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Latest Comments by slaapliedje
OpenRazer 2.9.0 is out, adding plenty of new Razer device support on Linux
6 Dec 2020 at 2:51 am UTC

Quoting: Mountain Man
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: Mountain ManUnless Razer quality has dramatically increased in recent years, I won't touch their products ever again. About seven years ago, I bought a Razer Black Widow keyboard and a Razer Onza gamepad, and both developed significant faults within a year -- LEDs started to burn out on the Black Widow, and both joysticks on the Onza developed significant drift that could not be corrected with calibration. If the second-rate quality of their hardware wasn't enough, the fact that they started requiring drivers with online connectivity to unlock the full capabilities of their products has kept me away for good.

Now I have a WASD mechanical keyboard [External Link] with custom keycaps and a Zowie EC1-A mouse [External Link], and I couldn't be happier.
Ha, this is the same reason I have stayed away from Radeons for so long.
I always like hearing about other keyboard snobs.
I bought recently a blue Cherry MX keyboard that a friend of mine said was obnoxious. I told him I bought it because I can barely hear it through the noise canceling headphones I end up wearing all day for work. :p
I'm a Cherry Brown aficionado myself.
Yeah, I have 3 other keyboards that are browns and I prefer them. I literally got the blue so I could hear it just enough through the NC headphones. They drown out the HVAC and laptop fans, but I can hear the Blues!

DOSBox Staging has a rather large new release out with 0.76.0
6 Dec 2020 at 2:48 am UTC

Quoting: dreamer_
Quoting: slaapliedjeI should try this out. Was playing Stonekeep on my laptop the other night. Got to ask, is there anyway to implement touch screen passthrough for DOS games? Would be incredibly awesome for games like that!
Guess I should look into it.
SDL2 handles this (SDL_TouchFingerEvent), but someone who owns a touchscreen would need to implement this and send us pull requests.
Damn, suppose I should learn whichever language it is written in... (C?). Ha, I can test at least!

Not sure if DOS is happy with any non absolute position cursor (I think that is what it is called, been a long time since I looked into how touch screens work)

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti arrives December 2, hits RTX 2080 SUPER level performance
5 Dec 2020 at 7:22 pm UTC

Quoting: 3zekiel
Quoting: x_wingHow many games I can play with DLSS or RT on Linux? Truth is that we are on Linux and those are pointless features for now. IMO, right now this technologies have the same weight as Physx had in the past.
For RT, it is most likely coming soon, see the movements from Khronos on vulkan RT API (which is literally tailored for dxvk/vkd3d use). So RT definitely matters, unless you are completely against proton of course.

For DLSS, who knows ... Hope it comes, maybe yes, maybe no. Nvidia did release the headers for some of that but not all, the sdk itself is under NDA. Guess it's in Valve's hands to unlock the situation now, I don't see what anyone else can do. Unless Stadia goes Nvidia for next round, that would help a lot.
Yeah, shocker. I still have to dualboot for things, and there the features are definitely being adopted more and more.

DOSBox Staging has a rather large new release out with 0.76.0
5 Dec 2020 at 6:42 pm UTC

I should try this out. Was playing Stonekeep on my laptop the other night. Got to ask, is there anyway to implement touch screen passthrough for DOS games? Would be incredibly awesome for games like that!
Guess I should look into it.

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti arrives December 2, hits RTX 2080 SUPER level performance
5 Dec 2020 at 5:47 pm UTC

Fuck it. I had a nice rant going about this subject, but then my mobile fennec crashed on me, and I don't give enough of a shit to try and convince peopls that updating your entire kernel so that you can get your video card working is an unsustainable msthod of doing it.

RetroArch will soon get the PlayStation 2 emulator PCSX2
5 Dec 2020 at 5:37 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: TheSHEEEP
Quoting: HexatopeI highly doubt you'll see RetroArch on Steam, due to legality concerns behind the acquisition of game and bios ROMs. Not something that Valve would want to get involved with, I'm sure.
Nothing about emulation itself is legally concerning.
As you say, it is about the roms (bios & games) - none of which will be offered via Steam or RetroArch.

Now, naturally, I and every other person that ever used an emulator owns 100% of emulated games & systems and made all copies of all ROMs themselves.
And it will likely remain that way until the day all these games become old enough to have their copyright expired.
Yeah, I mean it isn't technically illegal to sell flash carts, but they can only legally provide some home brew games that they have bsen given permission to distribute.
Yet, I see TONS of people selling pre-configured sd cards, and hard drives filled with ROMs, not sure how any of that is legal, but it does make a convenient way for those who are too lazy, or don't have the knowledge to enjoy some old gaming.

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti arrives December 2, hits RTX 2080 SUPER level performance
5 Dec 2020 at 4:58 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: slaapliedjeI have been using nvidia for years, and it has pretty much been 'just works'.
I remember Nvidia breaking more than once due to kernel updates and I remember Nvidia messing up my install to the point of frustration and wiping out the whole OS to reinstall. Not upstreaming their driver has consequences. Ditching the blob felt very good and I'm not interested in going back to that horror :)
See, I have had the exact opposite experience. The Radeon laptop that I have, it worked mistly with the fglrx driver, but would break all the time as it wouldn't work either with a newer kernel, or xorg. Then there was a point in time where it fit in that tiny slit of not being supported by the open source driver OR fglrx, and I basically had to switch to Windows...

