Does anyone here use Linux?

.. as a desktop OS? Do you use it for gaming? Or have you, like me, just downloaded Ubuntu a couple of times just to "try it out"?

 

Not ATM, but I definitely will switch to it once Linux Editor is out of beta.

 

Well for time to time i use Ubuntu MATE in my home to learn, For my work i use ubuntu too for server. later when is out of beta i will switch my workflow too.

 

I'd suggest Linux Mint from debian-deriveratives as it is both easy to use, constantly updated (unlike Debian, where newest soft in the repo is from 4 years ago ) and is free of any clutter such as Unity (the poor excuse of a desktop environment, not our Unity), Mir and so on. Teorethically you can either install *ubuntu (kubuntu, xubuntu, etc.) or "clean" regular Ubuntu, but it is more work than it is worth.

 

Using Linux Mint myself, and the Linux editor. It's still pretty buggy: on my machine, the editor crashes as soon as I try playing in the editor, and my graphics card doesn't appear to like the antialiasing. However, I can work around those easily enough by creating a fresh build and lowering the graphics quality when testing it, and if nothing else it forces me to test in the final build. Testing in the editor caused me to not notice a bug until I tried to record some gameplay footage

Regarding gaming, I have only three installed on my machine at the moment - OpenTTD, Oolite, and Jagged Alliance 2 (running under Wine). OpenTTD and Oolite are running natively and have given me no problems at all, while JA2 sometimes freezes up for no apparent reason. I did install Mount & Blade: Warband, but that (somehow) caused an issue where logging in via the gui instead of the command line went into an infinite loop after I restarted the computer.

Apart from that, I love Mint. It's quite easy to use, and it something works on Ubuntu, it's very likely to work in Mint.

 

I want to move away from Windows in the long term, but I need more apps to become available and stable first. Not just Unity but the Adobe and Substance suites too. I'm not holding by breath for any of that to happen though.

 

Sorry to burst your bubble but this hasn't been accurate for over a decade now. Debian's numbered releases began coming out every two years starting around 2005. Currently it's on the eighth major release and the packages are only one year old.

Of course if you absolutely must have the latest releases you can always pick up Debian's "testing" release which functions more or less like a rolling release. Don't be too fooled by the name though. It's often more stable than official releases from most other distros.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=debian

Going back to the questions you've asked, I have used Linux off and on as a desktop OS. There was a period of time where I used Slackware but I have used Debian and Red Hat as well. My current plan for the foreseeable future is to return to Linux but with a slight twist.

My goal is to have a Linux server distribution running as my host operating system. Every desktop OS, both Windows and Linux alike, will be running through KVM. Virtualization has supported directly accessing the processor in VMs for some time but now we can do actual devices as well like graphics cards.

I've already picked out the server distribution but I haven't completely decided on one for the desktop.

https://lime-technology.com/what-is-unraid/

 

Me too, for Substance Suite is going to be soon. Here you have info that are working in porting to Linux and telling what are the problems.
https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=da3ogj787l5trcipga6uraqf14&topic=1176.15

For Adobe port to linux, how says in my city "the hell can freeze waiting for that". Because of that i change the workflow of quixel to Substance and learning Gimp that work pretty well with then.

 

Don't forget on the musical side with guys like native instrument not budging a finger and one of my fav synth1 not even making an effort

 

This is largely why I've decided on using VMs. I can have the security and stability of Linux without having to worry about losing my applications and games. Running VMs on Linux has become absurdly easy too with various management tools.

 

I always have 3 platforms running, Win10 as the host, then Ubuntu and CentOS running under vmware. I love Linux but as a work platform not a gaming platform.

 

Never touched Linux, except at the vauge at a distance level of a remote server. Don't think I ever will.

 

Hows the performance of games running in VM?

That's great news!

 

Unfortunately I don't have any hardware capable of passing non-processor devices through to the VM yet. Most of my knowledge comes from scouring the web, various reddit communities, the unraid forums, YouTube, etc. From what I understand the performance of a VM with both processor and device passthrough is about 97% of normal.

A performance loss of approximately 3% is only going to cost you a frame or two in most cases though.

