Microsoft wants to stream your OS to you. Ignoring the whole "Microsoft" angle on this, I personally hate this idea. I miss the days when a computer was a standalone device that COULD connect to the Internet, but didn't have to. These days, so many things DEPEND on having that connection, and just flat out won't work without it. Maybe I'm a stodgy old guy, but can't we go back? I want my computer to with exactly the same online or offline.
@mike I entirely agree. Our devices shouldn't be taken this far. They may evolved into appliances, but not to this point where one needs Internet all the time which is not realistic. I realize a lot are use to being always connected, but that is not possible in all scenarios. This is a power move by Microsoft, to generate constant stream of money which is not reality of what people can afford.
One thing for sure, you are the wise old guy, but age may not play the role here. It's just a common sense. If there was one thing I could "say it live it", it's the autonomy that most of us want in the end of the day.
@mike I have the idea that my computer would be a brick if I had an internet outage. There's less and less I can do without being online and it's infuriating.
I've switched to Linux before, but always ended up back at Windows for games. But Linux support for games has improved a lot recently, so maybe it's time to finally let go of Windows.
I'm in the process of selecting a new PC, mostly for gaming, but I'm seriously considering just making it a Linux machine now. I'm not entirely sure all my games will work well on Linux, though.
@mcv@mike@ablackcatstail I switched to Linux back in November and my experience so far is pretty great. Just a couple of notes:
Nvidia does not play nice with Linux. The drivers kinda suck. But they are getting better lately and some pretty major and good changes dropped in the last month or two (like gsync support for Wayland). If you pick an Nvidia card, you'll likely want to use X11 still, but X11 does not play well with multiple monitors with different refresh rates and/or resolutions. This is my advice today, but it may change in the coming months.
If you run Wayland, KDE Plasma (Kwin) has a better implementation than gnome (Mutter) does right now. Mutter is pretty buggy on Wayland in my experience with an Nvidia card and lacks support for VRR. It works fine on an Intel iGPU though, but still no VRR support yet.
You can usually switch between X11 and Wayland from the login screen on your distro of choice. At least I can do that on Fedora and I know you can on Ubuntu too.
As for game support, my experience is that most games just work as long as you run them though Steam. If not, you may have to manually install some Windows libraries and stuff. Games using Easy AntiCheat and other anti-tampering or very strong DRM stuff may not always work. Some games can have weird bugs that don't happen on Windows. Some games run better on Linux, some games run worse. Most games I've tried have worked perfectly fine for me.
Raytracing rarely works, but does work for some games. Control and Portal RTX are two games that has working raytracing on Linux. Cyberpunk, Resident Evil, and most other games does not though. But this may change in the future.
HDR does not yet work on Linux. But this is in active development and we may see it working in the next year or two.
I've heard that System76 (an Ubuntu spinoff) has a special Nvidia version that I assume has better Nvidia support. I have no experience with it, though.
For me, the choice between Nvidia and AMD was mostly about whether I want to play around with neural networks on those Cuda cores. But that idea is probably never going to move beyond the idea stage for me, and Linux support is definitely an important consideration too.
It seems to me that the main reasons to go with Nvidia right now are raytracing and neural network stuff. For other things, my impression is that the AMD cards are cheaper, more power friendly, and apparently better supported by Linux.
X11 does not play well with multiple monitors with different refresh rates and/or resolutions
Really? I assumed resolutions at least were a solved problem by now.
I've got to admit I still don't know much about different display systems and desktop environment. Back when I was playing with it, there was X and a bunch of window managers you could use in it. I've never really gotten into the whole KDE vs Gnome debate, let alone that I know what Wayland is, but apparently it's a replacement for X11.
@mcv@mike@ablackcatstail The System76 (ergo, pop!_os) nvidia spin is just pop!_os but with the proprietary Nvidia drivers bundled in afaik. Tho, it is possible they've done some extra work that haven't been upstreamed that I'm not aware of.
Nvidia does have better raytracing for sure, and DLSS is only supported on Nvidia cards and is better than FSR.
AMD has pretty good Linux drivers afaik and they're pro-free software unlike Nvidia who loves to make proprietary stuff.
