As usual, I can recommend Lightworks for its incredible stability. But the free version is hobbled to 720p output, so if that's a factor, then you'd have to take one of the subscriptions - but it's a viable model to use the free version to get everything lined up, then buy a month's sub at £15 to do a specific piece of work.

https://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=102&Itemid=213 [External Link]

I can't say I've used it for complex/heavy stuff, but it has been used in the film industry, so it's certainly capable. And it's the only video editor I've ever used that hasn't crashed, ever.

Otherwise, Kdenlive is the only video editor I'd trust not to crash every 10 minutes or so, so it's the one I use when I just need to quickly splice together a couple of streams of footage. If they've further improved stability, that's a huge win.

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I wonder if this will ever get deb/ppa support. I'm just not a fan of "locally" (i.e. non-managed) installed software. Such a cool project too.

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Quoting: soulsourceI dug out the very first PC game my parents bought for me: The Settlers 2. 24 years after release it's still an incredibly awesome game, and of all Settlers games I've played it's still my absolute favourite (though it might be the nostalgia talking :tongue:). Runs perfectly fine in Dosbox.
Apart from that I've been playing Death and Taxes, and while it's fun, it lacks a bit of challenge.

I spent many hours in Settlers 2 - it has an atmosphere which is hard to describe, but which hooked me in. Combined with that perfect learning curve and mid to late-game challenge, it's a classic.

I might try Widelands, after Liam covered it a few weeks back: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/07/inspired-by-settlers-ii-the-open-source-widelands-has-a-new-test-build-up

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Quoting: randyl

Quoting: berarmaI would have liked that you started with a supported title like HL:Alyx. It would have been more representative of the state of SteanVR on GNU/Linux.

Besides, add to that, like others said, that you're using an unsupported distro and it seems you're going for the big prize. Yesterday I read Lutris isn't supporting Mint for the issues with Wine games.

I'd like to read the experiences from someone not going so hard on it.

Wait, does Valve VR only support Ubuntu? That would be a terrible marketing decision on their part.

Like all Valve products, Ubuntu is the only "official" supported platform. However, as you can see from this article, Mint works with a bit of foresight, and I can see extensive notes on the ArchWiki [External Link] too, so there's plenty of platforms you can use if you prefer not to go with Ubuntu. You haven't filled in your profile details, so I can't see what distro you do run, but I unless it's Linux From Scratch, I doubt you'll have too many issues making this stuff work.

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Quoting: CatKillerOff Topic:

Quoting: scaineAnd I just can't enjoy my desktop when it's Gnome3. It doesn't gel, despite my giving it 6 months to do so.

But Mint! Holy cow, what a slick, beautiful experience it is. Better... better(!) than Unity, in my opinion. I have fallen in love with my desktop all over again. So, giving up Mint for a slightly better VR experience isn't on the cards, I'm afraid!

I was in a similar position to you. I had Cinnamon on my laptop because, at the time I got it, the high-DPI support was best, and I was getting increasingly annoyed by Gnome 3 on my desktop.

When I built my new desktop I gave KDE a try. Within a week I decided to switch my laptop to KDE as well, since I liked it so much more.

In particular, and the reason I'm mentioning it, the out-of-the-box audio configuration for setting device priorities - and having different priorities for different classes of audio application if you want that - is way better than what you get on the GTK side, since they had all that already for Phonon.

If you do get itchy feet to try something different, that's the direction that I'd suggest you try.

While I was disilluioned by Gnome3 on my primary PC for that 6 months I mentioned in another comnent... I actually ran KDE (I think it was Kubuntu, or KDE Neon, one of the two) on my laptop.

Two things put me off using it. First, the KDE devs have a funny attitude about Nvidia, and at the time, my primary PC was running a GTX1080, so I couldn't see myself using it.

But second, and most importantly, I've been a gnome-fanboi since 2005! I know it inside and out. It's familiar. And while certain things were really nice in KDE, other things were a pain. One thing in particular I hated is that both Kate (the text editor) and Dolphin (the file manager) are crippled to disallow running as sudo. Now, I get it - they're trying to promote good behaviour. But when an O/S makes it THIS hard to do what I want, it's become something I really resent. It thinks it knows better than I do.

If there were a simple('sh) fix for this behaviour, I'd have shrugged my shoulders and continued to use KDE. But it wasn't simple. It was painful. The absolute simplest way around this was to, I shit you not, install thunar and gedit/xed. That felt like ridiculous overkill for the five or six tasks I need admin for when I'm installing a new O/S I'm trying to fall in love with. It put me on the back foot with KDE right from the start. So when the papercuts began, I felt them more keenly. I hated that every app had to have a K in it. I hated how there's no "desktop" and I had to create a desktop widget for the 3 or 4 files I temporarily use the desktop for. I hated how confusing and convoluted the control panel is (better than KDE3, but still a mess). There was more, but I moved on.

I'll give it another try at some point, I'm sure. I like to check in with DE's and distros on my laptop, I usually test at around two a year. I'm overdue for another shot at Manjaro. Serebit won't shut up about Budgie. I want to see what the fuss is about Elementary. And I haven't used XFCE in over 5 years.

