Hello again.
Today I wanted to chat about linux. Specifically, 4 years ago when I joined the TekSyndicate Forums / at least read the forums there was talk of "Oh well there is a huge gap of where linux will be and where it is now its not a desktop and theres no games bah bah bah" yeah ok. You get the point. Today, I feel like picking a fight, so, I'll argue that linux on the desktop is where we wanted it 4 years ago.
Steam - Check
GPU Drivers - Use AMD
Games - 3000+ of good games
Kernel Advancements - .....Yeah
Let me rattle down the list. I'll start at GPU stuff since steam and games go together as far as I am concerned.
When I really started mainlining linux in senior year of high school I had a laptop with an apu and my desktop had a PX7900GT. I didn't have great support on my desktop and my laptop got good performance on the rolling updates from arch using the ATi driver, and eventually, catalyst. Since then, we have had quite some advancements from AMD towards completely reformatting the company in GPU terms, trying to shake up the market with better hardware in terms of performance and support. In that time we also saw AMD GPUOpen happen, making docs and code and all sorts of dev tools open source and available to those who wanted to work on it, and then we saw AMDGPU start to happen in 4.2, at least thats when I noticed it at least. As kernel advancements came every few months we got to that magic 4.9 number recently with thorough support coming through on the AMDGPU drivers and even a holy shit load of Mesa driver and RadeonSI / openATi code getting completely overhauled making hardware support vast and REALLY REALLY GOOD. We have seen the driver stack completely flip on its head for AMD and we can get great performance, and at least for me, sometimes even BETTER performance than on windows!
I don't have nvidia, haven't for a long time, but from what I have seen, for the most part, the performance is still about as expected as 4 years ago. I mean its pretty good, better than AMD in a lot of high performance games and tasks, but they're still VERY strict about what happens with the driver. Theres still a lot of pushback from nvidia to even work on opensource drivers and giving complete support to devs who need it. They push the driver sure, but I haven't seen much for help from them on the nouveau driver, which would be nice. But the performance is still there so that can make up for some of it (though I'd argue its only there because the 1080 is used in every comparing benchmark and thats why the average numbers are so high, which, no fault there, its just not comparable to a 480/70/60/300 cards).
Games have gotten.... Better. Greenlight is gone, thank fuck, and steam is getting its act together. We have seen the new Deus Ex get ported, the old ones are getting ported, witcher is coming, we have all the source games, games ported to vulkan are compatible / run 0.9:1 in comparable performance in wine and when the moment strikes that league is in Vulkan I can start giving a fuck about that game again. The now 3000+ games that are on steam cannot compare to the normal steam library, but last year and in 2015 steam also gained like 60% of its library so the numbers aren't fair to compare with all the bloatware. We are seeing MAJOR releases come over, as well as older games such as the Saints Row series getting pushed over with, driver dependant to hardware, relatively good performance. At that there have been significantly large improvements to Wine, enough that we got DX10 and 11 support and Vulkan pipelining so that if you run a vulkan game in wine, you use the native system calls and rendering to run the game. Some things might be missing and everything may not run 1:1, but it runs!
At that, we have also seen hardware passthrough come a LOOOOONG way from what it used to be. IOMMU groups are easier to read now and handle, and as such we can run windows in KVM with 1:1 performance. EVEN IN 4K (or 12K).
With all of this, I also want to mention that OBS Studio has come to linux / has had better performance in linux within the last year of development time. I can now stream whatever in linux the same as I would in windows, but thanks to my hardware limitations in the past I had problems streaming in 720p (this has been fixed). Everything, streaming wise, runs amazingly well and it runs as I would expect it to.
Now.... Kernel advancements. I'm going to reference from June 2013 and onward as thats around where I decided that I needed linux more than I needed windows. I had problems with GPU drivers, X.Org didn't like my APU laptop so I started using Netrunner which at the time used a combo of Wayland as a renderer and X.Org to post frames to use my laptop. Eventually I started using arch to be on the front of kernel development so that I could get the newest drivers and all that crap. Since then, we have seen, in my opinion, a complete overhaul on many distributions and a bunch of new developers piping work into the driver stack on the linux kernel. We have seen SystemD improve (some) people's lives and dev time put back into OpenRC to keep the rational (in my opinion) people happy. We have seen the init systems go in their own directions. We have seen UEFI support go from questionable to LOOK I WORK to being able to install easily to SystemD having a UEFI boot manager don't worry about it. At that, we have even seen NEW EFI SYSTEMS START UP such as openboot. With that, old systems like my macbook can be brought into modern OS's expediently and be more than useful picture frames. We saw a pile of display managers happen, Mir wayland xwayland etcetc, and wayland has ACTUALLY SHIPPED ON SOMETHING AND IS COMPATIBLE WITH STUFF HOLY SHIT. We have seen Containers become a huge part of many developers work cycles and get easily integrated into the kernel and even allowing to run OS's in those said containers. We have seen the PowerPC, POWER, SPARC, and MIPS kernels also get their own overhauls with the old PPC macs getting a boot priority overhaul and better hardware support built right into the kernel, POWER has gotten more Desktop-Like improvements by request of those who have attempted to make a POWER7/8 desktop system, SPARC actually has development proper again, and MIPS has gotten somewhat some improvements to their support such as the R4000. At that, RISC has a full on devcycle, not just for phones and pi's, but for RISC based machines like the dreamcast or RISC computers that have either been recently produced OR that lost development at release and with the strength getting put back into the kernel cycle have gotten strength back into them.
