GNOME Shell Hurts Gaming Performance 232
An anonymous reader writes "According to recent benchmarks by Phoronix, using the GNOME Shell will cause a large performance hit when running OpenGL games on Linux. Using Unity and GNOME Shell are also hitting various bugs in the open-source drivers."
Not seeing the downside to this (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yep. Anything that bugs out on you and doesn't work is actually A Good Thing (tm). Those who disagree run Windows.
Re:Not seeing the downside to this (Score:4, Funny)
> Those who disagree run Windows
And as a first witness I call the infamous "On error resume next" statement in VB.
Re:Not seeing the downside to this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not seeing the downside to this (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no problem at all, unless of course someone would go ahead and make this the default setting for the most popular and visible Linux distribution for non-techies out there today. But why would someone put together a hack like this and release before it's stable.
There are no doubt "non-techies" that accidentally installed an operating system that was not as stable as they would like.
For this I can make no excuse. If only it were noted somewhere prominently on the download page: "...long-term support (LTS) releases are supported for three years on the desktop. Perfect for organizations that need more stability..." -- Perhaps it would be best to place such text right next to the download options [ubuntu.com], near the giant "Start Download" button.
If only there were several ways to try out the operating system before installing it, as well as step by step instructions on how to do so; Perhaps these should go on the download page as well?
Alas, What fools they are! If only they were even more user friendly! Or -- Perhaps they've made it too easy to upgrade. MS wouldn't think of having a single button + admin password upgrade feature... I bet they don't have this problem on Windows.
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unless non-LTS upgrades are explicitly enabled by the user.
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Re:Not seeing the downside to this (Score:5, Insightful)
If only it were noted somewhere prominently on the download page: "...long-term support (LTS) releases are supported for three years on the desktop. Perfect for organizations that need more stability..." -- Perhaps it would be best to place such text right next to the download options [ubuntu.com], near the giant "Start Download" button.
If only they went the extra mile and made the giant "Start Download" button default to LTS. If only they warned people that, in Ubuntuspeak, "Latest" meant "Unstable" and "Long Term" meant "anything after six months" and "Support" meant security bug fixes rather than any application updates. If only they hadn't got the reputation as "the Linux for the rest of us" which lets them lead potential "switchers" up the garden path. If only Linux devs were as good at designing GUIs as they are at writing solid systems stuff. If only they'd finish playing (GUI) catch-up with OSX 10.2 and Windows XP before they tried to play catch-up with iOS and Android. If only Linux GUIs didn't still feel like a cargo-cult mishmash of eye-candy ideas from Mac and Windows thrown together by nerds who only ever use a GUI to run 6 copies of vim side-by-side.
Linux in general has a major problem with its model: the only user-friendly way of installing applications is via the distribution repositories, forcing such people to upgrade their entire OS when they just want to upgrade one application (unless they're lucky and someone backports it). Techies see only openness (I wouldn't run a server on anything else, and I usually end up building all the server-side software from tarballs anyway), but non-techies see a garden with even higher walls than an iPad.
(unless they're lucky and someone backports it) (Score:3)
Linux in general has a major problem with its model: the only user-friendly way of installing applications is via the distribution repositories, forcing such people to upgrade their entire OS when they just want to upgrade one application (unless they're lucky and someone backports it).
I was able to update Shotwell ahead of the next release by adding the Yorba PPA.
Then please allow me to rephrase the last parenthetical to capture what I think Cynic was trying to say: (unless they're lucky and someone makes a PPA for their distro version)
And for any of these I had the option of downloading the *.DEB install files
(unless they're lucky and someone makes a *.DEB for the system library versions in their distro version)
But then I might be missing something about how PPAs and .deb packaging work. Can someone clue me in as to how these are or are not the answer?
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You do realize this is why people don't take open source seriously, right?
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You make a lot of very bold statements
Not really, but do I insinuate them with my boldness.
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Unless the bugs are in, say, the nVidia driver.
Re:Not seeing the downside to this (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless the bugs are in, say, the nVidia driver.
...which, according to TFA, they aren't. In fact, the bugs seem to be in anything BUT the proprietary nVidia driver.
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for the good of all of us,
except the ones who are dead.
