Even though i have some of the older Tomb raider games on PC, there's still something charming about playing the originals on PS1 just as i remember them, i guess i just like the retro aesthetic. I might pick these up on a bigger sale eventually, after all you can pretty much remaster a lot of retro games yourself now with Ai texture packs and 4k resolution.

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Quoting: tuxayo

Quoting: slaapliedjeHonest question; what do they do different that would make me want to switch to Mint DE over just Debian?

This is not complete and just from memory:
- non-libre video codecs
- non libre wifi drivers (that's still not out of the box/with a checkbox in Debian right? One has to know the package to install IIUC)
- a software center by default, (type VLC in synaptic and show the results to a non IT person)
- flatpak setup by default. Important for non IT people to not end up with a years old Minetest of 0ad and not being able to play with friends.
- update notifications, important to have any hope a system is updated by non IT people
- major upgrades possible with a GUI tool (WIP, that's new, not prompted by default, one has to install and run it)
- things to check on Debian: laptop power management, MTP support, simple-scan installed by default
- anything else someone here know about?

Cinnamon is decent looking and complete functionally by default but just search for screenshots for Debian and Mint with Mate and XFCE and the difference will be striking. Root of the issue is Mate and XFCE not having different presets whose use is recommend for general public distros. A user-friendliness barrier for Debian, Fedora, openSUSE.

Overall a lot of stuff that will make a big difference for random people on the street. A lot of people coming at install parties have no particular IT knowledge and interest in tech, but a political one for libre software. (the rest is people wanting free IT help :-( and the remainder are some techies ^o^)

Good post.

Mint team fix paper cuts where it counts which is in the immediate end user experience by providing useful defaults, applications and update mechanisms.

Im on Arch on one of my machines, using EndevourOS which is a heavily promoted Arch distros by the community. And it does not have sane defaults and chunks of obvious settings are missing by default. I like it still because im a tweaker but at times it has not been fun. It's just an arch install after all and that's the difference between a manicured distro like Mint and a utilitarian one like Arch.

One big point of criticism i have for Mint is that their forums still look out of date and aren't anywhere near as helpful as the Big Arch forums. With the amount of monthly donations they receive it wouldn't take long to change this to a more modern system.

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Quoting: D34VA_

Quoting: TimeFreezeBesides the new rendering features whats the point of this Source Port? Vulkan already exists in GZDoom. Surely they could merge those features into GZDoom itself?

This port has real-time ray-traced lighting, though that's weirdly not obvious thanks to only being a bullet point in this article and the screenshot not showcasing it. The chosen screenshot just looks like any other GZDoom screenshot. Meanwhile, on the project site:

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Raytracing reminds me of what Nvidia did to bring about Tessellation in Crysis which tanked performance for AMD and gave very little noticeable improvement over standard techniques, just like when Nvidia released RTX.

And every time i see the 'accurate' shadows of raytracing they look soft and fuzzy, if i want raytraced shadows on my older games i just switch shadows to medium settings and gain 40FPS. Of course with RTX its the other way round, you lose 40fps. Not to mention the whole scene tends to look 'darker' so again i just lower the gamma in game and we have a similar look.
Then there is the softening 'de-noizer' effect which is like added motion blur as the scene renders slower than your eyes ideally need.

That aside, there are many ways to do standard lighting in games that are not pathtraced that look so close that you can barely tell the difference and those techniques improve all the time. Aesthetically, i often prefer the traditional lighting in games, maybe i like the clear cut difference between reality and non-reality, maybe it's better for escapism? idk.

That said, technical progress is good, but i can't help but shift the feeling that raytracing will be used by some devs to spend less time on intricately lighting a scene and just flooding the thing and letting the raytracing do its work.

Each to their own. So long as it is toggle-able.

