Semperverus

For AMD, it’s literally just make sure mesa is installed (it is by default on most distros), make sure radv is installed, and then go.

From there, if you are gaming, you handle whatever your games need like enabling 32-bit libraries for Steam if your distro doesn’t by default, or doing whatever WINE or Lutris wants you to do.

Done.

The story goes that around the time the AMD RX480 came out - or maybe a little after - AMD almost completely opensourced their GPU drivers on Linux.

They gave two offerings: amdgpu (open source) and amdgpu-pro (Closed source, included some extra features most people wouldn’t care about but some really do). Thus retiring the old radeon driver.

At first, the new drivers were decent, if slightly unstable.

AMD also provided a Vulkan driver by the name of amdvlk, which was good but the performance wasn’t very exciting.

Then Valve started contributing. They started providing a Vulkan driver for AMD cards that is better than AMD’s called RADV, which has since become the default and has been mainlined into mesa. Performance went through the roof.

I may be wrong but I think Valve may also contribute back to the amdgpu driver.

Wayland finally became a thing, and between AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, AMD was king in stability and performance in this arena. Especially on KDE, which had very early adoption of many important features long before Gnome had them - Mixed monitor scaling, Variable refresh rate, mixed monitor refresh rate, DRM modesetting for VR headsets, HDR monitor support, etc., in addition to a bunch of extra security features which some appreciate greatly and others find frustrating.

Over in Nvidia land, they were busy doing Nvidia things. And by Nvidia things, I mean doing nothing new.

Nvidia’s drivers mostly remained just as you remember them from 15 years ago, with the Nvidia config tool for X11 and so on. Their closed-source driver performance on Linux was good but not great.

Wayland threw a wrench in Nvidia’s gears. Nvidia tried to control the narrative by trying to force EGLStreams as the standard, several years after the community had settled on GBM as the standard (I won’t dive much into what those are - for now, you only need to know that they’re important in making Wayland work at all and affect performance, stability, and the ability to talk to the Wayland protocol). For a very long time, Nvidia card users were either unable to use Wayland, or had a very poor experience with it; experiencing stuttering, flashing or flickering screens, black boxes, and so on. This whole thing locked Nvidia users to the outdated X11 system which is missing a lot of modern features mentioned previously in the AMD section.

Some time later, Nvidia was hacked by a group called LAPSUS$, who among other things demanded that Nvidia fully open-source their drivers. They essentially got ahold of Nvidia’s code and said “Either you open-source it or we do.”

I forget exactly what Nvidia’s direct response to them was, but interestingly some time later, they opted to “open-source” their drivers by reducing the size of and wrapping the closed proprietary binaries in what the Linux community was calling an “open-source condom.” Effectively, we got drivers that behaved the way the Linux kernel expected, despite not being truly open source. A neat hat trick.

Something else happened, I think maybe more bits got open sourced, but as of recently there are now new open source Nvidia drivers as of driver version 555, called nvidia-open (not to be confused with nouveau open source community drivers), and you can now use Nvidia cards with 80-90% as much ease and performance as AMD users have on Linux. There is still some jank and rough edges that need to be smoothed out, but Nvidia is now part of the 21st century on Linux.

I personally would recommend avoiding Nvidia due to their history and how they treat their Linux customers, but if you already have an Nvidia card and don’t want to or can’t afford to switch, you can now use your card with relatively smooth and high performance on Linux - and use Wayland to boot.

I think it’s still valuable to document these things so that the users who insist on sticking with X11 can receive a healthy dose of this (replace diapers with vulnerabilities) when the proverbial shit hits the fan and it becomes as hackable as Windows XP

Summarizing documents, writing documents you don’t want to (within reason), and… whatever the hell Neuro-sama is doing on Vedal’s channel, are like the only ones i’ve found so far that kind of work. And I guess image generation.

That definitely is true, we do tolerate a lot of rough edges out of ethics and principals.

Interestingly, the Linux foundation had to remove several Russian maintainers recently because of the sanctions.

I have not looked into the details on the matter, but from what I gleaned it seems like they did not want to (don’t punish the individual for the sins of their government), but were made to. Linus Torvalds apparently made a statement on the matter that I still need to go read.