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I think I'll get myself some cake from the fridge. ;)
It also mentions KWin. (Score:2, Interesting)
...and I have noticed some weirdness here. It seems like KWin disables desktop effects on fullscreen windows, yet disabling them entirely (there's a hotkey to toggle it) has a huge impact on the performance of most things (like games) that use the GPU.
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Disable thumbnails in desktop effects. This was what used to kill full-screen windows. While it usually do not impact performance of kwin, it seems for some reason to impact performance of apps with many updates per second.
Btw. Do not disable deskop effects on nvidia GPU with the proprietary driver. Disabling effects on nvidia will make graphics slower and use more power. The problem is the nvidia has terrible 2D performance, the composer uses XGL which is heavily optimized in the nvidia driver.
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No, it magically makes kwin use GL for drawing (or xrender, there are two backends). I am not sure about the rest, window caching and cached thumbnails are not the same as far as I know.
What, no Intel? (Score:2)
Intel might not be your first choice if gaming was the primary function for your computer, but then Linux probably wouldn't be either.
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Not needing to reboot, and not having to maintain two installations is major win...
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I like to know that the code for the software I run could be independently evaluated by a third party. Whenever I run Windows, I'm worried my computer is doing something behind my back that I don't want it to be doing and have no control over.
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Dropping in Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that was great! Almost every feature I used either gone or mangled. It can no longer render windows properly, causes video playback to jump and freeze, and is now almost entirely unusable with my new video card. Gnome is even worse.
So, as a strong proponent of open source software, I am really dismayed. I can't even use Linux anymore because no window manager works right with my ATI card, and even before that, were barely usable (older Nvidia) without glitches. How am I supposed to advocate that others use it if I can't?
I think Linux needs a complete change in focus and methodology, or it is going to end up losing what little market share it has. It is time to stop trying to copy Apple UIs and time to start worrying about stability. This whole batch of project managers has failed us - we need mass forks of major projects.
But then, what do I know? I'm a windows user, again...
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But I did disable Nepomuk/Strigi and the fairly puzzling aggregating notification syste
Re:Dropping in Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
[all WMs seem to suck now...]
Use FVWM :)
I think Linux needs a complete change in focus and methodology, or it is going to end up losing what little market share it has. It is time to stop trying to copy Apple UIs and time to start worrying about stability.
I wholeheartedly agree (caveats below). The obsession with copying interfaces is getting really annoying now. Back in the day when Win9X seemed to be the thing to copy, I could afford a Windows machine (in fact I had a partition then), but I preferred the unixy UI that Linux had. I found creeping windows-isms an unpleasant change. Now Apple seems to be the thing to copy. I can afford to buy an Apple if I want one, but I don't. I prefer the user interfaces that Linux has available, and so I find the creeping appleism's really annoying.
It also comes with this rather annoying de-facto assumption that anything Apple does must necessarily be better.
Ever time I sit down at a new ubuntu install, I find the interface less like what I am used to, and more like interfaces that I actively avoid.
It seems like the only thing I can do is to keep using Linux while the things I love about it are slowly chipped away by people who seem intent on destroying it for what?
Re:Dropping in Quality (Score:4, Insightful)
Before the above comment is moderated away as a troll or something (it isn't by the way), I'd like to completely agree! I used linux almost exclusively from 1994 until about 2009. Then I gave up, despite my ideals, and just installed Windows. I even bought Windows 7 when it came out and am happily using it. Why? Because I just want shit to work. I don't have the time any more to tweak an OS to a point where it almost works; I need to get work done. But even with that considered I was using linux and KDE to develop my open source app using KDE and KDevelop until KDE 4 came out. Yes, yes, yes, I could have changed my development methods and made things work, but I had (and have) very little spare time these days to "set up an environment" so I just stopped developing it. My app didn't even rely on KDE... had nothing to do with it in fact, but my dev environment was KDE-Based and I had no time to adapt. I reckon others may have been in the same position. I still have linux installed, but instead of on my primary partition it's not even on a real partition anymore -- it's in a VM. I can't see that changing in the near future because, as I said, I need to get shit done and not fuck around with tweaking an OS.