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Quoting: Pyretic

Quoting: Loftyim kind of surprised Valve have not jumped on the glasses as a giant HD TV screen thing yet plugged into the deck.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/05/nreal-air-and-steam-deck-together-quite-mind-blowing/

Something like that, but affordable and not requiring a specific prescription to be made in order to get them to play nice with people who wear glasses. Not everyone wants a bulky VR headset, but a HD 70 - 120" in front of your face laying on the couch or in bed at night requiring just one cable to the deck would be pretty cool if priced right.

i "think" these types of devices can still do 3D i.e. depth perception or can be used as a dual monitor (with some slight tracking to look left and right ??) Now a real 3D image even if its not tracked like in VR would look amazing. I don't want 'AR' or any of that other jazz and no cameras or microphones on the damn thing.

Im too old to jump around with a VR headset on and im not even that old.

I feel like thats too niche of a product for an already niche product.

Probably yea. Maybe il wait for a 3rd party vendor to make one.

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Quoting: I_Hate_Windows

Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: I_Hate_Windowsexactly, i distro hopped for 2 months looking for "the one", it didnt exist lol but i found garuda gnome after trying the kde version, welp it might be less customizable but it looks more modern and runs faster, its instant, its arch based so you get pacman and all of the aur at your arsenal, i use pop os tiling manager from pacman called pop-shell, then i build gamescope-session-git from the aur to make a steamos at log in to choose from, its a seperate desktop environment that is based on the game mode of steamdeck, so far this is the best os in existence, it is also not immutable like steam os so it is actually meant for daily use, rolling release, newest everything every day lol, included update manager and install manager, this is why i want to roll all this into one neat tidy little package so i dont have to explain all this, i can just say, use this distro because i have over 2k worth of hardware and it performs better than windows ever could

i use gnome + arch on my gaming machine too and also tiling, but i use forge.

But it sounds like a good setup you have. im interested in trying out gamescope, but as a separate user so i can have one login for personal stuff and one just for gaming. That said, i have pretty much moved to just using my large desktop PC solely for gaming and a mini pc just work work / personal. which seems like a bit of a waste as im not gaming all the time.

I think once the 8000 series APU's are here i might move my gaming to a powerful handheld + GPU dock, my current GPU is very efficient but i don't think my CPU is as good as it could be even though its a 65w model, it has no lower Power states. And amazingly i think at least on synthetic benchmarks the Z1 extreme AMD APU actually is around the same performance (5700x)

Also, as an aside im interested in the gnome-like Cosmic desktop from System 76 written in Rust.

or just put mint on your laptop when it gets slow and use it for work, and on home pc run gamescope, but bro you can just switch at login by clicking the gear icon in bottom right after you click on the user to pick which session, for the same money as a handheld plus a gpu dock blah blah just build an amd desktop with a used 6900 xt like i got and live the happy life on the cheap, whole setup is like 1k if you get a used 6900xt for like 500 or less

I get you. I already have a decent GPU though, i would not throw away my current PC it would just move to becoming something else.

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Quoting: I_Hate_Windowsexactly, i distro hopped for 2 months looking for "the one", it didnt exist lol but i found garuda gnome after trying the kde version, welp it might be less customizable but it looks more modern and runs faster, its instant, its arch based so you get pacman and all of the aur at your arsenal, i use pop os tiling manager from pacman called pop-shell, then i build gamescope-session-git from the aur to make a steamos at log in to choose from, its a seperate desktop environment that is based on the game mode of steamdeck, so far this is the best os in existence, it is also not immutable like steam os so it is actually meant for daily use, rolling release, newest everything every day lol, included update manager and install manager, this is why i want to roll all this into one neat tidy little package so i dont have to explain all this, i can just say, use this distro because i have over 2k worth of hardware and it performs better than windows ever could

i use gnome + arch on my gaming machine too and also tiling, but i use forge.

But it sounds like a good setup you have. im interested in trying out gamescope, but as a separate user so i can have one login for personal stuff and one just for gaming. That said, i have pretty much moved to just using my large desktop PC solely for gaming and a mini pc just work work / personal. which seems like a bit of a waste as im not gaming all the time.

