Linux

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 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 now 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.