9 ms·

I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer probl

by kentonv 10mo ago

I switched all the machines at https://lanparty.house https://lanparty.house over to Linux a couple months ago. So far, we've experienced noticeably fewer problems on Linux compared to Windows. Stability and performance are better. I can't think of one game we tried that didn't work. And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore. (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)

varun_ch 10mo ago
As an aside.. I went down a mini-rabbit hole learning about the LAN Party House, read your website and about Sandstorm[0] and how that ended up with you at Cloudflare leading Workers. That’s a really cool and honestly inspirational path. Would love to learn more if you’ve written elsewhere…! [0] https://sandstorm.io/news/ https://sandstorm.io/news/
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
  I was also impressed by his wife's Chez JJ work. I suspect that she has done much more impressive stuff, but that kind of thing is a dime a dozen, in SV. The hacker housing stuff speaks to her humanity, and I like humans.
- crabmusket 10mo ago
  I've been down this rabbit hole too. I quite enjoyed Kenton's two episodes on SE Daily: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/12/18/protocol-buffers-with-kenton-varda/ https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/12/18/protocol-buf... https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/02/06/serverless-at-the-edge-with-kenton-varda/ https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/02/06/serverless-a...
abrookewood 10mo ago
Yep, I've been gaming exclusively on Ubuntu (mainly because I want my desktop to match my servers) for several years. If you aren't playing the latest AAA FPS, then everything pretty much works.
- curt15 10mo ago
  How much work is it to get snaps out of your way? Canonical seems to be going all in on them as their business strategy.
  - unixhero 10mo ago
    Just use Linux Mint
    - abrookewood 10mo ago
      There are a few games I play that have native Linux versions available (e.g. Warhammer Total War) and getting support requires you to run Ubuntu. Not the end of the world, but that plus some dev work was enough to get me to stick to it.
      - unixhero 10mo ago
        Linux Mint is Ubuntu
        abrookewood 10mo ago
        Not as far as the Game Devs are concerned. I was running Kubuntu and that wasn't 'supported' by them - only Ubuntu LTS.
        unixhero 9mo ago
        You just install it. The debs work.
  - abrookewood 10mo ago
    Not that much. TO be honest, I have a few installed (Heroic Games Launcher for one), but the main one I wanted to avoid was Firefox - which is easily doable. It is annoying that we have yet another way of packaging apps - would have been better if they just supported Flatpack
LeoPanthera 10mo ago
What distro?
- kentonv 10mo ago
  Debian... mostly just because it's what I'm most familiar with. I don't have strong opinions on distros.
  - argsnd 10mo ago
    I find that Fedora hits the right balance of stability while being up to date for anything desktop and specifically gaming focused, Debian has different priorities and packages can be a bit too old. And it’s less of a faff than Arch.
    - kentonv 10mo ago
      Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things, and those all have their own update schedule independent of the distro.
      - tapoxi 10mo ago
        You're right because the games run in containers anyway, steam-runtime.
      - sznio 10mo ago
        I'm hopeful that's been fixed by now, but when I switched to Linux a year ago I started with Debian, and had a lot of issues with input latency for games on Wayland. Switched to Fedora which was two KDE versions ahead and never had that issue again.
        joe200 10mo ago
        Because you used Debian stable (which is mostly for servers). Try Debian Testing. And don't get fooled by its name "testing" - it is because Debian community reserved "stable" for Debian stable. Debian testing is also stable :-)
valorzard 10mo ago
Your house sounds like a great place to hold a fighting game local tournament (or something like the old Smash Summit series for Smash Bros Melee and Ultimate before Beyond The Summit shut down)
bigyabai 10mo ago
Battlefield 4's anticheat runs fine on Linux, if you end up needing one. It definitely slakes my BF fix, in the same way Deadlock is filling the LoL-shaped hole in my contemptible subsistence.
ThatPlayer 10mo ago
Did you ever get those local SSDs as copy-on-write overlays on Linux? I imagine it'd be easier with btrfs support for seeding device: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Seeding-device.html https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Seeding-device.html
- kentonv 10mo ago
  Yes, on Linux I was able to move the copy-on-write overlays to use local disks, which is one reason it performs much better (admittedly not a reason that would affect most people). I am just using dm-snapshot for this -- block device level, no fancy filesystems.
reincarnate0x14 10mo ago
I recently heard that Star Citizen of all things, still in eternal development hell, runs really well on Linux. Also, amazing house, my friend is enamored of the cat-transit. I used to live not too far from you :)
- b112 10mo ago
  cat-transit You cannot say such things without more info. I envision cats sitting on small trollies.
  - crabmusket 10mo ago