Now for the things that are great, but not overly monumental to the generic linux desktop user.
RedoxOS has shipped showing how microkernels can be improved and how little of code can be used to make a fast system. Many bits and bobs from Redox have been pushed to the linux kernel and init stack in the last 3 - 5 months.
Flash has a full on dev cycle on linux again.
The COW bug has been fixed, allowing for security holes all over the place to also be patched.
Many new apps, app environments, and new ways to make apps have been ported. This includes webapps (electron), apps like Discord, vivaldi, opera (lost dev cycle until a year or two ago), and many more basic apps for work and production.
Microsoft has put money into linux and started their Azure platform, as well as added a linux subsystem to windows. Whether this is good or not is subjective to opinion.
Many companies, such as entroware, system76, and dell, have gotten the lime light for their linux hardware and have seen a HUGE market sales increase on linux hardware (dell especially).
Linux laptops are cheaper than macbooks and still have better features/port availability.
LAS has shut down, prompting more and better shows to come out with better focus to work related tasks and the basic desktop.
Video and Photo editors, as well as DAW's and 3D workstations (CAD, blender) have had significant improvements and are even starting to be competitive to the adobe platform tools.
Munich stopped using linux due to bribery from microsoft. Holdout companies are still using linux though, and will probably have better security in the long run.
Linux has had mentions on gaming and generic computer chat podcasts, including but not exclusive to: the cooptional podcast, Mac Break Weekly, and the Podquisition.
Huion has open sourced their drivers and now have native support in linux with their graphics tablets (in solid place since 4.0.1).
The PS4 can run linux and play steam games.
Conventions have seen increased viewership of linux computer providers (such as Entroware and Tuxedo) with a lot of hubub flying around and even increase of sales.
@ryanleesipes joined the forum (level1techs.com).
Skype has an actual dev cycle again in linux, but with this sadly the 4.14 skype app on PPC mac will be shutdown with the linux compatibility services no longer being needed (thats how PPC mac users were able to connect for the last..... wow, like 8 or 7 years?).
Discord is better than skype on linux with much improved sound quality and uses IRC. Skype has missed the boat to keep users around :I
VST's are starting to get ported/have been ported so @Logan can stop bitching about that.
Snap and Flat packs have become, in my opinion, the first steps to a unified package system, with OS's like Solus leading the way to their wide adoption.
Mycroft is real now, and has market attraction.
TL;DR what the fuck are you talking about dude, but my windows market share, my macbook is purty, but my nvidia, etc
So essentially, 4 years ago we were bitching about app support, package managers, hardware support, and all the other shit I talked about. FOR THE MOST PART none of this is even a problem anymore if you have relatively recent hardware. Yeah there are less games than windows, but windows also has all the bloatware bullshit games (shots fired) that were stuffed into steam for the last 2 years. Linux has all the major releases of recent times plus a good grouping of other games, not to mention really cool games such as sanicball (its a lot better than a generic meme game, I demand everyone play it). Drivers have skyrocketed in quality, OS devs are easier to talk to, older platforms / esoteric platforms have better support / some if any support now, init has become much better as well as uefi support, and the general desktop experience, I will say, is better than windows. Yeah you can still break linux just as easy as before, but you can do the same in windows with just internet explorer being open for an hour and windows updates being turned on.
My point is the basic demands we had, and are still making, have been met and exceeded. We are a desktop OS, people just need to stop adding more to the list of basic compatibility to the normal user. In my opinion, we have a good desktop platform. If we get better sales in europe to start (Entroware, Tuxedo), and have it grow, we'll have better market compatibility and market share. This is a vast improvement to when I joined the forum / started reading on a regular basis. What we need to focus on is how to talk to people about linux sa a desktop for content creators. Hell, MY WHOLE YOUTUBE CHANNEL has been built on linux, for the most part (everything that has been an edited video). I'm a shit editor, but my channel is built on it. I have 12 subs! I have been streaming games in linux. Viewers say its all good! Art stuff is easy, gaming is easy, work stuff is easy. Theres nothing missing now.
This post is an article from my account on level1techs, article here: forum.level1techs.com/t/linux-is-where-we-wanted-it-4-years-ago/114681