My experience with Linux Day 3 - Lemmy.World
Recap. I’m a relative noob to linux, but have been trying it on and off since
around 2005 when Ubuntu was first making waves, to test the viability of Linux
as a Windows replacement for me personally. I’ve been documenting my relative
impressions and process so far. Day 1 - Nvidia driver issues and issues
attaching a NAS drive. Day 2 - Solved Nvidia issues with Pop!OS transition from
Fedora (Nobara was totally non-functional for me), figured out NAS drive was
sambav1 drive and was able to get those packages installed and enabled. Also
solved external hdd connection issues with steam by using steam console to force
the mounted drive, which is now working. Which brings us to Day 3. I wish I
could say that solving those issues was the end of it, I wish I could say we
were double rainbow gold across the board right now. But these things are not
so. Current issues plaguing me. 1. I have 2 ‘monitors’ one which is a samsung
odyssey ultrawide. Obviously my primary for gaming and work. Mounted on the wall
behind and over it is a 55in TV. It’s awesome cause they almost perfectly line
up, but the 55in TV is a touch hard to read text on in 4k. So my usual solution
is to set scaling on the second monitor to 150%. Initially I couldn’t figure it
out, in windows the setting was under the Nvidia controls, in Linux it’s under
the xorg config. After some fucking around I got it working! Holy shit does that
break things. Steam, which I have installed, and have installed a few games to
my external HDD and local SSD for testing has a super weird error where the text
and icons go absolutely nano, and even when you resize the screen the icons and
text do not resize. I found a sort of fix, where you can add a manual entry to a
steam file described here
[https://askubuntu.com/questions/1229960/steam-fonts-are-very-small-on-ubuntu-20-04]
but while this did sorta fix it, the problem persisted in any window that steam
launched like friends lists. After hours of digging further I came up with this.
It’s a known issue in steam and has been for 2 years. There is no fix, for any
version of linux. Rather than deal with it or go further, I just set the scaling
to 100 and said fuck it. I may lower the resolution on the upper monitor from 4k
to 1080p to make things easier to read in a way that doesn’t break Linux. 2. I
use NordVPN, which I guess I’m not taking recommendations on what to switch to.
Using NordVPN on this is through command line with no GUI which annoys me,
because I actually liked the windows GUI for a number of reasons. But there’s
also two glaring functionality issues. When I connect to a NordVPN server it
breaks my NAS connection. So I checked fstab and I’m connected via local IP
192.168.1.1 so it looks like NordVPN connections break my local connection in
name resolution? How that’s possible is beyond me and I’m a networking guy, that
just makes zero sense. I use a VPN for the obvious sailing of the high seas, so
this creates an issue cause I usually just had it download locally then upload
automatically, looks like I’ll be doing this manually. Oh yeah and have no
access to media while using piracy. I also liked just leaving the VPN active for
anon browsing, but guess I can’t do that and access my stuff locally. So
annoying. So my goal has been to get my media and games working. So far, aces
across the board on VLC on PopOS! Failure on Fedora. Now, let’s try a game.
Easily my most played 3 games are the Total War Warhammer series, Elite
Dangerous with a HOTAS setup… so we’ll be trying that later, cause I still need
to set up the HOTAS system, something I’m super duper looking forward to. And
BattleTech with the 3062 mod, because I played with the minis as a kid and it’s
amazing to see it fully programmed into a game. I couldn’t afford many mechs as
a kid so collecting them in game is cathartic. I know this sounds rambling, but
these are the things that tie me to windows. Getting all this working in Linux
is kind of necessary for me to remain here. So let’s start with Warhammer, since
out of the gate it’s going to require the least configuration. I also figure
since it’s a AAA game with tons of players, it’s probably the best optimized.
I’m also watching The Expanse on the big screen, so streaming 4k video to a
second monitor and typing this at the same time. I just finished the first
battle on an Immortal Empires campaign, and performance wise, just wow. I mean I
was doing this from sort of thing from windows as well, but yeah, running the
same graphics there’s a performance jump while the game is running. However on
the con side… I was running it like this off the external HDD before and while
load times are definitely increased compared to the SSD there is definitely some
lag when going from battles to the campaign overview. From a diagnostics
standpoint I’m going to have to check to make sure that it’s reading at a ‘high
speed usb’ connection. Also another theory is linux takes more time to compile
assets because it’s undergoing some kind of conversion or something, but once
compiled it runs better. That’s my theory at least, or where I’d start tugging
that performance issue. This is kind of a wow moment for me. I’m going to
cautiously say that switching to Linux is a real possibility in a longer run
scenario. However, there are still tons of isos and other… acquired games that I
have that aren’t running. And while I do like steam I also don’t want to be
locked to it and other pay stores. So tomorrow will be trying to fix whatever
issue NordVPN is having, and trying to figure out some installs from isos and
exes, which should be super fun from what I’ve seen. For the rest of tonight I’m
just going to enjoy a campaign of warhammer and watch my stories, and marvel at
the fact that I’m doing it on Linux. I never thought I’d see this day.