    https://lanparty.house/#catwalk https://lanparty.house/#catwalk
    - b112 10mo ago
      Cool. Thanks
isnckwndkwmx 10mo ago
[dead]
aqme28 10mo ago
On a similar note, performance is sometimes better. As a direct comparison, the steam version of the Lenovos Legion S handheld is significantly more performant than the windows version. Like 20% better FPS and double the battery life. Literally the only difference between the two is the OS.
- eru 10mo ago
  Though from what I've read, Microsoft could fix that relatively quickly, if they made some tweaks to Windows (and called it a special 'handheld gaming edition' or so). For some reason, the Lenovo Legion S's Windows still comes with a lot of baggage and background services etc.
  - joseda-hg 10mo ago
    If LTT is to be believed, this is in the works Maybe SteamOS managed to ruffle enough feathers to start moving the inertial colossus that is Microsoft, not that I have much trust on their willingness to leave a good idea remain good in the long term
  - everdrive 10mo ago
    Microsoft is a big expensive oil tanker. They have the resources to turn the ship around, but they need to feel incentivize to do so. I love using Linux and won't go back to Windows, (it's been quite a while for me) but they could blow the performance problems out of the water if they really cared to.
  - bsimpson 10mo ago
    It's called Xbox Full-Screen Experience and is marketed as Xbox PC. It's available now, but nobody's been impressed yet. Gives you a gamepad-compatible launcher (although the gamepad PIN to login is buggy). Doesn't seem to actually save resources.
- ToucanLoucan 10mo ago
  I might have to look into this for my ROG Ally X... it already runs pretty beastily but I'm never going to complain about better performance... Edit: though, I'd have to give up my Fallout 4 with mods. (Don't judge me I know it sucks but it makes the dopamine go brrr)
z3t4 10mo ago
I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive. GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pcie lanes available, so if you already got a gaming PC with many slots and dont need top performance it could still be worth it to get two more cheap gpus and use multi seats - for those building a mini lan gaming room at home. One annoying thing is that linux cant run many different GPU drivers at the same time, so you have to make sure the cards work with the same driver. Properitary 3rd party multi seat also exist for Windows, but Linux has built in support and its free.
- seg_lol 10mo ago
  This is awesome! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration I am super curious about your setup. I played with MS years ago, but I lost the need. It is a super cool tech that I'd love to see its efficiencies embraced in some way.
  - z3t4 10mo ago
    Install an old GPU, Connected a monitor to the extra GPU, connect mouse and keyboard, Use the loginctl command to list available devices/usb ports and attach them to a seat. I suggest using Arch linux although loginctl should be available in all distributions using SystemD now. If you don't have enough USB ports you can use a USB hub, some monitors comes with USB hub. And some with built in sound, or you can use wireless headset. My main issue was that driver support was dropped for my oldest GPU card. So one day when I upgraded the OS it just stopped working. So to be on the safe side get another GPU like the one you already have.
    - ngcc_hk 10mo ago
      Sorry being IT guy I wondered about the logic. I understand the need to align. But if one fail all fail and children like customers … not the patient kind? Or you have two system within each … then across the …. Sorry cannot stop my mind spinning.
bloating8731 10mo ago
Does this mean the GitHub repo linked with the scripts now include up to date linux versions? Last time I looked it was all windows specific, but I'd love to setup something similar with stations for (much lower power) versions.
- kentonv 10mo ago
  Sorry, I haven't gotten around to updating it yet, although it basically works to follow the same instructions except replace Windows with Linux and skip all the workarounds for Windows-specific bugs.
  - bloating8731 10mo ago
    Thanks for the heads up. I'll keep an eye out on the repo in case you get it there. It's an impressive setup. Just so I understand correctly, are all the game machines segmented off so that the DHCP server only serves the game machines and doesn't interfere with the rest of the household? Or does it serve everything at once? My thought process was to keep this game network segmented with a VLAN so that DHCP would be unaffected for the rest of my household.
asymons 10mo ago
league of legends is basically the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux for myself :/ really want to just swap over to linux fully. love your website + house!
- chmod775 10mo ago
  Some would consider not being able to play that game a feature!
  - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
    You might be saying it in jest, but I think there may be something to this line of thinking. Whenever I read about anything on HN and bazzite comes up, it feels like the beginning of a new holy war is approaching. I am starting to wonder if the concern from the 'older' linux crowd is that the gamers will introduce changes to linux that will corrupt it more than systemd ever could ( like kernel level drm in games ).
    - stavros 10mo ago