 

I used to run Slackware linux system for a year or so as a primary OS.I wrote basic traffic accounting for it (based on ip-tables), know the way around the system, how to build kernel, install packages from scratch, where most stuff goes, how to manually configure X server (well, I'll need a refresher for that), build custom packages, etc. The basic usage, pretty much. That was the only linux system I liked and find pleasant to work with. Then I gave up.

For the most tasks you need windows system. To maintain linux system, you'd need your own sysadmin, package-manager based systems are usually not very pleasant to deal with, due to amount of stuff they do behind the scenes - it's like windows, only worse.

You should be able to run some games and windows software on linux through WINE, but don't expect miracles. You should be definitely able to run Crysis 1 and Half Life 2 on it. I'm not aware of current status of hardware acceleration on virtual machines, though, it appears you'd need vmware for it.

Some stuff was nice, like KDE desktop.
Overall it is worth using if you're planning to maintain servers at some point, or maybe if you're into robotics and will need an os for custom hardware (you'll end up dealing with unixlikes there). As a desktop system - it is not a good choice, IMO.

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Also, community can be quite toxic/delusional, and it is contagious. Lots of people want to be a part of "bigger something" fighting for the "greater good" or "future of mankind", etc. Some of them think that Linux is that "bigger something"...

 

My experience with package managers is largely restricted to Debian and its derivative distributions, so my experience is pretty much only with apt. Not only have I not had any negative experiences with the apt package manager but I found it to be quite pleasant to deal with.

Adding and removing repositories, watching as it automatically fetches any necessary dependencies, having it scan the system for any unnecessary packages, etc has all been very straightforward.

Your statements that it's worse than Windows just doesn't hold up for me. The entire point of a package manager is to ease the process of acquiring dependencies for software. Yes, Windows doesn't have a lot you generally need for dependencies but at the same time that's because it has how many years/decades of cruft embedded in it?

Yes, some of us do believe Linux is part of "something bigger" but not all of us are fanatics about it. Fanatics exist just about everywhere to some extent though. I've run into them extensively in game development communities.

You do not need vmware for hardware acceleration of virtual machines. Any virtualization software will generally do the trick with KVM (that's the name of the kernel module, the application is known as QEMU) being a decent one.

 

"us"?
:-\

I'm not having one more of those discussions. Do you know that HUUUUGE Linux vs Windows thread on linux questions? IIRC it usually goes for few years, then get closed only to be reborn anew? I participated in that. So I had enough.

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Slackware felt right. Debian didn't. Windows felt more right than Debian and less "right" than Slackware.
I'm not a big fan of system that do a lot of work behind the scenes as debian package manager.

Also, in my opinion, dependency resolution should be 100% automated without any need of human intervention. The system has source code access, so it should parse it. And debian repos, IIRC require human-made submissions.

-_-
I was obviously talking about GPU hardware acceleration. Direct OpenGL version 4.5 support on a guest, CUDA guest to host forwarding and all that stuff, not to mention less needed things like running accelerated DX11 guest on Linux host.

 

Many of my friends are Linux fans. I've generally come to think of "us" as "anyone who isn't a fanatical nutjob".

Kinda like the [insert game engine here] vs Unity threads?

I only have limited experience with Slackware and Red Hat so I cannot remember how those functioned beyond the fact that Slackware was very lightweight if I recall.

If only it were that easy.

Yes, I'm quite aware of what you were referring to but I think the part you failed to understand is that I was referring to the exact same thing. My impression from your statements regarding virtualization is that you haven't kept up to date. I may be wrong but I'm going to explain it regardless for everyone.

Basically modern virtualization allows you to pass DMA-capable devices through to the virtual machine allowing it to directly access the hardware device as if the guest OS weren't even running within a VM. What this means is that the host OS does not need to have a driver for the device nor does the VM software need to emulate anything.

It simply needs to know how to pass it through to the VM and the guest OS will have the full capabilities. One very major reason I began investigating this path to building a system so heavily is due to Linus Tech Tips. They built an experimental system to allow seven gamers to use the same system. It's not vmware but rather KVM.

They showed each station running Unigine Heaven (a DX11 benchmark) as well as games I don't recognize. Trust me I wouldn't be considering this for my next computer if I felt it would hold me back in any way. I love messing with new hardware features. I've spent weeks researching unraid alone.