But Mint will take some beating. I love it. It feels good, it looks amazing, and it performs wonderfully. But you never know!

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The only thing I'd add to the "works out of the box" piece is that when I was googling for answers, there were a LOT of people who had similar issues to me. Finding the answers was only a trial because a lot of the information was quite dated, or about Vive, for example.

My dependency issues for the 32-bit libraries was definitely Mint doing their own thing, deviating from the Ubuntu base too much. But other things like the Pulseaudio crackling - other people had experienced that, for example, and some of the solutions to this and other issues really amaze me - like, moving from HDMI to DP, or running pavucontrol (just, running it... nothing else).

So basically, the people who had great first time experiences, I suspect, were running largely un-modified Ubuntu, single-screen, on DP. Which was about as far from my position as you can get! :grin:

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Quoting: barottoI think this experience should be added to the wiki.

Also, don't get used to Elite Dangerous on VR too much, as the next big Odyssey expansion will not support it.

I'll look into putting some of it into a wiki. As Patola notes, everyone's experience is different, but it would certainly be useful to create a central resource for this stuff. Hunting the web for it all was definitely an issue, and made worse by out of date information.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: scaineI'm gonna upgrade to Mint 20 today and retry some of my bullet points to see if I can solve them. I might switch from OIBAF to the Steam ACO branch too, to see if that helps.

Steam's ACO repo/branch is quite a bit behind Mesa master these days and there's no PPA available for Ubuntu 20.04. All the work seems to go into upstream Mesa now, and ACO will actually be the default compiler in the upcoming Mesa 20.2 release.

I like Kisak's PPA [External Link] myself. That's what I've been running with my 5700 XT. Latest stable Mesa with a bunch of patches and backports. New Mesa versions tend to be available very soon after release.

Thanks. I've used OIBAF for a while now, but since my upgrade to Mint 20 is now complete, I'm re-adding PPAs and I think I'll give Kisak a shot. I can always swap over if I notice any regressions.

God, Mint's upgrade process is just crap. Liam noted to me that until recently, there wasn't an upgrade process - you were encouraged to do a full re-install each new (LTS) release. And it shows. But it's done now, and hopefully they'll eventually put the same polish and beauty on the upgrade process that they do for the rest of the O/S.

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Quoting: fabertaweGreat article and quite entertaining :grin: I'd love to go VR but need to upgrade CPU and GPU before that can even be considered. One consolation of late(r) adoption is it should all work better by then.

One question please: do you need Pulseaudio for this? I'm running Jack but do occasionally fall back to just ALSA for some games.

Thanks! I'm afraid I can't answer your query about jack audio. I can't see that it would matter, particularly, though, as long as you have a way to switch to the Index speakers somehow, I suspect it would be fine.

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: DragosakPlease reassess what you consider "mainstream". Mint is higher on distrowatch than Ubuntu for instance and used to be number one there. Does it mean it's more popular? Probably not, but it is pretty popular and mainstream. Also, with the same package base it's basically Ubuntu 18.04 with some different skinning, tooling and without some weird ubuntu choices.

Distrowatch is not a good measure of a distribution being mainstream or popular [External Link]. For Steam specifically, the Steam Hardware Survey [External Link] is much more relevant and in there Ubuntu 20.04 is the supreme leader, with almost 20%, Ubuntu 18.04 being second with ~13%. But specifically, Ubuntu is the distro officially supported by Steam and the games (besides SteamOS that is almost irrelevant these days), and we would assume that's where they test their games to work. Valve was going to drop support for Ubuntu due to the 32-bit-libs debacle, but gave up on it when Canonical took steps to extend the longevity of these libraries -- and 20.04 mostly works with them yet.

I am not saying I agree with Canonical, I am not saying I wish everyone to use Ubuntu and I myself am pretty disappointed with Canonical (I expressed my anger towards them in some messages, you might find those occasionally), but let's be real, it is close enough to a good standard desktop experience on Linux, and I find it sensible that developers use it for their testing and support. I would even recommend it to new users even though I am myself moving away from it.

Well, as an Ubuntu-only Linux'er since the Breezy Badger in 2005, and an official Ask Ubuntu "top responder", I was seriously invested. But I was gutted by the last two releases - ditching Unity was a huge blow, the adoption of Snap didn't sit well, especially after the Mir fiasco, and then the whole 32-bit support drama... oof. And I just can't enjoy my desktop when it's Gnome3. It doesn't gel, despite my giving it 6 months to do so.

But Mint! Holy cow, what a slick, beautiful experience it is. Better... better(!) than Unity, in my opinion. I have fallen in love with my desktop all over again. So, giving up Mint for a slightly better VR experience isn't on the cards, I'm afraid!

And ultimately, it's pretty much Ubuntu under the hood anyway, or so I thought. I'm gonna upgrade to Mint 20 today and retry some of my bullet points to see if I can solve them. I might switch from OIBAF to the Steam ACO branch too, to see if that helps.

I note here [External Link] that audio switching is currently unsupported, so I'd be keen to hear how you fixed that, Patola! Thanks!

I'll report back in a bit.

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