      I think the GP means because the game is a time sink, but you raise an interesting point. I wanted to say "that'll never happen", but someone could fork Linux, add DRM, and then that becomes massively popular and we're done.
      - swiftcoder 10mo ago
        > someone could fork Linux, add DRM Realistically, that's only going to happen if Valve, specifically, decides to do it. There isn't really another player in the linux-gaming business with enough skin in the game to make it worthwhile.
        wongarsu 10mo ago
        I could imagine Epic Games trying to keep the Epic Games Store relevant by making a SteamOS competitor, with the idea of attracting developers with strong kernel-level DRM and anti-cheat
jakebasile 10mo ago
I'm sorry if you hear this a lot, but your house is so cool, and I must admit I am more than a little jealous. I've also said it here before but I will just give up on PC gaming wholesale before I go back to Windows. It's crazy how much gaming on Linux has improved in just the past couple years.
harles 10mo ago
I see not being able to install invasive kernel level anti-cheat as a positive. I uninstalled all Riot games before they rolled it out. I would’ve been pretty miffed if I had accidentally gotten their kernel modules simply because I wasn’t reading tech news before the auto update.
cdgfdfdgf 10mo ago
what stability and performance? yeah, i dont see bsds but bluetooth doesnt work and it doesnt wake up after sleep 85 percent of the time. kind of crap really
- dtj1123 10mo ago
  Bluetooth is admittedly less snappy than on Mac or Windows, although it absolutely does work. As for wake after sleep, I've not had a single issue in five years of daily driving Linux. No idea what you're talking about.
  - Hendrikto 10mo ago
    A lot of hardware does have problems with properly resuming from sleep, but that is pretty much universal, not OS-dependent. People report just as many problems on Windows.
ahartmetz 10mo ago
It keeps surprising me how many people don't care about some of the most popular games today. I mean I don't care about Battlefield or League of Legends neither, but in earlier decades of PC gaming, almost everyone had some of the most popular games. Doom, Half-Life (1 + 2) and such. The games market today seems more similar to music in its fragmentation.
- a_humean 10mo ago
  Well yes. The addressable consumer market is just a lot bigger and more diverse than it used to be. You go back to the early late 90s and its a market dominated by teenage boys. Go back and look at some of the 00s and early 10s E3 presenations from the big three and its very cringe inducing how focused they are on a teenage boy demographic and appearing edgy and how blatantly sexist they are in their language. For example, at the E3 conference where MS announced xbox live (2004?) they explictly said that girls don't play games (there were actually plenty of girls that did play games at that time), but they might want to use xbox live to design t-shirts to sell to boys on their online marketplace. This was also still the era of booth babes trying to pull in men to booths with barely dressed women. Nearly every game ad was just a wall of exposions and violence or just the latest NFL game. Today you have fully grown adults in their 30-50s with very different tastes and you have a lot lot more women and girls playing. On top of we have a lot of diversity in who creates games and the kinds of games they can create and still be commerically successful. Lots of interesting narratively focused games, puzzles games, platformers, and more artsy games. But if you want your multiplayer shooter battlefield and CS2 are still there for you.
  - ngcc_hk 10mo ago
    Let us say Star Wars. Until someone has a daughter and suddenly found out there is no nothing between them and then he should we say now we have one then very annoying girl Jedi forced onto the team.
  - schlauerfox 10mo ago
    This apparently is something that came about after the Atari days where games were social activities in bars and home console advertising features boys and girls. When the NES came out, it was marketed in the US as a toy so had to mold itself to the retail store layouts and pick a toy aisle and they picked boys. In the mobile era and perhaps as early as The Sims beating MYST as the bestselling game, started to develop a more balanced marketing approach.
gloomyday 10mo ago
The only game I tried on Steam that didn't work was Slave Zero, a game from the 90s. Unfortunately, I still have to use Windows for VR games. It is too troublesome on Linux (at least for the Meta Quest 2).
- awkwardpotato 10mo ago
  VR on Linux is probably going to be the main reason the Steam Frame is going to be a day one pre-order for me
  - fortyseven 10mo ago
    Certainly mine!
ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.) As I've said elsewhere, Battlefield 6 has got a far better user experience on Linux than Windows and I would recommend it to anyone.
andrepd 10mo ago
> I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work I consider this a feature, not a bug
EMM_386 10mo ago
"And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore." I don't understand this - and I'm not being a Windows defender here, I use Linux when I can (and promote its use). But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads and zero "crapware". And it's a Dell! Everything that I didn't want on the machine was removed when I purchased it (two years ago). I see no ads. If I did, this can be fixed easily by even non-technical users with OOShutUp10 or similar - or just edited with a registry change. I've been using Windows since 3.1 and there were some ugly years but that is not the current state-of-the-state. I'm just calling it like I see it at this point.