 

I've used it a little bit, but everything about Ubuntu and Debian were worse then Windows and OSX except that they were smaller and left more CPU for programs(Not that it mattered as all the software I used was crap compared to Windows/OSX alternatives)

That being said, I'd use Android over Windows if they pushed more towards desktop and programs started supporting it.

 

For painting textures I strongly suggest Krita instead (unless you're making textures from photos). It's better for making things "from scratch", be it a digital art or textures. You can also paint normal maps in it! Additionally, from Krita 3.0 it will have support for classic, frame by frame, animation (it already has, if you dl alpha).

 

LMMS has support for VSTi on Linux via WineLib (which allows for dynamic linking to Windows dlls from Linux apps).

 

I'm using arch linux with xfce as my primary workstation. Looks and acts mostly like windows pre-metro. Currently I'm only using windows (dual boot) for a few games and for building my game to steam (steamcmd is windows only apparently), though plenty of games do run on linux. The linux editor works <mostly> for what I do with it, only locked mouse aiming is glitchy.

IMO Windows 7 is a great OS, it's just sad that you're required to uninstall adware to keep it great. Windows 10... meh. They seem to keep adding new interface designs on top of the old ones. There must be 3 or 4 now with windows 10, and you'd never know which one you have to be in the find option %x or do %x.

So, as this will of course become a windows vs linux thread:

Windows:
+ More software, especially proprietary
+ Marketshare. People will know what it is and often how to use it.
+ More hardware (driver) support. Looking at you, printers and wifi adapters/cards.
- Fragmented UI. There's aero, some windows xp menus, and even some w98 menus. Now with W10 metro on top of those.
- Adware on W7 to get W10. Need to get technical to fix it.

Linux:
+ More up to date if you want, depends on distributions.
+ Package management in most distributions
+ More secure, though quite a chunk of it is possibly obscurity. And depends on distributions.
+ More plug and play hardware support, especially older hardware, in my experience. Though less specialized drivers.
- Fragmented, so many distributions, window managers, desktop environments.
- Often need some minimal knowledge of terminal use.

 

I do, with cygwin
GCC/G++ and cross platform development issues glued me like this.

 

Please show a recent article that describes how to do that for:
OpenGL 4.5 guest.
Hardware-accelerated CUDA guest.
DX11 guest on Linux host.

Also, USB device forwarding (Wacom tablet on host being accessible to guest)

On a free VM solution like VirtualBox.

 

Unfortunately there aren't any recent articles describing it. About the closest thing to instructions would be the Linus Tech Tips video covering their smaller 2-in-1 system. Some additional information is available on the unRAID forums but you have to sort through multiple posts to find it.

Once I start putting mine together, which will take a while as I need to save up enough to buy the parts, I'll write up an article detailing the processes I went through to achieve it. For now I'll just throw up the earlier LTT video.

By the way KVM is an open source solution. It's a kernel module that has started coming pre-installed with some distros.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine

 

I hate video tutorials and don't want to watch through that thing for shreds of potentially useful info.

Exactly.

Look, it is just when you say "but it can be done!", I sorta expect that you already used that, know how to do that, and remember an article that explains how to do that, or can outline the process using a few sentences, and are aware of the shortcomings and have this thing running.

Example:
Claim: "It is possible to run 3d games on text linux terminal"
Outline in few sentences: "To do so, you need a 3d game with software renderer (for example, UT2004 for linux), that relies on libsdl. You recompile a new version of libsdl, while adding support for libcaca to it, then force the game load new version, while forcing libsdl to use libcaca as rendering system. I don't remember specifics and it may require kernel support for svgalib or running the game as root".

If you just *heard* that it can be done, but don't know the process or articles, then you're just retelling a rumor/hearsay.

So, someone made a two-in-one gaming tower. Cool. That was sarcasm.

However, Murphy law says that if I try to run linux guest with accelerated CUDA/OpenGL on my Win 7 64bit system, then I'm with 100% certainty will hit a couple of hard issues those guys didn't have to face, because their goals and setup are different.

