What are the important milestones Linux has achieved this year?
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Continued not to show me anything AI-related
nVidia released drivers that aren’t a complete tire fire under Wayland.
(It’s more of a regular pile of discarded tires now, but it’s still dramatically better.)
I think It might’ve been last year but anti-cheat compatibility was huge. Still up to the studio to enable it but some games have.
Progress towards wayland is going steady which doesn’t mean much to those that don’t know much about Linux. But what that means is more modern features like VRR and HDR. Not completely here yet as far as I know but that wouldn’t have happened on X11
Note exactly a huge milestone but you can’t discredit the steady development of pipewire. Audio was annoying as fuck before it.
Honestly, I think we’re 3 years out from Windows being replacable for a gaming platform.
Anti-cheat is a big one (sure, there’s “support”, but if none of the games people play are supported, is that support?), but VRR and HDR are also huge.
That trifecta is the only reason I’m still sitting in Windows, and I find myself hopeful we land there sooner rather than later so I can dump Windows and never have to think about whatever dumb crap Microsoft is going to do next.
VRR works really well already - some Nvidia users might lose extra functionality like Reflex Ultra that, when paired with VRR, can smartly adjust the frame rate cap. But VRR itself works.
HDR is a difficult beast though… It’s hard even on Windows, and very problematic on Linux (though with Gamescope, KDE Plasma and Wayland you can kinda use it already).
I still get persistent black screen issues going in and out of VRR mode… It’s not as bad on displayport, really bad on hdmi.
Amd 7900 XTX for reference
I’ve been using HDR on Linux since February or March and it works pretty well. MPV works great (with vk_hdr_layer), and games work if you run them in Gamescope, which has its own complications but overall it’s pretty good.
The helpful thing is we are at a point people are starting to move over in larger numbers. With every extra person, there is more enthusiasm to get the next useful milestone completed; which will continue to bring in more people. It’s pretty telling that the top PC gaming handheld is a Linux offering, not a Windows one. Just a few years ago that idea was unheard of.
As a personal anecdote, I work at a company that releases Windows software. However, in active development we have intentionally decided to not cut ourselves off from Linux and MacOS, and such OS releases are on the order of a month or three of work to make happen, rather than the complete rewrite monstrosity that is the case with our previous offerings.
Real-time Linux makes it to the mainline kernel was a big one I can think of off the top of my head.
Wayland is usable now
For all major graphics cards. Except NVIDIA :(
It’s actually quite fine for a while now. Sometimes I need to fallback to Xorg but that’s not related to Nvidia anyway.
I use it successfully with an Nvidia card
The only thing that doesn’t work is TF2
I think marked share on desktops has increased substantially more than the years before.
I was able to switch to Wayland with an Nvidia GPU this year with the update to plasma 6. I’ve only been a full-time Linux user for a year now, but gaming has gone smooth, my install has been stable and Nvidia drivers are better. Arch install with LUKS encryption was very smooth with my last install a month or so ago.
Atomic desktop ftw.
Delaware