- d-us-vb 10mo ago
  The real problem is with trust and encroachment. I think a lot of people that spend a fair amount of time on their computers start to feel like their OS is their home and they go on excursions through apps. Previously, ads were limited to apps you had to go to yourself. Ads showing up as wallpaper in your house would be unsettling, and it reveals that your homeownership was illusory from the start: you never really controlled anything. Yes, you can use cleanup software to fix the symptoms, but that's not the real issue here. Edit: further research revealed my original first point was a false assumption.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  > But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads I did a clean Windows 11 install a few months ago. I expected to be bombarded with ads and all of the other things I kept reading about in comments here, but it’s been fine. I do find it interesting that so many of the comments about how bad Windows 11 is are coming from comments that also admit they aren’t using Windows 11. Not everything in Windows 11 is my favorite design choice, but the anti Windows 11 comments have taken on a life of their own that isn’t always based in reality.
  - hasperdi 10mo ago
    I never used Windows 11, but with 10 they had craps like Candy crush etc that comes back after large updates. They don't have annoying bundleware with Windows 11?
kwar13 10mo ago
Hey man can I be your friend? That is a super sick setup and I love how you've done it!
airstrike 10mo ago
That is literally the coolest house humanity has built this side of the Industrial Revolution, if not ever. Congrats on envisioning and executing such an amazing project!
aprdm 10mo ago
That's an amazing website, I just spent 30 minutes reading all of its content. Thank you for sharing ! I haven't been to a lan party in probably 20 years and made me jealous !
drug5 10mo ago
Wow this is amazing!
kreyenborgi 10mo ago
Pretty sweet setup. Mine is a bit simpler, one laptop on a spinny taco table with HOMM3 from GoG
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.) If every PC gamer would finally just hop into Linux for a year, no Windows, don't buy games that don't work. Just hard boycott, we could actually do a drastic change for PC gaming as a result. As they say "vote with your wallet" well I've been using Linux as my main OS with all my Steam games for about 3 years now? I only use Windows on work computers, but I'm increasingly only going to apply to work at places that either let me use Linux or will give me a Mac to work. I'm voting with my wallet full force. Windows has been turning into a steaming pile of trash. I've repeatedly said, if Microsoft would release "Windows for Gamers" without all the bloated BS on it, I would consider using it. I spent 2 grand or more on a prebuilt gaming system and it came with Windows Home which didn't let me add new users, so I was stuck with a Microsoft account user. Jokes on Microsoft, that and their AntiVirus sending files to their servers without any audit log was the last straw for me. I'm not supporting Microsoft, I say this as someone who is a "fanboy" for Microsoft (.NET is the only good thing they have going, but they can't even stick to one GUI stack they have to reinvent it 1000 more times).
Sparkyte 10mo ago
keep it up! prrsonally using bazzite desktop for my stuff.
devedse 10mo ago
Hey Kenton & the others, What version of linux are you using? I did try to get it to work with a few and I believe only managed to make CachyOS work Besides that, today I also finished my own netboot solution (that still uses Windows). I'm quite happy with the state now where it's able to inject drivers (so it works on multiple systems with different hardware), and also fix an issue with the latest Win11 Nov update where it suddenly didn't netboot anymore. If anyone is interested I actually made a small post on it today: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1q6kpto/devepxeboot_i_built_a_tool_for_network_booting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1q6kpto/devepxeboo...
- hackernudes 10mo ago
  Do you still have the details details about fixing Windows 11 boot over iscsi? I love the idea of injecting drivers into windows and did a lot of experimenting along those lines (using WinPE to install drivers offline and edit the registry). I upgraded my home network and am booting over iscsi using ipxe. My only two remaining issues are: - Windows 11 25H2 fails to boot since 26200.7019 (and 24H2 since 26100.7019). - Windows 10/11 S3 sleep+resume does not work with WinOF-2 (mlx5.sys) driver Everything works well in linux, though! I am using NixOS. I had to customize the initrd to use iscsistart to connect to the target. It is also important to run iscsid when the system boots to automatically reconnect (which annoyingly takes 10-15 seconds when I resume from sleep). I am using iSER (iscsi over rdma), but TCP worked fine too. I export ZFS zvols on the server over iscsi using targetcli (which configures the in-kernel iscsi target support, sometimes called LIO). I tried NFS but the performance was bad.
Grisu_FTP 10mo ago
Love your website + house :D