OpenRazer 2.9.0 is out, adding plenty of new Razer device support on Linux
5 Dec 2020 at 4:55 am UTC

Quoting: Mountain ManUnless Razer quality has dramatically increased in recent years, I won't touch their products ever again. About seven years ago, I bought a Razer Black Widow keyboard and a Razer Onza gamepad, and both developed significant faults within a year -- LEDs started to burn out on the Black Widow, and both joysticks on the Onza developed significant drift that could not be corrected with calibration. If the second-rate quality of their hardware wasn't enough, the fact that they started requiring drivers with online connectivity to unlock the full capabilities of their products has kept me away for good.

Now I have a WASD mechanical keyboard [External Link] with custom keycaps and a Zowie EC1-A mouse [External Link], and I couldn't be happier.
Ha, this is the same reason I have stayed away from Radeons for so long.
I always like hearing about other keyboard snobs.
I bought recently a blue Cherry MX keyboard that a friend of mine said was obnoxious. I told him I bought it because I can barely hear it through the noise canceling headphones I end up wearing all day for work. :p

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti arrives December 2, hits RTX 2080 SUPER level performance
5 Dec 2020 at 4:51 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: x_wing
Quoting: slaapliedjeThey BACKPORT kernels from testing to stable. https://packages.debian.org/buster-backports/linux-image-5.9.0-0.bpo.2-rt-amd64-unsigned [External Link] Also backports for nvidia drivers are also enabled.

What I was saying is that installing them ARE supported You just don't WANT to have to install newer kernels unless you really need something in the new kernel, that was my point. The whole 'meh, let's swap out the kernel' should be more of a 'holy shit, you're forced to get a new kernel because you want a new GPU?' It should be like any other platform, you update the driver for newer card support, you shouldn't have to update your whole kernel. Not everyone can just do that, like if they have a workstation where they are tied to a specific kernel for business case (like nessus won't accept anything but the kernel version string to certify it's not vulnerable).
Not sure why people don't take such things into account when they say 'just update the kernel'.
We are running in circles here. I previously mentioned that if you have a the requirement of stable kernels or workstations, you must stick to the officially supported distros (i.e. RHel/Centos or Ubuntu LTS) so you can use the dynamic module (and this appliers for both Nvidia and AMD). But lets be real, this discussion is about people that mostly use their GPUs for gaming so getting the latest kernel for the latest hardware is an standard requirement for a Linux user as GPU driver is just one of the many drivers you may need.

Quoting: slaapliedjeThat's what we're talking about here, if you are going to get the latest hardware, you basically have to upgrade kernel / mesa instead of just letting your distro packages handle it. Debian Sid apparently already has the minimum (kernel 5.9.x and Mesa 20.2+ (may have been 20.1+ that is needed). But that IS a rolling release. Yes they have backports, but you'd have to 'prep' for stable and install that stuff before you pull out your old card and put in the new.
Having to get the latest kernel or an specific library version is completely related to the fact that you bought the latest hardware. If you go bleeding edge with the hardware you will have to go bleeding edge with Linux, that's the way it works in our system.

And regarding of having to install your drivers before putting the new one, that's exactly what you have to do no matter if you have AMD or Nvidia (this is probably not 100% true with AMD GPUs, though).

Quoting: slaapliedjeBut the way nvidia and AMD do it with their proprietary driver is more supportable, as you don't have to muck with new kernels, and they package their own OpenGL/Vulkan libraries. DKMS is the correct way to go here. If your distribution breaks DKMS, that means they didn't test kernel+dkms+driver integration, and that's ON THE DISTRIBUTION, not nvidia or AMD's fault, right?
DKMS is a handy option but it's far from being the ideal solution for Linux as many things can go wrong during the build of the module (dealing with those errors will be quite hard for most users), not to mention that you force the user to install a building tools. IMO, from a distro maintainer POV it's probably far better to have everything in the kernel as this helps to avoid the maintenance of the dynamic module (one less package, one less headache).
Thing is, and my point being, yku should NOT HAVE to go bleeding edge just to get a graphics card to work. With nvidia you do not, as most distributions package the drivers themselves. With AMD you will always be chasing the latest mesa libs or kernel, because distrubutions don't chase AMD. The proprietary drivers for AMD have been a mess for a long time and so distributions gave up on packaging them. The open source ones tsnd to not perform as well, as noted earlier in this thread. So being forced to use the proprietary driver for either 'team' to get the full benefits out of your hardware makes me think both of them only give us as much as they think we deserve.
I usually backed Matrox back in the day as everything just worked out of the box. But then the Parhelia came out and the driver install was much like nvidia's and it sucked.
Funny thing is, now Matrox hardware is supported in the nvidia driver, go figure.
So let's all admit, both have their advantages and disadvantages. Neither is 'evil' they both compete for different audiences for the most part. Truth is, for any of the things like DLSS and Raytracing, nvidia still is going to trounce AMD this time around. They got a jump on the tech. AMD was trying so hard to catch up, this is their first gen on ray tracing, so performs similar to the the 2080 from what I have seen, where the rest of stuff is about at 3080 speeds.
The ONLY reasons I would switch to AMD is for better Wayland support and Async Reprojection in VR (which may be pointless with the new cards).
With a new 3080 upgrade... I take the 2080 out of my machine and put in the 3080, done. For switching I will have to reconfigure 3 OSs...

DOSBox Staging has a rather large new release out with 0.76.0
5 Dec 2020 at 4:38 am UTC

Quoting: legluondunet
Quoting: slaapliedjeDosBox-X does as well, but unfortunately you have to compile it yourself in Linux (unless maybe Arch has an PKGBUILD for it or something, I had to build it for Debian / Pop_OS) because the flatpak doesn't include some x11 libs, so menus don't work.
Dosbox ECE has far better 3DFX support than dosbox-x.
Nice, do they support Linux better? (As in not having a broken Flatpak?)