this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
1080 points (96.7% liked)

Programmer Humor

32595 readers
1848 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Hate the irrational hate for Nvidia, Wayland or some desktop . I'm just out here trying to help others figure out their problem and some asshole comments"Nvidia doesn't work on wayland", "just get an amd card", "Wayland will never work" or "gsync doesn't work in Linux with multiple monitors".

All of them are equally absurd, the last one largely true on xorg for any GPU. Xorg doesn't do mixed frame rates. Also it doesn't help the person who is using an Nvidia card because there are solutions for most issues. Those issues are just not well understood because there was a time Nvidia drivers just didn't work on wayland etc.

I hate gatekeepers and purist that just make anyone who might be new to the platform feel attacked or alienated. No one cares about your ideologies if they're not asking and the idiots that parot it doesn't prove anything other than your part of the loud minority. Just being kind to one another and being understanding of other peoples decisions can go a long way to growing a healthy supportive community.

I'm still a little frustrated about the behavior of people when I was trying to help someone setup hardware video acceleration in their browser. And another that wanted to use a different distro but found Nvidia worked best on arch for him.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I am going to continue to tell people "just get an AMD card", but only if they have indicated to me that they are shopping for new parts and haven't committed to any yet.

Giving that advice to someone who already has an Nvidia card is just as useless as those StackOverflow answers that suggest you dump your whole project architecture and stuff some big dumb library into your build to solve a simple problem.

[–] PilferJynx 1 points 8 months ago

Hey man, the best way to quit smoking is to never start in the first place. Heh heh heh.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I am planning to shop for new parts (well, strictly speaking I continue to plan for more than a year already, but life gets in the way). I can't decide between the better compatibility of AMD and (supposedly) more features of Nvidia

I have just started trying to make sense of the situation searching the internet, but I would appreciate it if you can sum up what's the pros and cons for my use case: I mostly use GPU for gaming, consider participation in ML crowd sourcing like AI horde, sometimes edit images or video. Plus, I mostly use Win now and want to use Linux in dual boot on the new machine

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Nvidia and AMD broadly cover the same use cases. Nvidia cards are not intrinsically better to my knowledge, Nvidia simply offers ultra high-performance cards that AMD doesn't.

If you just need nonspecific games to run decently, a card from either brand will do it. If you need to run the most intensive games there are on unbelievable settings, that's when Nvidia should be edging out.

ML dabbling may complicate things. Many (most?) tools are written for CUDA, which is a proprietary Nvidia technology. I think AMD offers a counterpart but I do not have details. You will need to do more research on this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah, researching the last point now, thanks for the heads up about the rest. Probably not going to be running super mega ultra, not potato is already a big step forward 😅

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

There's basically only 2 reasons to go for nvidia, rtx and cuda, figure out if you care enough about it to get an nvidia gpu.
As for postponing shit, just get it over with, there'll never be a perfect moment to buy your gpu.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I was postponing because otherwise I had to carry my GPU in a suitcase instead of a computer case 😅 but I'm almost done moving around, almost

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

No need to rush it. I moved recently with an ultra wide 32", 24" and 2 midsized desktop. I ended up with scuff on my ultra wide screen and a gouge on the interior plastics because I closed my hatch on my pc by accident.

Now I have a lil squiggly dead center of my screen but thankfully no tempered glass mess in the back.

[–] cmhe 9 points 8 months ago

Nvidia has created a bit of a sore spot for many Linux Developers and thus users. Through their actions and non actions made it impossible to create FOSS drivers for their hardware that work well and are integrated and tested with the rest of the system.

Many fresh users don't seem to recognize the reason why they are having a sub par experience using their hardware is Nvidia and not the open source community. They often blame and complain to the developers of the open source drivers or applications, who either have to hack around hurdles placed by Nvidia or cannot inspect closed source drivers written by that company.

It is IMO understandable that at some point the community stops providing free and unpaid customer support for hardware and software, they have no control over or don't even own.

If you would start paying them, then I suspect you might get better answers. Otherwise you just get information about stuff people are excited about.

[–] ElectricMoose 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

As a developer, I really don't like how Wayland has fractured the ecosystem. Competing immature protocols are still all over the place while the immobility of x11 has spoiled us for years. It's getting better, but in the meantime I can still write an x11 app which will work mostly everywhere (thanks to xwayland), whereas a wayland app may not work everywhere (not on X11, and not on compositors which don't implement the right combinations of protocols).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

As a user I like no screen tearing, low latency, no soft locks from apps crashing, no softlock when a window is capturing the keyboard while the screen is locked, no weird artifacts from hardware accelerated effects, no app windows blanking out and lagging usually web apps (still happens in XWayland),etc.

I still miss being able to kill the screen locker from the terminal, made me feel like a hacker.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Linux users and Fromsoft fanboys seem to be cut from the same cloth "Just get gud."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. I'm guilty of doing that to myself, I use Arch and neovim btw. Your perspective kinda changes when someone close to you that wants to switch to Linux she found windows frustrating or start getting into more than just animal crossing and the sims but finds camera controls disorienting or both. (Mother)

A lot of these new people who want a better experience for themselves but find certain technology issues daunting and they really get the raw end of the deal when they run into the loud minority. I also blame Linux Bros for promising the moon and with no issues.

It's about as difficult and as exciting (for some) as switching to Macos for the first time, ask me how I know.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I also blame Linux Bros for promising the moon and with no issues

This is the one that I see the most when I'm in Linux communities. The guy that knows all of the ins and outs of the software and the hardware and has no problems, telling the person that only has ever used windows that it all just works no matter what. "ALL of your games will work right away AND run better than windows ever did." but they fail to mention that all they play are games that had good linux support or something.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think you get how dxvk and wine work. All games that don't require rootkits and have Linux support in their flavor of anti cheat will start, about 80% playable potentially with some tweaking or hardware specific fixes and about 20% pretty much work out of the box which is nice. AMD users are probably feeling smug about the aggregate 50% playable with 10% verified steam deck compatible.

It only runs better as a result of the optimizations done to translate Windows calls to Linux calls as well as translating Direct X into Vulkan or just uses vulkan. So if the game is well optimized Linux is a lot less likely to have an advantage and often suffers in performance a little bit until optimizations for that game are patched into Wine or DXVK about the same as video card drivers in windows.

On the other hand some poorly optimized games still run just as bad as they do on Windows if the game has issues not related to the graphics stack. Things like Elden Ring play to the strength of the optimizations and presented good results but I like to think of it as the exception and not the rule.

On average you see a delta of at most 10fps with windows beating Linux or Linux beating windows which even I find surprising sometimes. Maybe lower CPU overhead, the game just runs better being translated into Vulkan, or shader cashing in DXVK has gotten better than some in-house solutions; it's hard to say.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I don’t think you get how dxvk and wine work.

Clearly, I don't use Linux. I should have specified that it was an example of the type of comment I see rather than the absolute reality of it. My point was that there's always a something that the loudest proponents of linux don't mention simply because they took care of it so long ago that they forgot or its so routine to them they fail to mention it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Yeah, I totally agree. Sorry about that. I got pretty excited about the topic because it's amazing how all my games have worked so far and how it works is interesting. If I was using Windows or MacOS I'd be paying attention but I generally wouldn't care about the progress.