by kentonv 10mo ago

varun_ch 10mo ago

As an aside.. I went down a mini-rabbit hole learning about the LAN Party House, read your website and about Sandstorm[0] and how that ended up with you at Cloudflare leading Workers. That’s a really cool and honestly inspirational path. Would love to learn more if you’ve written elsewhere…! [0] https://sandstorm.io/news/ https://sandstorm.io/news/

ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
I was also impressed by his wife's Chez JJ work. I suspect that she has done much more impressive stuff, but that kind of thing is a dime a dozen, in SV. The hacker housing stuff speaks to her humanity, and I like humans.
crabmusket 10mo ago
I've been down this rabbit hole too. I quite enjoyed Kenton's two episodes on SE Daily: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/12/18/protocol-buffers-with-kenton-varda/ https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/12/18/protocol-buf... https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/02/06/serverless-at-the-edge-with-kenton-varda/ https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/02/06/serverless-a...

abrookewood 10mo ago

Yep, I've been gaming exclusively on Ubuntu (mainly because I want my desktop to match my servers) for several years. If you aren't playing the latest AAA FPS, then everything pretty much works.

curt15 10mo ago
How much work is it to get snaps out of your way? Canonical seems to be going all in on them as their business strategy.
- unixhero 10mo ago
  Just use Linux Mint
  - abrookewood 10mo ago
    There are a few games I play that have native Linux versions available (e.g. Warhammer Total War) and getting support requires you to run Ubuntu. Not the end of the world, but that plus some dev work was enough to get me to stick to it.
    - unixhero 10mo ago
      Linux Mint is Ubuntu
      - abrookewood 10mo ago
        Not as far as the Game Devs are concerned. I was running Kubuntu and that wasn't 'supported' by them - only Ubuntu LTS.
        unixhero 9mo ago
        You just install it. The debs work.
- abrookewood 10mo ago
  Not that much. TO be honest, I have a few installed (Heroic Games Launcher for one), but the main one I wanted to avoid was Firefox - which is easily doable. It is annoying that we have yet another way of packaging apps - would have been better if they just supported Flatpack

LeoPanthera 10mo ago

What distro?

kentonv 10mo ago
Debian... mostly just because it's what I'm most familiar with. I don't have strong opinions on distros.
- argsnd 10mo ago
  I find that Fedora hits the right balance of stability while being up to date for anything desktop and specifically gaming focused, Debian has different priorities and packages can be a bit too old. And it’s less of a faff than Arch.
  - kentonv 10mo ago
    Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things, and those all have their own update schedule independent of the distro.
    - tapoxi 10mo ago
      You're right because the games run in containers anyway, steam-runtime.
    - sznio 10mo ago
      I'm hopeful that's been fixed by now, but when I switched to Linux a year ago I started with Debian, and had a lot of issues with input latency for games on Wayland. Switched to Fedora which was two KDE versions ahead and never had that issue again.
      - joe200 10mo ago
        Because you used Debian stable (which is mostly for servers). Try Debian Testing. And don't get fooled by its name "testing" - it is because Debian community reserved "stable" for Debian stable. Debian testing is also stable :-)

valorzard 10mo ago

Your house sounds like a great place to hold a fighting game local tournament (or something like the old Smash Summit series for Smash Bros Melee and Ultimate before Beyond The Summit shut down)

bigyabai 10mo ago

Battlefield 4's anticheat runs fine on Linux, if you end up needing one. It definitely slakes my BF fix, in the same way Deadlock is filling the LoL-shaped hole in my contemptible subsistence.

ThatPlayer 10mo ago

Did you ever get those local SSDs as copy-on-write overlays on Linux? I imagine it'd be easier with btrfs support for seeding device: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Seeding-device.html https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Seeding-device.html

kentonv 10mo ago
Yes, on Linux I was able to move the copy-on-write overlays to use local disks, which is one reason it performs much better (admittedly not a reason that would affect most people). I am just using dm-snapshot for this -- block device level, no fancy filesystems.

reincarnate0x14 10mo ago

I recently heard that Star Citizen of all things, still in eternal development hell, runs really well on Linux. Also, amazing house, my friend is enamored of the cat-transit. I used to live not too far from you :)

b112 10mo ago
cat-transit You cannot say such things without more info. I envision cats sitting on small trollies.
- crabmusket 10mo ago
  https://lanparty.house/#catwalk https://lanparty.house/#catwalk
  - b112 10mo ago
    Cool. Thanks

isnckwndkwmx 10mo ago

[dead]

aqme28 10mo ago

On a similar note, performance is sometimes better. As a direct comparison, the steam version of the Lenovos Legion S handheld is significantly more performant than the windows version. Like 20% better FPS and double the battery life. Literally the only difference between the two is the OS.

