Please research the meaning of stability when applied to Linux before parroting stuff. Also, who mentioned Arch?

Warning, I’ve had an issue in the past where I couldn’t play a game (Deus Ex Mankind divided) because it needed a specific instruction set on the CPU (SSSE3). While not your specific case since the FX-8350 supports SSSE3 (I should know, that was the exact CPU I switched to to be able to play the game) there might be newer instructions sets that this old CPU does not support.

Also that GPU is older than what people like to remember, from a time where AMD was the worst GPU option on Linux. It’s very likely that the open source driver is good enough for that card by now, but there’s a good chance you might need to wrestle with the AMD proprietary GPU driver (fglrx) which is worse than the Nvidia one in some aspects and some distros don’t even package it anymore.

If you plug your Nvidia GPU that rig would be usable for gaming, I’m not sure what fps you would get as games keep getting updates and old hardware remains the same so old benchmarks might not be reliable, but I suppose it should run plenty of stuff.

You used Linux like Windows and got bad results, OP treated Windows like Linux and got bad results. The problem is neither OS but how familiar you are with it and their peculiarities.

That being said, GPU drivers are not a rough edge on Linux, only Nvidia drivers are. And even then it’s usually a single click/command to install the proprietary drivers if you need them, otherwise the open source ones work like a charm. This used to be more of a problem a few years back, when both manufacturers used proprietary drivers, but AMD ones are open now and therefore integrated into the mainstream kernel, so they just work.

Yes, but you would need to know to run that command, so it’s the same situation as the windows case where he didn’t know which drivers to get. So the argument is disingenuous in that it either ignores the case or he has knowledge on one OS that he doesn’t on the other. On the other side of the coin someone could be making a similar post saying in windows they just switched hardware, installed drivers and done, in Linux they spent hours trying to figure out how to install the drivers.

I’m not saying it’s hard (on any OS) but it requires previous knowledge on both (although to a much lesser extent on Linux since this only happens when switching GPUs and only under specific conditions).

Can you give me an example of which distro/hardware change gave you a black screen? Because unless it was Gentoo or something you built the kernel yourself a black screen is extremely unlikely. Unlike Windows which requires drivers for everything, in Linux the drivers are baked into the kernel, so any hardware change should just work out of the box (there are some caveats to get the best possible driver, but even the included driver should be more than enough for almost anything except heavy use on Nvidia GPUs).

I agree that on average the Linux user has more technical expertise than the average windows user, but that’s mainly because the average user doesn’t choose their OS. If you take into consideration only people who actually chose their OS, I think it’s very similar.

And OP talked about his experience doing that, the default windows driver gave him a crappy resolution, and he had lots of issues getting the right driver and making it work. You skipped all of those issues because you knew beforehand which was the correct driver, and pre-downloaded it.

This is disingenuous, if you had an AMD GPU on Linux and switched to an Nvidia card you would be using the nouveau drivers so you would need to install the proprietary drivers to get the best performance.

And lots of the same issues that are listed on the windows side could happen on Linux as well since they relate to connectivity.

I agree that the original post is dishonest, but your solution is exactly the same as what they said with the exception that you knew it would be a problem so you downloaded the driver beforehand. Had you not known that would happen the series of misfortunes could have happened to you too.

If you know that that’s the right driver to install, what is your question?

I usually give detailed responses, but honestly the correct response here is RTFM. The short answer is to install nvidia-580xx-dkms.

Arch wiki is such a great place that has the answer to most technical questions you might want to ask. I strongly dislike the idea that Arch is for advanced users, but it does expect you to read the documentation (which is why I dislike stuff like Manjaro that try to make Arch “accessible”, but end up leaving people in similar situations without even knowing where to look for the solution to their issues).

Because you brought up a non-proton related issue. It’s highly unlikely this is proton related, this is an issue on how the steam virtual keyboard and Skyrim interact, and since the keyboard doesn’t cause issues on any other game I think it’s very likely the culprit is Skyrim, and if that’s the case I want to know if the issue also happens on Windows.

Is it possible that the issue is within proton? Yes, but the problem you presented can be in multiple other places that proton can’t touch. For example if the game crashes on windows too then proton is working correctly, and even if it doesn’t it can still be something else besides proton, e.g. steam closing the keyboard in a different manner, Skyrim has had a famous bug where it crashes when you alt+tab away from it and come back on Windows for a long time, and opening a virtual keyboard on top of the game and going back is essentially alt+tabing, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that this is the same bug in Skyrim showing up with a different face.

