The Windows 10 Resistance Thread

[ZakG]

Problem is the border between what is online and what is not has become increasingly blurry, we take for granted online features in single-player games, just to say one.

Not this gamer. If it requires on-line, i don’t play it (or test how terrible an experience it is at a friends!). Nearly all my MP gaming these days is local (hot-seat as in Civ) or occasionally LAN based. So i have a very clear stratification in what PC’s do what in relation to online connectivity. After years of Windows issues (malware etc) as a careful user, which involved a shed tonne of maintenance constantly, this last year with Mint as my only online PC has been 100% trouble free. That was a big reason behind my ‘conversion’ (that an MS being ass-hats).

[TechnicalBen]

So. The Frank-Lin/Frank-Win PC is setup (It’s a Frankenstein in hardware and software :P). I’m gonna play with a spare case, and a hacksaw and see what I can come up with. Oh, the only thing slowing me down on the software front is my internet being broken currently, either a burst pipe in the road has flooded the line, or something has come off the telegraph pole. I hate calling out the engineers…

I’ll swap this PC over to Linux for web browsing, and transfer my win key onto the dual boot PC, as I don’t have a spare key, but want that one setup for gaming. The dual boot will mainly be to save time searching for dependencies and Wine settings to begin with. That and some keyboard shortcuts that are mainly Windows dependant in graphics and other editors.

Having dual boot I hope will be a time saving thing, I’m happy to learn new features and methods, but having to unlearn takes twice the time (see here: https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0 ).

[alms]

Not this gamer. If it requires on-line, i don’t play it (or test how terrible an experience it is at a friends!). Nearly all my MP gaming these days is local (hot-seat as in Civ) or occasionally LAN based.

I don’t mean stuff like Diablo 3 or the old-new Simcity. In so many single-player games leaderboards and other features (think Devil Daggers’ replays) are integral parts of the game experience: you could play without, but it’s not the same.

Widespread diffusion of always-on broadband Internet connectivity has brought on a whole lot of changes in how people behave and think, and single-player game design isn’t exempt.

[ZakG]

…mores the pity

It’s especially frustrating in the OS space, email, cloud storage, this whole internet of things (that got badly hacked recently) is kind of ruining the way technology has so far aided people. Now it is about the data-mining and selling/having access to your personal information. Big thumbs down from me (which is why i can never use software such as Windows 10).

[TechnicalBen]

Well, the Frank-Lin is installed in a case… I had a spare Aerocool Strike X… except I don’t like it. So I took a pair of clippers to it, and it now has no drive bays and no PSU bay. But after connecting everything into the main chassis, it looks a lot nicer, though is still about 25% bigger than I’d want.

Still no internet, so not able to check my overclock on any games. I’m stuck between putting in the old 2.8GHz 6 core AMD, or 3.5GHz 4 core AMD.

If my internet stays up for just long enough, I’ll try Minecraft on it.

[somini]

Eventually people will embrace the penguin. It’s only a matter of time…
Soooon, world domination.

[TechnicalBen]

Well, bonus, Xbox360 [wired] controller support out of the box. I was Googling for a driver, and did not even look to see “player one” LED lit up (which shows it’s up and working), and the Google search answer was “duh, it’s standard in Mint”. Colour me surprised.

Still no internet, so only one little game I could try it on, but it worked well.

[alms]

So that I can look even more like a double agent, the 360 pad is supported out of the box in Windows 10 too (as it would seem logical)

[somini]

So that I can look even more like a double agent, the 360 pad is supported out of the box in Windows 10 too (as it would seem logical)

But can you plug it into a different port and it keeps working?

[TechnicalBen]

Well. This is interesting. Seem to have sorted out getting video drivers… which is not as simple as it should be. Oh it’s simple, but each group of provider is of cause against the other (open source, custom, official) and so you need to either fight one (allowing unofficial repos) or fight the other (use opensource, but loose our on 95% of features). The NVidia drivers from their site are working, but I had to get them from a non-official (but legit as far as I can tell) repository, as I was not keen on installing manually.

Most of the motherboard bells and whistles (sensors, soundblaster Xfi etc) are not available, as no Linux drivers

But that is no worries. Making/building/using a new pc is like that. What is a problem, is there is zero mouse configure-ability and support in Mint/Ubuntu.

Oh, it has “acceleration” and “Sensitivity [which is actually threshold, but who needs to label things correctly…]”. No “speed” and no scroll wheel sensitivity, or true sensitivity settings. This appears to be by design and/or choice. Oh, they could use the excuse it’s in the feature “to add/wish list”, but to have been left off for so long, it would require an active decision to avoid adding it! No, I can’t “fix it”, it’s a kernal/OS limit currently.

So other than the floaty mouse (I’ve got a slight fix with 100% sensitivity on a 2x multiplier to almost simulate 2x velocity, but still has a little acceleration/deceleration ), it’s a great OS…

… oh, what was that about an OS being mainly a GUI experience?

[DanMan]

With the Resource Monitor running in the back, I can see services take up 25% of my CPU all the time. It used to be only Windows Update, but now it started to be other crap, too, like the SSDP service - whatever that’s good for. Me no likey.