eru 10mo ago
Though from what I've read, Microsoft could fix that relatively quickly, if they made some tweaks to Windows (and called it a special 'handheld gaming edition' or so). For some reason, the Lenovo Legion S's Windows still comes with a lot of baggage and background services etc.
- joseda-hg 10mo ago
  If LTT is to be believed, this is in the works Maybe SteamOS managed to ruffle enough feathers to start moving the inertial colossus that is Microsoft, not that I have much trust on their willingness to leave a good idea remain good in the long term
- everdrive 10mo ago
  Microsoft is a big expensive oil tanker. They have the resources to turn the ship around, but they need to feel incentivize to do so. I love using Linux and won't go back to Windows, (it's been quite a while for me) but they could blow the performance problems out of the water if they really cared to.
- bsimpson 10mo ago
  It's called Xbox Full-Screen Experience and is marketed as Xbox PC. It's available now, but nobody's been impressed yet. Gives you a gamepad-compatible launcher (although the gamepad PIN to login is buggy). Doesn't seem to actually save resources.
ToucanLoucan 10mo ago
I might have to look into this for my ROG Ally X... it already runs pretty beastily but I'm never going to complain about better performance... Edit: though, I'd have to give up my Fallout 4 with mods. (Don't judge me I know it sucks but it makes the dopamine go brrr)

z3t4 10mo ago

I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive. GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pcie lanes available, so if you already got a gaming PC with many slots and dont need top performance it could still be worth it to get two more cheap gpus and use multi seats - for those building a mini lan gaming room at home. One annoying thing is that linux cant run many different GPU drivers at the same time, so you have to make sure the cards work with the same driver. Properitary 3rd party multi seat also exist for Windows, but Linux has built in support and its free.

seg_lol 10mo ago
This is awesome! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration I am super curious about your setup. I played with MS years ago, but I lost the need. It is a super cool tech that I'd love to see its efficiencies embraced in some way.
- z3t4 10mo ago
  Install an old GPU, Connected a monitor to the extra GPU, connect mouse and keyboard, Use the loginctl command to list available devices/usb ports and attach them to a seat. I suggest using Arch linux although loginctl should be available in all distributions using SystemD now. If you don't have enough USB ports you can use a USB hub, some monitors comes with USB hub. And some with built in sound, or you can use wireless headset. My main issue was that driver support was dropped for my oldest GPU card. So one day when I upgraded the OS it just stopped working. So to be on the safe side get another GPU like the one you already have.
  - ngcc_hk 10mo ago
    Sorry being IT guy I wondered about the logic. I understand the need to align. But if one fail all fail and children like customers … not the patient kind? Or you have two system within each … then across the …. Sorry cannot stop my mind spinning.

bloating8731 10mo ago

Does this mean the GitHub repo linked with the scripts now include up to date linux versions? Last time I looked it was all windows specific, but I'd love to setup something similar with stations for (much lower power) versions.

kentonv 10mo ago
Sorry, I haven't gotten around to updating it yet, although it basically works to follow the same instructions except replace Windows with Linux and skip all the workarounds for Windows-specific bugs.
- bloating8731 10mo ago
  Thanks for the heads up. I'll keep an eye out on the repo in case you get it there. It's an impressive setup. Just so I understand correctly, are all the game machines segmented off so that the DHCP server only serves the game machines and doesn't interfere with the rest of the household? Or does it serve everything at once? My thought process was to keep this game network segmented with a VLAN so that DHCP would be unaffected for the rest of my household.

asymons 10mo ago

league of legends is basically the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux for myself :/ really want to just swap over to linux fully. love your website + house!