Re:Dropping in Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
When I started with linux back on mandrake 8, you had the utterly awesome sawfish/sawmill built into Gnome - I played with that for weeks just because it was fun, but when doing Real Work I found that some of those esoteric window functions really did make a huge difference to my workflow. Then metacity was brought in to the exclusion of everything else and I switched to KDE, which had broadly similar WM capabilities. So far so froody until everyone decided that desktops needed to be 3D accelerated because apple had done so (and everyone loved the swooshing dock), so both KDE and Gnome throw the baby out with the bathwater and redesign their WM's from scratch, losing a lot of the functionality along the way (or almost all of it in the case of Gnome 3), because apparently "most people don't use feature X" means the same as "no-one uses feature X". Granted, KDE4 is still pretty configurable and IMHO orders of magnitude better than Gnome 2 or 3 but I still feel like I'm fighting it for attention all the time, when it should really be getting the hell out of the way.
Windows 7 may try very hard to make you fit into it's "the user is stupid" mould, but with the right reg hacks I can customise it almost as much as I could on my KDE setup; heck, focus-follows-mouse support (an utter deal breaker for me) is waaaay better in 7 than it was in 2000/XP and doesn't cause half the glitchiness in some apps like it used to do. Overall, it's not perfect, but good enough and once the initial pain of configuration was done with (and then exported to a reg file which makes it a 2s change on every other machine) I no longer have to fight it. Throw cygwin + mintty and a few other choice apps into the mix and all of a sudden I've got me the best of both worlds (cue Borg joke).
My main problem is usability "experts" and neophiliacs who keep telling me that I'm doing things the wrong way, or that "clicking on a launcher is so old hat, that's why we removed launchers! Just open the X menu, start typing what you want to run, and then click one of the programs that show up!" or other such counter-intuitive bullcrapshitturds which for some inexplicable reason have become the default in all the major DE's. Not interested, and yes I have tried it. Not against new ways of doing things by any means, but devs shouldn't expect users to re-learn every paradigm at the drop of a hat because some self-appointed expert says "this new way I just invented is the best for me, therefore it's the best for everyone!" and then someone else sees that as a great way to do away with the old "inferior" method, making it painful to add back. A bit like Wikipedia deletionists actually; "shading the window of type X is not notable enough, and therefore will be removed!".
Not that I'm singling out Gnome here, almost every non-niche DE/WM I've used in the last few years is guilty of the above, MS and Apple included.
</second rant of the thread>
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Which ui is copying apple?
Birth kde sets are fairly their own, with the desktop one most like windows pre seven.
Gnome three was completely it's own thing when I last tried it.
Gnome two was perhaps an updated take on os 9, maybe, but again I'd say it was more it's own thing.
Unity is closest to os x, but also is quite different.
Unity makes default old apple features (menu at top), and the dock is fairly similar to os x, and the button placement, but it still looks and feels fairly different (window snapping,
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First of all, Linux is doing quite well from servers to cell phones. What you're complaining about is GUIs that run on top of X, both of which do not rely on Linux for their existence. GNOME and KDE may have issues, but those issues don't involve Linux at all.
And with regard to desktop environments, I used XFCE 4: it's relatively small, lightweight, and not resource intensive. OTOH I use my XBox 360 and PS3 for gaming.
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Yes, so you don't actually use your OS to do work and get things done (apart from maybe web browsing or development).
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Yes, so you don't actually use your OS to do work and get things done (apart from maybe web browsing or development).
What exactly do you consider "work"? And no, I don't use the OS to do work. The OS gets out of the way while I do work, which is exactly what it should do.
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An OS is more like a desk or bench on which you put your tools (hence why we have the term "desktop", and Amiga OS was even called Workbench). You want it to be there, holding everything up and easy to hand, but you don't want it to get in the way.
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I have been a long time Red Hat (started 6.0) and Fedora user. Due to the limited support cycle of 1 year, I recently had to upgrade my Fedora 13. Decided to go straight to Fedora 15 to avoid the same trouble 6 months from now. Unfortunately, that GNOME 3.0 thing is totally f*cking UNUSABLE. They indeed tried to mimick Mac OS X but then a job very badly done. It is a pity that a couple of arrogant developers think they are usability experts. Same thing happended years ago with the Spatial view in Nautilus,
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If I had mod points today I would mod you up. I have been a Redhat user since the old version 4.2 and Fedora since V. 1. When the Gnome developers made spacial view the default, I truly began to question their judgement and competence as interface designers. I mean WTF? What are these people actually doing with their computers? Not much apparently or they would "get" why these interface solutions are increadibly irritating to true desktop users. And no amount of comment from disgusted users seems to make a
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I updated from F14 to F15 and made sure I had XFCE installed, just in case Gnome 3 wasn't for me. It wasn't.