As for X11 and refreshrates and resolutions, well, I oversimplified it slightly for brevity. If your monitors have different refreshrates, it'll lock down to the lowest common denominator. As a result, the higher refreshrate screen will get lots of screentearing and worse framerate. As for resolution, as long as you're fine with having the same scaling for both monitors, it's fine, but if you want different scaling, that just isn't supported by the protocol. So, having a 4k monitor and a 1080p monitor with similar physical size could be a pain as either the 4k monitor will have tiny content on it or the 1080p monitor will have huge content.
Keep in mind that Wayland does not have the limitations above and you can mix resolutions, scaling, fractional scaling, and refresh rates as much as you want across monitors.
Wayland is indeed the replacement of X11. It's made by the same organisation, Xorg. X11 relies on soooo many hacks and was not made with modern requirements in mind, so it has a lot of weird bugs and security concerns. Wayland is supposed to replace it and addresses the shortcomings of X11. We're at a point now where I think anyone who don't use Nvidia drivers and don't rely on accessibility tools that rely on X11 should probably use Wayland.
Anyway, you don't need to learn everything about Linux, but I do recommend you look into what desktop environment you want to use. Examples are GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, and xfce. There are more ofc and you can always switch later. Fedora makes that really easy. https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/switching-desktop-environments/
So do the drivers in pop!_os have the same problems as elsewhere in Linux? Or is the issue that Nvidia's open source drivers suck and people don't want to use proprietary drivers with Linux?
If I'm not mistaken, X11 is over 30 years old by now, and there's been quite a few changes since then, so a replacement sound pretty sensible to me.
So I guess my new PC is going to get AMD and Wayland, which is great, because I was already leaning towards AMD.
Those scaling issues would have been a problem with my current laptop. I have tried to install Linux on it but never got it to boot properly, but the laptop has a 4K screen (ridiculous overkill) and an Nvidia GPU, so that would have been exactly the wrong combination (because I usually use a second screen). I noticed that on Windows too, not everything deals well with ui scaling.
@mcv@mike@ablackcatstail the driver issues are across the board, including on pop!_os. The issue is that they were built for X11 and Nvidia doesn't really care much about Linux. They have slowly been improving them since they open-sourced parts of their drivers tho at least. My guess is that Nvidia will work fine with Linux within the next year or two.
If Nvidia works better on pop!_os, they must've implemented some Nvidia-specific fixes that I'm not aware of.
I would recommend AMD anyway because of their stance on FOSS. Nvidia only open-sourced parts of their drivers because they moved a lot of the proprietary code over to the firmware instead from what I can gather :/
@ablackcatstail@mcv@mike Yeah, I'd like to pick AMD next time. I only recently went all in on FOSS. That said, it does suck that I won't be able to use DLSS anymore then :/
@reina@mcv@mike For me open source has brought the joy back in computing. I've only recently went completely open source myself. I still used to keep Windows for my desktop. I am happy to now free from Windows. Period. The only Windows I use is at work where it's unavoidable.
@mike And when companies just flip a switch on their servers and your computer changes. No update needed. Just an A/B test change and boom. Feature flag enabled. Or disabled.
@frankie@devinprater@mike Yup! Having an operating system completely in the cloud won't be as good as all the tech bros think it will be. There might be an offline mode where parts of the system are cashed, but, just, fuck that shit. I want speed, and an offline OS that runs on my laptop is very fast, even on older hardware. There is absolutely no benefit to this other than enabling Microsoft's wet dream of everybody renting an OS to you while they have endless streams of cash from a monthly subscription to the OS. As a result, stuff will break more, etc.
Do they give the client device for free? If and only if, they include the client device as part of the deal, this gets anywhere close to being reasonable. Paying money for a device that is constantly in the brink of disconnect shouldn't be any less capable than the device I already have.
Also, where did you see 12$/month ?
Only price I could find is 31 USD per month per user. This is too expensive for a VM with 2vcpu 4gb ram and 128gb storage.
Microsoft has announced functionality that will allow Windows 365 customers to access their cloud desktops while offline, but it’s not yet clear precisely which features will be available.
TechRadar article
That is a subscription based offline system with extra steps.
@murtezayesil
I think it's going to be something like VMware live migration with you running a local copy of VM and another copy of it "in the cloud", the two replicating constantly, so you can still have some access to your data offline, but have ability to offload computing expensive tasks to more powerful hardware. And you always have your data backed up! I still don't like it and won't use it, but some might if they can make it truly seamless 🤷 @selea@mike
Add comment