chmod775 10mo ago
Some would consider not being able to play that game a feature!
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
  You might be saying it in jest, but I think there may be something to this line of thinking. Whenever I read about anything on HN and bazzite comes up, it feels like the beginning of a new holy war is approaching. I am starting to wonder if the concern from the 'older' linux crowd is that the gamers will introduce changes to linux that will corrupt it more than systemd ever could ( like kernel level drm in games ).
  - stavros 10mo ago
    I think the GP means because the game is a time sink, but you raise an interesting point. I wanted to say "that'll never happen", but someone could fork Linux, add DRM, and then that becomes massively popular and we're done.
    - swiftcoder 10mo ago
      > someone could fork Linux, add DRM Realistically, that's only going to happen if Valve, specifically, decides to do it. There isn't really another player in the linux-gaming business with enough skin in the game to make it worthwhile.
      - wongarsu 10mo ago
        I could imagine Epic Games trying to keep the Epic Games Store relevant by making a SteamOS competitor, with the idea of attracting developers with strong kernel-level DRM and anti-cheat

jakebasile 10mo ago

I'm sorry if you hear this a lot, but your house is so cool, and I must admit I am more than a little jealous. I've also said it here before but I will just give up on PC gaming wholesale before I go back to Windows. It's crazy how much gaming on Linux has improved in just the past couple years.

harles 10mo ago

I see not being able to install invasive kernel level anti-cheat as a positive. I uninstalled all Riot games before they rolled it out. I would’ve been pretty miffed if I had accidentally gotten their kernel modules simply because I wasn’t reading tech news before the auto update.

cdgfdfdgf 10mo ago

what stability and performance? yeah, i dont see bsds but bluetooth doesnt work and it doesnt wake up after sleep 85 percent of the time. kind of crap really

dtj1123 10mo ago
Bluetooth is admittedly less snappy than on Mac or Windows, although it absolutely does work. As for wake after sleep, I've not had a single issue in five years of daily driving Linux. No idea what you're talking about.
- Hendrikto 10mo ago
  A lot of hardware does have problems with properly resuming from sleep, but that is pretty much universal, not OS-dependent. People report just as many problems on Windows.

ahartmetz 10mo ago

It keeps surprising me how many people don't care about some of the most popular games today. I mean I don't care about Battlefield or League of Legends neither, but in earlier decades of PC gaming, almost everyone had some of the most popular games. Doom, Half-Life (1 + 2) and such. The games market today seems more similar to music in its fragmentation.

a_humean 10mo ago
Well yes. The addressable consumer market is just a lot bigger and more diverse than it used to be. You go back to the early late 90s and its a market dominated by teenage boys. Go back and look at some of the 00s and early 10s E3 presenations from the big three and its very cringe inducing how focused they are on a teenage boy demographic and appearing edgy and how blatantly sexist they are in their language. For example, at the E3 conference where MS announced xbox live (2004?) they explictly said that girls don't play games (there were actually plenty of girls that did play games at that time), but they might want to use xbox live to design t-shirts to sell to boys on their online marketplace. This was also still the era of booth babes trying to pull in men to booths with barely dressed women. Nearly every game ad was just a wall of exposions and violence or just the latest NFL game. Today you have fully grown adults in their 30-50s with very different tastes and you have a lot lot more women and girls playing. On top of we have a lot of diversity in who creates games and the kinds of games they can create and still be commerically successful. Lots of interesting narratively focused games, puzzles games, platformers, and more artsy games. But if you want your multiplayer shooter battlefield and CS2 are still there for you.
- ngcc_hk 10mo ago
  Let us say Star Wars. Until someone has a daughter and suddenly found out there is no nothing between them and then he should we say now we have one then very annoying girl Jedi forced onto the team.
- schlauerfox 10mo ago
  This apparently is something that came about after the Atari days where games were social activities in bars and home console advertising features boys and girls. When the NES came out, it was marketed in the US as a toy so had to mold itself to the retail store layouts and pick a toy aisle and they picked boys. In the mobile era and perhaps as early as The Sims beating MYST as the bestselling game, started to develop a more balanced marketing approach.

gloomyday 10mo ago

The only game I tried on Steam that didn't work was Slave Zero, a game from the 90s. Unfortunately, I still have to use Windows for VR games. It is too troublesome on Linux (at least for the Meta Quest 2).

awkwardpotato 10mo ago
VR on Linux is probably going to be the main reason the Steam Frame is going to be a day one pre-order for me
- fortyseven 10mo ago
  Certainly mine!

