sadmac356

@sadmac356

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Gay badgercat who practically lives on bad puns and cursed computing. Fluent in typo

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sadmac356
@sadmac356
ann-arcana
@ann-arcana
ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

"Just try Linux"

With Dawntrail on the horizon, I had been planning for a while to upgrade my video card, but the recent tendency for MS to slip more and more adware and AI bullshit backward into Win10 was also making it feel like it might be time to try Linux on the desktop again.

Since this is the hot button issue right now, OK, let's go for it.

Surprise, this gets long.

I wanted a more "bulletproof" experience, like you get on the Steam Deck. I even picked up the dock for mine, thinking I might just use that, but instead I grabbed an extra SSD with my parts order, and set about investigating distro options that would capture that same feel.

There are fanmade clones of SteamOS out there but they're not the version that runs on the Steam Deck, and in fact, are basically now abandonware. There's a couple others however that aim for a similarish experience, and one that seemed promising and came recommended from a friend was Bazzite.

Bazzite is essentially a set of custom tweaks on top of Fedora Atomic Desktop. Atomic goes for a somewhat similar approach to the current SteamOS, in that you have a locked and versioned root filesystem, and then software installation is encouraged to happen via flatpak/brew/distrobox, rather than directly onto the root. The idea is to provide a more stable experience that can be broken by installing the wrong package, and can even more easily be rolled back.

So I downloaded it, burned it to a USB-C thumbdrive with BalenaEtcher ... and it wouldn't boot. Somehow, the ISO I downloaded had the wrong hash, and failed the integrity check on boot.

OK, fine. I boot back to Windows, check the SHA256, and sure enough it doesn't match. huh. Must've got corrupted during download? Download again, this time hashes match, burn that one ... still won't boot. Same integrity check fails. Huh.

OK, maybe Balena's doing something weird, time for good old Rufus. Download that, point it at my good ISO that passed the hash, burn that, finally it boots ... by skipping the integrity check altogether because Rufus apparently installed it in a different way ???

Also, for some reason the Rufus burned stick doesn't get detected by the Windows advanced startup tool like the Balena one was, so I have to race my BIOS to get the boot menu up in time to start it instead of just running Windows.

Fine, whatever. We're running now, so I go through the installer, straightforward enough because I'm giving it its own drive. Reboot, reboot again because I forgot and missed the tiny window to hit the BIOS key ... and voila, I can log into Bazzite.

Onboarding wizard thingie pops up, offering to install all kinds of helpful things, though it appears to hang at several points because the progress console somehow only prints operations after they're completed, so the big giant dnf invocation that sets up the initial root just quietly happens for what feels like 30 minutes, and then suddenly wall of text.

Whatever. Get Firefox synced, get 1Password (eventually, after figuring out how Distrobox works). The onboarding wizard helpfully preinstalled Discord and XIVLauncher for me, so now it's time to give the new install it's first big litmus: can we get FFXIV working?

No. At least. Not at first.

Log into XIVLauncher, let it do its thing, start the game: insta-crash.

Fiddle with a ton of settings, try with and without dalamud, nope. Crashes the instant the game starts.

OK fine, maybe the bundled XLCore Wine doesn't work for some reason. The launcher is supposed to be retargetable, so I load up Lutris, install vanilla via the recommended there, which takes yet more download time measured in hours, and ... nope. Crash.

Dig around online trying to find help, find some stuff about custom Wine prefixes that I don't have any idea how to install, but in the process I get a hunch, having noticed that a bunch of different tools make special mention of having to do goofy shit to get it working on Wayland.

I figure I can either fight with trying to understand all that ... or I can just use X11 instead. Bazzite even has a helpful one-line command to install the X11 version of Plasma, so I do. It's mildly annoying, because X11 can't do per-monitor DPI scaling, and of course it's just generally X11 and thus just a little more clunky and slow than Wayland, but not enough to care about.

Anyway. Reboot into X11, fire up XIVLauncher, works the first time. Even run around a little.

Fine though, it's working, lets get my settings transferred over. Oh ... XIVLauncher on Linux doesn't have any way to access the backup tool from the vanilla launcher, so IG I gotta boot back over to windows and use the online backup tool from inside the game instead.

Do that, got all my buttons where they belong, everything's golden. Even do my retainers this morning.

Then it's time for mod setup. Anna be peeled, and it makes me have a sad, but should be easy enough. Add the SoS repo, add another repo because for some reason Simple Heels won't install on Linux from SoS, get my plugins installed. Copy over mods and settings from the Windows install.

Tada! Anna is her curvy self again ... until I try to leave the room.

Crashes.

Try without Dalamud or any mods or plugins.

Crashes on login now.

Maybe it doesn't like Crystarium, so I DC hop to force her to end up in Ul'dah instead.

Crashes.

Log in to a different character, which works fine, log over to Anna again, and now she can at least load in ... and then immediately crashes.

So now I have working FFXIV ... as long as I don't mind not being able to play my main character.

Maybe there's some weird quirk in the per-character settings I loaded from the online backup? Who fucking knows. I'm exhausted.

At this point, I'll poke and see if I can get the Dawntrail benchmark working somehow, and if I don't like the results, I don't see any reason to continue fighting this fight.

And this is as far as I got as a professional computer toucher! There's stuff here that if I didn't know at least SOME nerd shit, I never could conceive of intuiting. There still is even! I dunno how to install custom Wine prefixes, and a lot of my troubleshooting has been blind trial and error because of course none of this shit is fucking documented.

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in reply to @ann-arcana's post:

renmerry
@renmerry

this is really just not true, but i'm going to engage in good faith here. i don't know if you've seen posts from the other side, from linux users talking about what makes windows the worse option for them. i'm definitely also in that camp, windows fundamentally just doesn't offer what i need to use my computer in the way i prefer to.

linux's core software is pretty stable. kde plasma offers a great experience, gnome is... gnome, and there are a lot of smaller desktop environments that are also pretty good. and there are plenty of window managers for people who are willing to get their hands a little bit dirty in return for an experience customised exactly the way they prefer. if you use linux, and use software made specifically for linux, it works wonderfully. it's absolutely ready for the desktop.

the big issue though is software made for windows. it's just not going to work perfectly, because it's made for a different os. it's full of hacky workarounds just to get things to "good enough". but steam has about 700,000 non-deck linux users now. that's a lot! it's a viable market. but big software developers still don't seem to understand that, so we're stuck in a limbo where enough things don't work, or at least well enough, for a lot of people to want to make a switch.

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