Admittedly there are tweaks you can do to make it more "normal" but yeah it's very iOS-y. Fallback mode isn't a solution because you lose some functionality that way, and you can't theme fall back mode to look more Gnome 2-ish. As far as I know there IS a way to add app launchers to either the top bar or bottom bar thingy.
I had no problem with wired networking at all on F15.
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No need to use a "spin", just use the standard DVD and choose to install the XFCE group. Why they don't make the DVD the default download instead of the CD I'll never know. We constantly see people over on the Fedora Forum posting on how their new Fedora install doesn't have Open/Libre office, and then they mention they installed the CD.
Re:Dropping in Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
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My only complaint is the inclusion of the nouveau driver - which despite being present as the default driver for all NVIDIA cards, doesn't work with all NVIDIA cards. It's included in every distro I've tried recently, despite this shortcoming - a poor decision from all distros.
Not a problem with slackware as it treats its users as intelligent beings instead of clueless eyecandy junkies and installing the blacklist package is a doddle.
There's little, if any, r
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Maybe it you just used the default settings instead of incorrectly trying to tinker with stuff, it would work for you as it works for everybody else?
I have no problem with Gnome 2 nor KDE4, be it on ATI or Nvidia cards.
Now it is widely known that some ATI cards were only well-supported by fglrx and fglrx dropped support for them (ATI's decision), so if you're using one of those (like the Radeon 9800 Pro) you're better off buying a new one if you're using Linux.
But the nvidia drivers usually work flawlessly
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Same here. I've been using CentOS w/KDE 3.5 simply because I couldn't yet get used to new distros with KDE 4. CentOS 5 is getting a little long in the tooth (can't run Firefox 4) but you'd be surprised how usable it is (and it still gets security updates).
To be honest, I think people like you and I really need to investigate the alternative WMs. Some of them have never changed from their core presentation as far as I can see. Maybe that's the kind of stability we want.
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Huge desktop environments on *nix have always been crap. All you really need is a window manager and a terminal. Nothing on Windows comes close to the convenience and power of a simple wm and terminal.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Why don't you just buy some hardware that hasn't been (or has minimally been) poisoned by Microsoft? The two machines I have that work the best are a Gigabyte-boarded and -video carded machine with Phenom II, AMD chipset and nVidia GPU running Natty, and an Asus EEE 701 OC'd to 900 (mine is a 600MHz model) running Maverick. (If it ain't broke...) And yet I also have an AMD chipset and GPU notebook with R690M chipset and L110 CPU which can only run Vista. Since I bought all of this stuff either used or assum
Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz. (Score:5, Insightful)
Disable Desktop effects shut off Compiz. This has been known for a very long time, whether it be Warzone 2100, Quake 4, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament, or Warcraft 3. These "desktop effects" do nothing but slow the box down.
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Or you could log out and log back in with a Compiz-free session. Or you could create another user and switch to that user to play games. I have a limited memory system running Natty and I installed XBMC on it, created a user with a non-login "shell" not in /etc/shells, set the password to a nice mess of characters and then ate the characters, then permitted that user to log in to gdm without a password via PAM. If I were to install some game that wanted all the RAM on that system I'd make a user for that, t
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For the longest time I kept a blackbox [sourceforge.net] login for gaming from, because of the very low overhead.
I now do all my Linux gaming from within Gnome, mostly because I'm running 8GB of RAM though.
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I now do all my Linux gaming from within Gnome, mostly because I'm running 8GB of RAM though.
you and me both. I don't even mess with window rules unless the game is visibly slow.
If you still want KDE 3.5 (Score:3)
Support the Trinity Desktop Environment, it is KDE 3 upgraded to work on Modern distros.
Summary (Score:2)
The new GUIs are bloated pigs and eat processor and GPU resources.
Yeah, that's about the sum of it. I'm still on Fedora 14 and I don't see any cause to go to 15 just yet. I may never go to 15. If they resolve these problems, I might go to 16.
I hate to say it, but I think it's just about time that Linus Torvalds started wearing black turtlenecks and began influencing vendors and developers to come together under a grand mystical vision. The biggest problem with Windows is the multitude of directions deve
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The new GUIs are bloated pigs and eat processor and GPU resources.