ErroneousBosh 10mo ago

> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.) As I've said elsewhere, Battlefield 6 has got a far better user experience on Linux than Windows and I would recommend it to anyone.

andrepd 10mo ago

> I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work I consider this a feature, not a bug

EMM_386 10mo ago

"And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore." I don't understand this - and I'm not being a Windows defender here, I use Linux when I can (and promote its use). But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads and zero "crapware". And it's a Dell! Everything that I didn't want on the machine was removed when I purchased it (two years ago). I see no ads. If I did, this can be fixed easily by even non-technical users with OOShutUp10 or similar - or just edited with a registry change. I've been using Windows since 3.1 and there were some ugly years but that is not the current state-of-the-state. I'm just calling it like I see it at this point.

d-us-vb 10mo ago
The real problem is with trust and encroachment. I think a lot of people that spend a fair amount of time on their computers start to feel like their OS is their home and they go on excursions through apps. Previously, ads were limited to apps you had to go to yourself. Ads showing up as wallpaper in your house would be unsettling, and it reveals that your homeownership was illusory from the start: you never really controlled anything. Yes, you can use cleanup software to fix the symptoms, but that's not the real issue here. Edit: further research revealed my original first point was a false assumption.
Aurornis 10mo ago
> But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads I did a clean Windows 11 install a few months ago. I expected to be bombarded with ads and all of the other things I kept reading about in comments here, but it’s been fine. I do find it interesting that so many of the comments about how bad Windows 11 is are coming from comments that also admit they aren’t using Windows 11. Not everything in Windows 11 is my favorite design choice, but the anti Windows 11 comments have taken on a life of their own that isn’t always based in reality.
- hasperdi 10mo ago
  I never used Windows 11, but with 10 they had craps like Candy crush etc that comes back after large updates. They don't have annoying bundleware with Windows 11?

kwar13 10mo ago

Hey man can I be your friend? That is a super sick setup and I love how you've done it!

airstrike 10mo ago

That is literally the coolest house humanity has built this side of the Industrial Revolution, if not ever. Congrats on envisioning and executing such an amazing project!

aprdm 10mo ago

That's an amazing website, I just spent 30 minutes reading all of its content. Thank you for sharing ! I haven't been to a lan party in probably 20 years and made me jealous !

drug5 10mo ago

Wow this is amazing!

kreyenborgi 10mo ago

Pretty sweet setup. Mine is a bit simpler, one laptop on a spinny taco table with HOMM3 from GoG

giancarlostoro 10mo ago

> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.) If every PC gamer would finally just hop into Linux for a year, no Windows, don't buy games that don't work. Just hard boycott, we could actually do a drastic change for PC gaming as a result. As they say "vote with your wallet" well I've been using Linux as my main OS with all my Steam games for about 3 years now? I only use Windows on work computers, but I'm increasingly only going to apply to work at places that either let me use Linux or will give me a Mac to work. I'm voting with my wallet full force. Windows has been turning into a steaming pile of trash. I've repeatedly said, if Microsoft would release "Windows for Gamers" without all the bloated BS on it, I would consider using it. I spent 2 grand or more on a prebuilt gaming system and it came with Windows Home which didn't let me add new users, so I was stuck with a Microsoft account user. Jokes on Microsoft, that and their AntiVirus sending files to their servers without any audit log was the last straw for me. I'm not supporting Microsoft, I say this as someone who is a "fanboy" for Microsoft (.NET is the only good thing they have going, but they can't even stick to one GUI stack they have to reinvent it 1000 more times).

Sparkyte 10mo ago

keep it up! prrsonally using bazzite desktop for my stuff.

devedse 10mo ago

Hey Kenton & the others, What version of linux are you using? I did try to get it to work with a few and I believe only managed to make CachyOS work Besides that, today I also finished my own netboot solution (that still uses Windows). I'm quite happy with the state now where it's able to inject drivers (so it works on multiple systems with different hardware), and also fix an issue with the latest Win11 Nov update where it suddenly didn't netboot anymore. If anyone is interested I actually made a small post on it today: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1q6kpto/devepxeboot_i_built_a_tool_for_network_booting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1q6kpto/devepxeboo...

hackernudes 10mo ago
Do you still have the details details about fixing Windows 11 boot over iscsi? I love the idea of injecting drivers into windows and did a lot of experimenting along those lines (using WinPE to install drivers offline and edit the registry). I upgraded my home network and am booting over iscsi using ipxe. My only two remaining issues are: - Windows 11 25H2 fails to boot since 26200.7019 (and 24H2 since 26100.7019). - Windows 10/11 S3 sleep+resume does not work with WinOF-2 (mlx5.sys) driver Everything works well in linux, though! I am using NixOS. I had to customize the initrd to use iscsistart to connect to the target. It is also important to run iscsid when the system boots to automatically reconnect (which annoyingly takes 10-15 seconds when I resume from sleep). I am using iSER (iscsi over rdma), but TCP worked fine too. I export ZFS zvols on the server over iscsi using targetcli (which configures the in-kernel iscsi target support, sometimes called LIO). I tried NFS but the performance was bad.

Grisu_FTP 10mo ago

Love your website + house :D