I think once the 8000 series APU's are here i might move my gaming to a powerful handheld + GPU dock, my current GPU is very efficient but i don't think my CPU is as good as it could be even though its a 65w model, it has no lower Power states. And amazingly i think at least on synthetic benchmarks the Z1 extreme AMD APU actually is around the same performance (5700x)

Also, as an aside im interested in the gnome-like Cosmic desktop from System 76 written in Rust.

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Quoting: Scattershot

Quoting: LoftyThe Steam deck is probably the most ergonomic game controller ever made, why change the formula ¯\_( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉)_/¯

Completely disagree. While the Steam Deck controller isn't bad, it's far too cramped to be ideal. It's a compromise because it's being bolted onto a small form factor computing device.
The Steam Controller was my personal favourite, but then I know a lot of people found it too large. The PS4 controller is a good compromise. PS5 seems fine too. The older XBox controllers were good too. I find new ones to be oddly shaped.

i guess then, everyone likes different things. which is okay 👍️

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im kind of surprised Valve have not jumped on the glasses as a giant HD TV screen thing yet plugged into the deck.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/05/nreal-air-and-steam-deck-together-quite-mind-blowing/

Something like that, but affordable and not requiring a specific prescription to be made in order to get them to play nice with people who wear glasses. Not everyone wants a bulky VR headset, but a HD 70 - 120" in front of your face laying on the couch or in bed at night requiring just one cable to the deck would be pretty cool if priced right.

i "think" these types of devices can still do 3D i.e. depth perception or can be used as a dual monitor (with some slight tracking to look left and right ??) Now a real 3D image even if its not tracked like in VR would look amazing. I don't want 'AR' or any of that other jazz and no cameras or microphones on the damn thing.

Im too old to jump around with a VR headset on and im not even that old.

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Quoting: Drakker

Quoting: LoftyCan't we just have nice things. The amount of plastic these things use is fractional compared with other products available on the market. Not only that but buying these is supporting an individual with a cottage industry and not some giant mega corporation.

I'd agree with you if the new controls brought new functionalities/features, or were significantly better than the old ones... but its only for looks. The correct way to do this would be for Valve to allow you to customize your Deck from the factory (yeah, yeah, I know its not that easy...), ideally using the parts from the small business as an option.

But if valve sold them they would no doubt be needed eventually in the tens of thousands. And would the small business need to arrange transport for these plastic parts using a diesel vehicle or rail ? etc..

The only way would be for valve to print these themselves from factory, but then again the surplus required so that a customer could choose either black or colored would probably outstrip the amount of items made by this sole individual and sold to a niche audience who, via lack of marketing will be much smaller than if valve sold them on their store.

So respectfully i disagree. The reduction in e-waste is something i can get behind though 100% but the problem doesn't just lay with the individual making these in a shed, but rather the whole economic system in general that incentivizes mass mindless consumerism ... but that's a debate for another day.

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Quoting: ripper81358

Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: ripper81358

Quoting: lejimsterIs ray tracing on Linux comparable to Windows these days?
I just bought a 7900 xtx and plan to have a tinker when I install it.

The next MESA release 23.2.0 will come with lots of raytracing improvements for MESA RADV. However performance will still be an issue when compared to the windowsdriver. The forthcoming MESA releases will adress these problem.
However with an RX 7900 xtx you should be able to get decent performance when you use FSR.

And that the issue with slower release distros that don't run cutting edge MESA. You end up having to add 3rd party repositories and kernals and it's not the most friendly end user experience. Ironically it's the most friendly end user experience distros that fall foul of this.

Well newer kernels are only needed when your GPU is not supported by the default kernel. On Ubuntubased distributions you just need to add the kisak mesa fresh ppa. This will keep MESA on the latest stable version. Doing the same with nvidias driver is clearly more inconvinient.

it's more inconvenient to use the nvidia driver i agree. Although i have had issues adding 3rd party MESA PPA's to my Mint install. The Oibaf one in particular comes to mind. Perhaps the Kisak one is more stable and i would have more luck with that ? These days for my gaming needs i prefer to use an Arch based Distro.

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