So don't use them. Noone forces you to, not even on a new machine with all of some flashy, userfriendly new Linux distribution installed.
My desktop environment is, and has always been, at work and at home, on Linux and Solaris, on huge 16-core multiuser systems with 66GB RAM and on old Pentium boxes with 0.032 GB RAM, ctwm as a window manager. It has a menu for starting programs, and it has multiple desktops. It's supported everywhere, and always will be. The same goes for fvwm and many other window mana
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Depending on your needs, it may make sense to make a VM out of the existing system and migrate it to new hardware (as opposed to a reinstall). There are options to run VM's on hypervisors or on full-blown OS's, so you have some choice there.
just gaming? (Score:4, Insightful)
gnome-shell hurts productivity as well, taking away all the nice features that were in gnome 2. Like hamster-applet and being able to easily customize .. well, anything! Sure if you know javascript it's cool, but for those who were used to adding items to gnome-panel the new gnome-shell is horribly complex to use and customize.
It feels like we just jumped 10 years back in time.
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GNOME 3 (Score:2)
GNOME-Shell certainly exposes more driver bugs (Score:2)
.. with all the different compositing effects going on. And you would certainly hope that this will cause the drivers to improve in the long run.
However, there is a question why any desktop shell / window manager should have any noticeable effect on running OpenGL games in FULL SCREEN. Surely, the desktop compositor and all that jazz should be suspended while the whole screen is being controlled by a game?
From the no-shit-Sherlock dept (Score:2)
Worth reading the article (Score:2)
...where you'll see that it's not as simple as the summary suggests (wow, on Slashdot, who'd've thought). If you look at the results for the NVIDIA proprietary driver, Shell keeps pace pretty much precisely with GNOME 2 / Metacity and GNOME 2 / Compiz. It's only with the ATI proprietary driver where there's a clear performance deficit.
The numbers for the free drivers are more mixed, and utterly incomplete anyway because they insisted on testing in Ubuntu for some bizarre reason.
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ppracer ftw!
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Civilization IV is faster and more responsive on Linux/Wine than on Windows XP, for some reason. In particular, it loads much faster.
But in general, graphics performance is noticeably slower on Linux due to the lower quality of graphics drivers. The gfx card manufacturers don't feel the need to spend that much time writing drivers for Linux.
Re:You can actually play games on linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
But I do have a problem with something. As much as drivers cause problems on Linux, using them as a defense for Open Source failings to provide stable and quality libraries and programs is pathetic. I'm not accusing you of this, but already I see posts on here excusing GNOME because somehow, ATI/NVIDIA drivers are worse on GNOME than KDE... yeah, right. It is part of GNOME's job to make sure their library works with the drivers out there. That might not be right, but it's how it is, and making excuses gives Linux a bad name.
Guess what? Proprietary developers have to put up with it, too. The hardware makers aren't (generally) singling out Open Source libraries to mess with. They don't sit in dimly kit conference rooms, laughing maniacally from under their black hoods, saying "ha, we got GNOME to look bad today!" At some point, developers (I'm looking at you, GNOME), need to grow a pair and stop complaining about the world around them.
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That may be true; I'm not an active programmer myself, and have to rely on what friends and journalists tell me.
Re: Blaming the manufacturers is pathetic?? (Score:2)
As much as drivers cause problems on Linux, using them as a defense for Open Source failings to provide stable and quality libraries and programs is pathetic ... It is part of GNOME's job to make sure their library works with the drivers out there.
I have to disagree here. Just because it's your job does NOT mean when you achieve slightly less (even if your progress is more impressive) than your competitors while being severely handicapped by forces outside your control that you can't blame those forces.
If t
Re:You can actually play games on linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or we could simply not use non-free code.
Yes you could do that if you're a masochist who wants to suffer an inferior, possibly unusable gaming experience. Meanwhile people who want to use their hardware to its potential rather than in some gimped, buggy form will take any driver that's going whether it is open or closed.
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Re:You can actually play games on linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish more anti-GNU-tards understood this. People have standards - they don't want to have to live with a compromise when working with an entirely open source stack yields great benefits, particularly if there's little (only really gaming) they gain from compromising. It's just how some folks like it.
The hard-line FOSS type of thinking is not for everyone. It has benefits and drawbacks. If games are more important to you than access to source code then you go for your compromise system.
