A few years ago my wife and I built a computer out of old parts for her friend’s then 10 years old son. Last month we were visiting them, and I heard the wife’s friend say something funny that I thought I’d share with you.
They live on the other side of the city, this was the kid’s first computer, and his mom doesn’t have much computer experience either, so our goal was to build something that was easy to use and hard to break from the beginning. Originally I choose ElementaryOS since it seemed to fit the bill, but after a year or two it turned out that it couldn’t be upgraded to a new major version without a full reinstall so it got stuck with an older version. We didn’t visit that often, and the kid’s games still worked so it wasn’t a major issue until Factorio broke due to glibc incompatibility.
When his birthday was coming up last month we bought him a SSD to make the computer a little bit zippier without a major upgrade, and I thought I’d give him a brand new Linux experience too, so I asked for advice here and in the end chose Bazzite. While I was helping the kid with the installation, I overheard his mom saying in the other room:
This Linux thing… We’ve never had any problems with it, he just clicks something to install it and it works. Unlike normal computers, where you always have to do things and fix them.
Perhaps not the most eloquent, but I consider it a very good review.
I upgraded my gpu this weekend. Shut down, switched the psu off, swapped the old one out and new one in, booted into bios no issue (to check if I has left pcie on auto or needed to update it), then booted into the desktop (fedora cinnamon). Bam, after login only saw wallpaper, no mouse cursor or other UI.
Well, at least it’s kinda working. Time to figure out what’s going on. Terminal works. There’s some errors in the log but nothing to do with amdgpu or firmware failed to upload or anything. Software render just shows up as black screen. Reset my cinnamon session and boot back to the same thing. Fuck.
Then I try moving my mouse way over to the right and it shows up! Oh right. I have my TV plugged in for streaming to it sometimes and it ended up defaulted to the primary display, so my main desktop was only showing up there (and it was off). Right click, display properties, swap my monitor to primary, disable the TV until I turn it on.
This is about the magnitude of the average problem I need to deal with on Linux. Something isn’t working like I want it to, half the time it’s actually working but I misunderstood something or the default doesn’t match my intent and I need to adjust settings and then it’s perfect or close enough.
Or the other problem I had yesterday, tried monster hunter world for the first time and it wouldn’t launch. Played satisfactory for a bit instead (new gpu is noticeably smoother yay), then did a quick search, found that a specific version of proton works, switched to that version and it played. That’s the first game that has had such trouble for me.
In all fairness, I’ve had some really dicey problems on Linux. I think the most difficult problem I’ve encountered was when I bought a USB soundcard which only worked in legacy mode, but using Wireshark and the USB audio class specification I managed to track down the bug in Linux’ usb-audio module, so now I’m technically a kernel contributor :)
For me the difference is that when I get a problem on Linux, it usually tries to provide me with the information I need to figure out what goes wrong, and due to its open nature it tries to make it easy to fix things. Also the majority of the time, Linux is working flawlessly. Windows on the other hand, is plagued by bugs and annoyances that show up on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And when issues happen, they come with little information and are often impossible to fix yourself since the OS is locked down.
Actually, there is one thing that is an annoyance that I haven’t been able to resolve. I use dvorak as my main layout.
Sometimes games get the keyboard right and keys are remapped to qwerty layout (and typing still uses dvorak). This case works better than on windows, since playing a game there either required the game itself to recognize keyboard layouts (best case), or remapping the controls (annoying case), or switching to qwerty (frustrating for typing because I’m stronger with dvorak now).
But sometimes instead it does the opposite and remaps the qwerty bindings to dvorak. As in, even if I swap layouts, wasd are all over the keyboard instead of all together. I need to exit the game, swap layouts to qwerty on the desktop, then relaunch for controls to work properly (and then I can sometimes swap back to dvorak in game and they continue to work). Often, the next time I launch the game, I’ll forget to switch it but it will just work this time.
And sometimes it behaves like windows did where I can swap the layout in game and keys change as you’d expect.
I have no idea why it’s inconsistent between these three options or where the “preserve key location despite the layout” feature is even coming from. Anyone have any idea about this?
Hey, long-time Dvorak user here, almost as long as a Linux user.
When I start playing a new game, I usally just go with defaults. Some games (like all Valve games) do a good job of using keyscan codes for bindings and mapping them to the layout. If that’s not the case the game is likely to be incorretly using the keyscan codes, or just using the OS’s key events. If that’s the case, I will just force qwerty with
setxkbmap usand restart the game. After a few hours, I try to rebind keys for dvorak. Persoally, I like to change keyboardings to use Tribe’s ESDF layout instead of WASD anyway.If you are using wayland for your display,
setxkbmapis great since most games run in Xwayland mode, so native apps will still be in Dvorak.I don’t really need to type much in games anyway now, so I don’t mind keeping with qwerty bindings. I play Starcraft 2 this way.
The worst experience I can recall is Natural Selection 2, which its game engine refused to bind non-alphanumeric keys like ‘,’ 😵💫… But that was playing with Windows, would probably work with Linux if the game was still alive.
Is that method different from using the hot keys to swap layouts? Like can I tell it to always use that mapping for that game or do I need to remember to run it each time I play the game and then set it back after I’m done (or automate that)?
There are dozens of us! But yeah, same.