I could be very very wrong on this and am open to being educated.

A lot of people grew up in a time where the desire for anonymity on the internet was praised and respected, reading usernames unless you had a specific reason to do so was considered strange.

I know I at the very least have to force myself to look at them if it’s something that needs doing, as I am conditioned specifically to ignore them.

My post you are replying to is absolutely aggressive and was 100% intended to be at the time. I am calmer now though.

The original post was not written with any aggression in mind. Could you expand on how it sounded that way? I didn’t feel any aggression until they started namecalling and making unfactual claims.

I actually hand-typed it, thank you very much.

But, point taken.

And, i could have handled my response better to the namecalling. I should not have let them pull aggro like that.

I listed a bunch of things that have been said by the community in the past, and pointed out that they made a statement that fell into that larger bucket.

So, i would be willing to concede that I lumped them in with the greater whole. But: I did not start with the aggressive namecalling.

Read the first post again and tell me how what i just said is a backpedal.

I accused the community as a whole of goalpost moving.

But you’re right, i did get the username wrong.

With that being said, I’m not here as community support. Im not offering you or anyone support. I am calling out the inaccuracies and the slander.

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I think that talking about how you want to switch but then claim the thing you want to switch to sucks because of totally fabricated reasons is cringe.

I don’t think everyone should switch, but i do think that people walking around spouting out bullshit that they clearly have no idea about should be called out and shut down.

So the projector thing isnt from DXVK, but rather from the Windows Media Foundation library. Basically, there are a bunch of video codecs that are completely illegal to reimplement locally because of the patents on them.

The good news is that Valve is working on a major workaround, and just pushed it out to Proton Experimental recently. They’ve had okay-to-good support for video codecs up until recently (they pushed out some fixes for it right around after you had that problem), and now it should be moving towards great-to-perfect.

Honestly it sounds like you suck more than linux does, because I have never had any of those problems. My 4k monitors have all worked perfectly, and with wayland i have a successful mixed resolution/scaling/refresh rate setup.

If anyone is being a bitch, its you. You sound salty as fuck. I kind of hope you don’t switch so the linux community doesnt have to put up with your awful attitude.

Oh, and no shit you need Proton. Thats not even worth discussing.

The goalposts have moved to hopefully their final position

• 99% of my games don’t work! I’m not switching!

• About half of my games don’t work, I’m not swiching!

• 20% of my games don’t work but the ones that do are all perfect, I’m not switching!

• 10% of my games don’t work and Valve is pushing for functioning anticheat with EasyAntiCheat and BattleEye, i’m not switching!

• You are here → 0.1% of my games don’t work because of holdout companies being assholes and going out of their way to specifically block Linux despite the massive success of the Steam Deck, I’m not switching!

At some point you have to ask yourself if it’s the companies thats holding you back or if it’s really actually you who are holding yourself back. Switching is gonna always require some kind of sacrifice or another, and currently that sacrifice has never been this minimal.

Either that, or you are just the kind of person who enjoys being a contrarian and has no interest in actually contributing anything meaningful.

I dont think that the developers who came up with the processes for LLMs were really targeting that usecase. It just so happens that the limitations of LLMs also lend power to disinformatiom. LLMs don’t really know how to say “I don’t know”.

I think we are just going to have to cordially disagree.

It is akin to the relativity problem in physics. Where is the center of the universe? What “grid” do things move through? The answer is that everything moves relative to one another, and somehow that fact causes the phenomena in our universe (and in these language models) to emerge.

Likewise, our brains do a significantly more sophisticated but not entirely different version of this. There are more “cores” in our brains that are good at differen tasks that all constantly talk back and forth between eachother, and our frontal lobe provides the advanced thinking and networking on top of that. The LLMs are more equivalent to the broca’s area, they havent built out the full frontal lobe yet (or rather, the “Multiple Demand network”)

You are right in that an AI will never know what an apple tastes like, or what a breeze on its face feels like until we give them sensory equipment to read from.

In this case though, its the equivalent of a college student having no real world experience and only the knowledge from their books, lectures, and labs. You can still work with the concepts of and reason against things you have never touched if you are given enough information about them beforehand.