Calling people retarded because they have different priorities to you is pretty dumb. When they try and force you to do things that way then feel free to complain, until then I suggest you stick with Windows, sure it's a bit of a compromise, but your games will run just fine!
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if that's not hypocrisy and borderline schizophrenia, then they're just plain retarded.
if you value so much freedom and such, why re you using proprietary hardware? because it's better? don't you see a contradiction right there?
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In an ideal world perhaps everything is open source, but we're not in the ideal world. If I happen to have own some hardware which is better served by the closed driver than the op
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I wish more GNUtards understood this. People have standards - they don't want to have to "live" with an inferior experience when compromising yields great benefits, particularly if they gain very little from sticking to the inferior option. It's just how the computing experience is at the moment.
The irony is that many "GNUtards" do understand this. But the call for a higher standard is still put out in the hopes that the environment can make strides towards that ideal. There's nothing wrong with goals. Even if we fall short of those goals.
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Do you play 3D games, and if so, what graphics card with free drivers are you using?
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I *used* to play 3D games on Linux, both under Wine (GoG titles, mostly) and native (Freespace Source Code Project [http://scp.indiegames.us/], OpenArena, native ports of iD engine games, Introversion titles etc.). Graphics card: Radeon HD 4670. Driver: the most recent proprietary ATI fglrx driver compatible with my kernel. There were some minor issues but for the most part everything worked and performance was great.
Then I switched to the open-source radeon driver. Most of the titles that used to wor
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But in general, graphics performance is noticeably slower on Linux due to the lower quality of graphics drivers. The gfx card manufacturers don't feel the need to spend that much time writing drivers for Linux.
Actually if you read the article you find out that the biggest problems are with the open source drivers or the ATI provided ones. The NVIDIA provided closed source driver had no issues and only seemed slightly slower although this was probably due to then using a much older NVIDIA card for their test.
It seems that NVIDIA is the way to go for anyone using 3d intensively under Linux.
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Well, that may be true for this specific issue, but nVidias drivers for Linux still have noticeably worse performance than their drivers for Windows. (I'm using nVidia myself.)
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And it shall be ever thus while there are more Windows users than Linux users. On the other hand, nVidia usually keeps pushing performance updates to their drivers which benefit older cards for some time, so at least the situation improves over time. AMD just abandons you. I bought a netbook with AMD/ATI chipset/graphics, and the day I got it home there was no linux support; the ati driver didn't support it because it was too new and the fglrx driver didn't support it because it was too old. Now the ati dri
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Steam games run fine.
I don't know what you're talking about.
--
BMO
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Steam games? Or Source engine games?
There are a lot of games on the Steam platform - make sure you're specific on what works. I tend to avoid Wine because I've encountered regressions going from one version of Wine to the other, and having a game start bugging out just because of a bump in Wine's version number does tend to suck (particularly if there have been improvements in other areas of Wine which benefit other games).
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I have started noticing this recently, it's quite annoying.
I guess it's a difficult proposition, trying to keep things working that already are, but adding in tweaks for known not-working programs almost always seems to break something else.
Some steam stuff works, some doesn't. I've been playing PvZ quite happily, but that's not exactly graphics intensive. The last actual 3D game I played under wine was Portal.
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In my opinion, if you're gonna play games on Linux for any length of time, stick to native games. There are quite a few of them if you know where to look, and they're not all crappy Quake clones either* (Amnesia and the Penumbra series come to mind). If you want to play Windows games, there's nothing wrong with dual booting simply for Windows games. The best tool for the job is sometimes not the one you'd prefer, but if it gets the job done the best, so be it.
*I use "crappy" subjectively. Most Quake clones
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Having just flamed you further up I now feel silly... sorry...
Anyway I agree, if you want to play windows games windows is probably the best option. In fact I keep it around just for that.
the last thing that broke under wine was a small VB application (from the look of it, I'm not 100% sure) for calculating the propertiesd of beer you'll get out of a homebrew setup. You tell it what grains you're going to put into the mix, which hops, how long it's going to be boiled, various other things, and it tells you
Think again ;-) (Score:2)
More intensive than Crysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4dPuQ4pw70 [youtube.com]
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Only about 5 people in the world actually play Crysis. The rest use it as a benchmark or to demo/test stuff.
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There is this great search engine called 'google'. You can start by clicking here [google.com].