Yeah, there's probably a theoretical way to forward any device from host to guest. However, unless there are drivers for that, article that outlines that, then practically it can't be done unless I'm willing sacrifice few months of my time looking for a way to do it and possibly sending patches to several projects. I have better things to do.

---

Also, during the whole deepdream craze lots of people tried to run deepdream on windows. There are howtos explaining how to run non-accelerated linux guest on windows via vagrant. There's a howto explaining how to enable CUDA acceleration, and run the damn thing on windows system.
However, I have not heard of even one howto that runs linux guest with cuda acceleration on windows host. Why is that?

 

I know the processes involved in setting up the VM, but I don't have access to an IOMMU-capable computer. It's pretty straightforward though. You simply set up the VM like you normally would. At least until you reach the stage where you assign the DMA-capable PCI devices to it.

Basically you need to acquire the hardware address of the device and give it to the virtual machine manager. That's it.

I'm not quite positive I understand your question. Are you suggesting that CUDA does not run natively on Linux?

http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-linux/

Only from Linux. Neither virtualbox nor vmware's non-server solutions are capable of it yet.

Okay, I understand. Why are you posting in Linux threads though if you have no intention of using it?

 

Have a screenshot instead. You'll have to make do with this until I have the necessary equipment for an exhaustive example.

 

There's a little problem - it is not a CUDA-accelerated GPU.

I was talking about Linux guest accessing a device that provides CUDA acceleration from Windows host.
I thought I was quite clear about it.

What's the point of talking about it, then?

-_-
Seriously?
"Hail, the being of planet earth! State the purpose of your existence to prove sentience or be destroyed!".
---
The thread was sorta interesting, so I chimed in. Then you started talking about greatness of linux and how hardware acceleration can be forwarded from host to guest even for GPUs and CUDA. I asked you for an article, and you couldn't provide it.
-_-
Where'd you get the idea that I've no intention to use Linux? If I ever decide to build a robot, it'll be running unix-like system.

 

Unfortunately I'm not aware of any virtualization software that can handle passthrough with a Windows host.

You just came across as negatively inclined towards Linux.

 

Thought so. ^_^

For a desktop, perhaps. I don't see it as a good desktop system. (on the other hand, there's no perfect desktop OS right now)
For robotics, science (or mad science), though, it is just what you need.

 

It definitely has some very bizarre desktop environments lately. Some feel like a step backwards in terms of usability.

Have you seen the Raspberry Pi module that allows you to use most LEGO NXT/EV3 motors and sensors?

http://www.dexterindustries.com/brickpi/

 

I was thinking about something that is bigger and has legs.
I do have some idea I'd like to try out someday, it is just that thing would cost quite a bit in parts alone.

 

I will move to linux when....

-Unity Editor is available
-PDAnet is available

Sometimes people say the unity editor is the best game made in unity... well to that I, the jester, ask, "Then why doesn't it run on linux?"

As for pdanet, not sure what I'm going to do about that one. I'm enjoying not having a rooted phone, but Sprint blocks the phone's built in wired tethering feature. The desktop client is only available for mac and windows

 

Yep about Krita, i have installed but is not going well with my Intel HD4000, pincels or tools need wait for show or using the eraser and his workflow is more easy when you use a tablet . i use Gimp for texture from photos and more easy to change the format that krita, but i going to use when i receive a proper gpu and tablet

 

AFAIK VMWare

You mean the performance? Compared to 2.9.9 which you most likely have, 3.0 will be much faster. Current alphas are already faster to use than they were. Also it can be used with the mouse, if you need somewhat straight line, you can use curve tool. To change current brush size use shift+lmb drag.

 

You are aware there is an experimental release available, right?

 

and thanks for the tips, yep perfomance in my home computer is bad using the 2.8.x version, now going to test the 2.9.1 and the 3 pre-alpha, and about info of creating normals is still new only i found a video and the userbase, beside for normal map of soft body is good for hard body i believe is going to more easy to create a height map than painting a hard normal.

 

Yes, but it's still funny. It's been asked for forever.

 

For anyone looking for photoshop under Linux, here is a small gem I found a week ago http://www.pixeluvo.com/ obviously its a much simpler app but I guess it can replace ps in a lot of tasks. There is also the announcement from Serif about Affinity for windows. Who knows maybe they will move to Linux next.