big issue with them... Wayland is just completely out of the question at least with my hardware setup
Now this wouldn't be an issue as I can still play all my steam games, blender and so forth just fine (in most cases better atm!) BUT Wayland is needed in conjunction with pipewire for the only working hack to get Discord Screen-Sharing with Sound to work atm... so short of me buying an AMD-gpu to throw into my system I still don't have that :/
I could potentially get it all to work, but likely not with my chosen distro and desktop enviroment... both of which I'm happy with so like bweh
Alrighty so the proper end of Day 2 update
I have pretty much everything completely setup as I want now and have found both the strengths and weaknesses of my current setup
Let's start with the good then
I love my desktop environment!
I knew I really didn't like the Windows UI in any of its iterations, but goodness is it a breath of fresh air using my customised Gnome. Asides from nicer file management, window snapping, search and general usability; I've been able to tailor nearly everything to my aesthetic tastes to a degree I just couldn't on Win. I have a cute mouse curser, fun icons, sleek UI and a consistent colour scheme that makes my entire experience feel more grounded and simply fun to use
Stability and Ease of Operation
Now this one is a little bit of a mixed bag, when things are working on this system they are working very well. Everything behaves as I expect it to and if I find I need something it is very easy to just install it. I always forget how much I appreciate a good package manager when I'm on windows and it's very nice to have one again. Also on my distro of choice, I'm using btfs which allows me to rollback super easily should anything on my system break. I've used this feature once and it was so painless that Windows recovery looks like even more of a joke than it already was.
Performance!
This one was a little surprising to me, especially compared to previous times I've used Linux, but I feel like I'm really utilizing 100% of what my PC can do now! I expected a slight uptick in CPU performance with a slight downtick in GPU, but my results are a lot more interesting!
Before I started on all this, I made the point to benchmark with Windows install with nothing else running to give it the best chance. As of minutes before writing up this CoHost post I've just finished benchmarking those same tests on Linux and the results are fascinating!
Firstly some Blender benchmarking, for this I used both the official OpenData benchmark and my cosmic burger scene to test the system and the results here are interesting!
In the OpenData benchmark, my CPU saw a massive near 25% uplift in this benchmark going from a score of 87.92 to 109.69!
My GPU also saw a slight uplift of about 5% from 574.06 to 600.72!
But how does that translate into real-world use? Well in my Cosmic Burger scene render viewport performance was up a tiny but noticeable amount from around 20 fps in eevee render preview to around 25
What was most interesting to me though, was that the render speeds were nearly identical between the two platforms, within .2 of a second to render out the full 4k frame, meaning that overall Blender has a very slight but not noticeable improvement
What was noticeable though was my gaming benchmarks! I tested three games Gunfire Reborn, Elden Ring and Apex Legends, all at max settings 2k resolution on my 1070
Gunfire Reborn saw a slight fps increase on Linux, going from 189 fps in my test scenario to 199 fps. Realistically whilst it's a win it's not one I'd feel, even on my 165hz monitor.
Elden Ring was the first (and so far only) noticeable performance drop on Linux however. In my test scene, it went from struggling a 47 fps on Windows to barely hanging on to something playable at a mere 24 fps on Linux. Now to be fair, Elden Ring caps out at 60fps so we only need it stable at that and reducing my settings happily gets me there with the game still looking great, but it is worth noting performance is worse here.
Lastly was Apex Legends and this one to me was the most interesting of everything, Maxed out on Windows in my test scene I was getting 59 fps, which is hardly a framerate I'd actually like to play on, but I thought respectable for my ageing 1070... but on Linux though, same settings, same setup and a massive 32% improvement in performance to 78 fps! This one really surprised me and means that I should be able to comfortably hit over 165 on my pc lowering the settings, something that could be a bit challenging back on windows!
All over this has been pretty great but I do have some issues that have shown up already...
Firstly, the Nvidia situation
Nvidia's drivers suck on Linux, this is something I've known for a long time. It's such common information it's a meme within the Linux community and even Windows-focused tech enthusiasts know about it.
But WOWEE is it bad first-hand for my specific hardware and software setup. When I boot my computer the driver is simply bugged. If I include it in my boot sequence the entire pc just freezes, so I have to run nomodeset for safety. Because of this though the Nvidia driver will only start properly if I first start my xsession as root and THEN login to my main account.
Thankfully I can do this in GDM, but it adds about an extra minute of jank to my login (I have already spent 10 hours trying every fix and the answer is no, not on my card) I also don't have sound through my GPU either over display port or HDMI because of this, which sucks but isn't the end of the world
The second issue I'm running into is the one I expected, Discord Screen-Sharing with Sound
This is still completely broken on Linux and from the looks of things the Discord devs straight up don't care and will never fix it (seriously Discord genuinely sucks)
But good news! The *nix community came to the rescue and HAS a consistent and easy workaround. By using Wayland, Pipewire and some custom script injection into the web client of Discord we can have screen sharing with sound! Now, this is technically against ToS so it's probably best practice to have a second account just for screen sharing, but it IS a fix and everyone using it says it works great!
"What's that though Rose?" I can hear you think, "Why are you talking like you're not using this?" well... it's because I can't. You see I have no doubt this works, I have pipe wire, Wayland and this custom script-based discord all set up on my computer, I made an extra Discord account for it and everything! but it requires this Wayland thing and it's now that we go back to the issue which is the terrible company Nvidia
You see, one of the things that are completely broken for the Nvidia driver is Wayland, it just won't work. Now you can sometimes force it to work, so long as your hardware and OS want to play nice, but that's a big maybe
It's now that I bring up, those 10 hours of troubleshooting. A lot of that was all around the same issues, which boil down to. "If you want Wayland, get an AMD GPU" and this sucks ass... Nvidia could probably fix all this with extra resources, but at this point, their Linux dev team are just a couple of people and they don't have the time or resources to fix what needs fixing
My housemate @hooskeh thankfully is going to lend me her 5700xt later this week for me to test Wayland and see if this magical screen share workaround does indeed do what everyone claims it does, but for the time being, all this is still very broken
Lastly, I am having an issue with my graphics tablet atm, it registers fine, I was able to map it to my main screen and it works great in Krita (which is also a bit snappier on Linux yay!) But it's button mapping is completely broken making the hotkeys on the tablet unusable and I can't rebind the defaults for my pen. This is a new one for me that I wasn't able to fix in 2 hours of troubleshooting, but I'm going to continue to try as this tablet (a Wacom CTE-650) has historically worked perfectly on every other Linux install I've tried for the last decade...
Despite all this though, my dive into Linux this time around has been very informative and I'm looking forward to the rest of this week of The Tradition thanks for reading these updates, the next one will likely be its own post so this thread doesn't get any longer!