You then enter keywords for what you want to look for, like "+linux +games". As an example, here is what I found: http://kahvipapu.com/blog/2007/06/16/linux-gaming-part-one-first-person-shooters/ [kahvipapu.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Oh god yes. SL is a beast that wants as much hardware as you can throw at it.
Re: (Score:3)
Scripting GUI's is something belonging in the domain of mentally challenged applications developers, not important operating system components.
Awesome is scriptable and it's only using ~7MB here.
Re:Memory Hog. (Score:4, Funny)
Gnome shell is the second biggest memory hog on my system. Only below firefox
So Gnome ISN'T using firefox to render its desktop? That must be remedied ASAP!
Re: (Score:2)
What? Of course compilation makes things faster. Modern interpreted languages use just-in-time compilation, but it's still compilation.
Re: (Score:2)
When a game runs fullscreen, there should be nothing to compose (if things are done right).
Re:More tasks for the GPU==Lower GPU performance? (Score:5, Interesting)
3D accelerated desktops seem to create more problems than they solve IMHO, and I'm not quite sure what problems there were meant to solve in the first place (other than "We don't have as much eye candy as apple yet"). All this talk of freeing up the CPU seems bogus as well, as long as 2D acceleration works fine I've never seen any WM/DE chew significant cycles drawing widgets. Composited desktops however result in higher aggregate power usage for me at least (tried on both an intel 4500 and a low-end nVidia under linux), seemingly all for the sake of squidging up a window when it's minimised and giving me a rotating cube instead of alt tab. I guess I'm just old an inherently old fashioned in that I even use win7 in a theme as close to windows 2000 as I can get (except it's greyer). All that fast-moving whizz bang stuff is just horribly distracting to me. Perhaps someone can explain what I'm missing?
Maybe in a CPU generation or two when we get an on-CPU framebuffer and decent drivers across all OS's and WM/DE designers will show a bit more restraint and tact, but the trend certainly seems to be to spend more and more resources on making Joe Sixpack's netbook resemble something from Hackers. I'm not against giving people a choice, by all means keep your flashy bling if you love it so much, but making it the default and impossible to turn off? Stupid. I think Gnome must have had a frontal lobotomy to think that mandating composition, and hence wholly bug-free drivers for 3D graphics cards in linux, was a good idea - in all my ten years of using it on the desktop I've never encountered a wholly bug-free driver. Same goes for windows for that matter.
</rant>
Re: (Score:3)
I use XFCE and have used it since its 3x days; I am running 4.6 now. I love it. Its a great desktop IMHO. My thanks and applause to anyone who has contributed the XFCE project who may read this. Its stable and its pretty. It might not be as flashy as OSX or even KDE but its still prettier then Windows 7 and the "eye candy" is actually useful.
I actually like the transparency effects quite a bit. 3D accelerated desktops let me see through menus, and inactive windows thru to what is underneath and that act
Re: (Score:2)
XFCE's the DE I use on most of my remaining linux desktops, with one running fluxbox for better performance. It's definitely a nice, lightweight but full featured environment that doesn't foist itself upon you. It's definitely come into its own over the last 18 months or so.
Never got my head around transparency though, but I rarely move things around (I'm a spatial + muscle memory type so I navigate faster when things stay in the same place) and I usually find a quick minimise -> maximise from the taskba
Re: (Score:2)
How is it with multiple monitors? I'm looking at other desktop environments since Gnome has crapped all over itself. I use XFCE on my home server but I pretty much only look at it through a VNC session.
Re: (Score:2)
3D accelerated desktops seem to create more problems than they solve IMHO, and I'm not quite sure what problems there were meant to solve in the first place
I have most of the eye candy turned off, but I find Expo and Scale Windows to be immensely useful. And yes, it's some eye candy we associate with OSX; however, I have the Expo reflection turned off so it's just function.
Re: (Score:2)
* problems with gaming, even in fullscreen mode
The hardest part is getting ccsm to work right, it seems to not want to grab window IDs for me any more. WTF? Once you disable ARGB visuals for an application and maybe force it fullscreen then it tends to work.
* problems with hd video playback, tearing
vsync works here.
* problems with suspend
Suspend works here, too. Natty x64, GT 240, recommended driver. External disk on firewire. Seven or eight USB devices. Two internal disks and two optical drives to confuse things, too. Maybe you should buy more credible hardware.