PS: out of curiosity I went and loaded my old prisoner save, and named the character which is how many people reported the bug and it just worked, so even if this used to be an issue, doesn’t seem like it is anymore.

What happens when you do that? And does doing that on windows work? Because it sounds like an incompatibility between the steam virtual keyboard and Skyrim.

The solution I’m talking about should already be the standard by most devs (especially small studios), even before LLM was a thing. See, small teams can’t afford QA, at least not to the same extent as big studis, so they need to add checks to stuff in a way that catches large problems, and a placeholder making it into the final game is a big problem. Even before generated images were a thing devs would just use any random image they had that more or less worked, and those images could have copyright or be problematic in any other way, so ensuring none of that made it into the final release has always been important.

Dude, naming the textures placeholder_<name> doesn’t take any more time and ensures you won’t ship a game with a placeholder. This is, or at least should be, common practice even without using LLMs, and only takes a couple of seconds, not enough to cause any inconvenience.

That’s not what a concept artist does, concept artists (if they had one) did the work before, game artists are still doing the work while the generated placeholders are in place, no person’s job was compromised by using generated placeholders. That being said, if any placeholder made it into the final game then fuck them.

I agree with almost everything here, I think using LLMs to generate placeholders is fair game and allows studios to nail down the feeling of the game sooner. That being said there’s one thing I disagree:

However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you’ll forget to replace items with this technique

There are ways to ensure you don’t forget, things like naming your placeholders placeholder_<name> or whatever so you ensure there are no more placeholders when you make the final build. That is the best way to approach this because even extremely obvious placeholders might be missed otherwise, since even if you have a full QA team they won’t be playing every little scene from the game daily looking for that, and a few blank/pink/checkered textures on small or weird areas might be missed.

I think it’s okay for studios to use generative AI for placeholders, but if one of them makes it to the release you screwed up big time. And like I said there are ways to ensure you don’t, it’s trivial to make a plugin for any of the major engines (and should be even easier if you’re building the engine yourself) where it would alert you of placeholders in use at compile time.

Ansible.

I use docker for most of the services and Ansible to configure them. In the future I’ll migrate the server system to NixOS and might slowly migrate my Ansible to NixOS, but for the time being Ansible is working with relative ease.

My main computer at work is Linux, I do have a Windows build box where I compile code for Windows, and to make my life easier I usually develop it there as well. But outside of platform specific code, or code related to a product that’s Windows only, I don’t have any issues.

As for other software Teams, slack, zoom, Google meeting and docs work well enough that I can use them daily without issues.

At a previous job for some reason they wanted me to use Windows, which was absurd since I worked on the backend of a site which would only be deployed to Linux, didn’t last long in that job after that was made official.

In short, as long as my main machine is Linux, I don’t mind having to have a Windows machine to do Windows stuff. But I get annoyed out of my mind if I’m either forced to use Windows as my main OS (it’s just not ergonomic for me), especially if there’s no reason for it.

Back in 2004 a friend was using Linux, I asked that friend to teach me programming, and he said he would only do so on Linux because he didn’t even knew how to compile stuff on windows. So I started dual booting and originally I only used the Linux partition for programming, organically I started to spend more time on Linux than on windows until eventually I only used Windows for gaming.

Over time I had some degree of success with Wine, so some games I would play on Linux, and only use Windows for the ones that didn’t worked. Then around 2011 I discovered Humble Bundle and started to get native games for Linux, and by 2013 when Steam came to Linux I realized I hadn’t rebooted to use Windows in years, so I wiped that partition.

Probably it’s not, probably what happens is that the GPU is throttling and not reaching the same performance, and with less performance comes less heat. Try running a benchmark to see if there’s any significant difference in performance.

Honestly, 2% cut is nothing. If you like your new job better for whatever reason, less stressful, more fulfilling, whatever, 2% is less than nothing, your personal life matters and should weight in.

I don’t know about your career paths, but I could see it being a problem if there was opportunity to grow in the old job but not on the new one. But everything else being the same, an insignificant pay cut to do something you like significantly more is a win in my book.