[somini]

Well. This is interesting. Seem to have sorted out getting video drivers… which is not as simple as it should be. Oh it’s simple, but each group of provider is of cause against the other (open source, custom, official) and so you need to either fight one (allowing unofficial repos) or fight the other (use opensource, but loose our on 95% of features). The NVidia drivers from their site are working, but I had to get them from a non-official (but legit as far as I can tell) repository, as I was not keen on installing manually.

Most of the motherboard bells and whistles (sensors, soundblaster Xfi etc) are not available, as no Linux drivers

But that is no worries. Making/building/using a new pc is like that. What is a problem, is there is zero mouse configure-ability and support in Mint/Ubuntu.

Oh, it has “acceleration” and “Sensitivity [which is actually threshold, but who needs to label things correctly…]”. No “speed” and no scroll wheel sensitivity, or true sensitivity settings. This appears to be by design and/or choice. Oh, they could use the excuse it’s in the feature “to add/wish list”, but to have been left off for so long, it would require an active decision to avoid adding it! No, I can’t “fix it”, it’s a kernal/OS limit currently.

So other than the floaty mouse (I’ve got a slight fix with 100% sensitivity on a 2x multiplier to almost simulate 2x velocity, but still has a little acceleration/deceleration ), it’s a great OS…

… oh, what was that about an OS being mainly a GUI experience?

I’m pretty sure the job of interpreting the mouse sensitivity is the job of the X server. At least for touchpads you can fiddle with the synaptics driver, so for regular mice I assume it should be possible too.

Are you sure non of this works:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mouse_acceleration

[alms]

Most of the motherboard bells and whistles (sensors, soundblaster Xfi etc) are not available, as no Linux drivers

Since I happen to still own an X-Fi, it seems to me it has been supported for a long time. There was some software thing-y that ran on non-Creative-branded sound chips, thought nobody used it though.

Also, weird that you have problems with sensors, that’s one thing that always worked for me, although the relevant software configuration may need some work.

I’m pretty sure the job of interpreting the mouse sensitivity is the job of the X server. At least for touchpads you can fiddle with the synaptics driver, so for regular mice I assume it should be possible too.

Wayland cannot materialize soon enough?

[somini]

Wayland cannot materialize soon enough?

Well, you can have Wayland’s input handling library today, it was ported to X (xorg-libinput). I was lazy and stuck with synaptics, but since I use Arch I know someday I will be “forced” to embrace the future.

[BillButNotBen]

Is this all linux, or just my distributions? :

• Clicking a text box with the mouse leaves the vertical cursor where you clicked so you can’t see what you’re typing (or at least the first letter). I’m not on windows right now, so I can’t check what windows does, but I don’t remember ever getting frustrated with that on Windows, but it annoys me every day on linux.

• Every setting in what would be the control panel under windows is a different app with a different name (all of which follow the linux tradition of having stupid names that don’t explain what they do) so you have no idea where any given setting might be hiding.

I think it’s little things like this that have always caused me to drift back to windows. All the big stuff works pretty well.

[alms]

May I ask what distro/DE you are using? Neither point sound especially familiar to me - first one seems like a glitch of some sort?

As for the little things, I am inclined to say yes. You’re likely so used to Windows that you don’t notice the warts anymore, but they are there. Take your point about the Control Panel - it’s a huge, stratified, freaking mess, but you probably know your way around it pretty well by now. Try and explain how to do anything to someone else and pay attention to the look on their face.

I find that if I stick to any one OS for a long enough time and then go back, I can make a list the of things I liked, often without noticing, and the warts I’ve taught myself not to see. Up to an extent this also applies to different versions of Windows.

[somini]

I just tested your first point on Cinnamon and it does hide the pointer as long as you don’t move the mouse. This is probably inherited from GNOME, so you should have it.

I’m with alms with the rest. Different apps to configure different things is a feature. Sure, there’s no integrated control panel, but the DE have them, like Cinnamon, GNOME and KDE. Unfortunately this causes more problems most of the times, since the DE overrides the settings from the actual app responsible and the bug reports keep flowing. Separation of concerns is important.

[DanMan]

Is this all linux, or just my distributions? :

• Clicking a text box with the mouse leaves the vertical cursor where you clicked so you can’t see what you’re typing (or at least the first letter). I’m not on windows right now, so I can’t check what windows does, but I don’t remember ever getting frustrated with that on Windows, but it annoys me every day on linux.

I’m pretty sure it’s the same on Win7, don’t know about newer versions.

• Every setting in what would be the control panel under windows is a different app with a different name (all of which follow the linux tradition of having stupid names that don’t explain what they do) so you have no idea where any given setting might be hiding.

Gnome has a “settings” app, which combines everything in one place that looks almost like the one on MacOSX. I know Cinnamon has something similar (but worse IMHO).

[TechnicalBen]

I’m pretty sure the job of interpreting the mouse sensitivity is the job of the X server. At least for touchpads you can fiddle with the synaptics driver, so for regular mice I assume it should be possible too.

Are you sure non of this works:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mouse_acceleration

Reading the main bit at the top (I’ve not read it all, so I may be wrong… but)… the entire problem is, none of those settings is “speed”. That and “zero” on acceleration, does not seem to function as such. It has sensitivity (threshold before adding acceleration) and acceleration (how much to increase the speed by linearly/the curve of acceleration) adjustments, I specifically want to amend the speed (constant velocity). But it might just take some muscle memory for me to get use to it. I’ll wait and see. Being forced not to use certain keyboard controls for full screen apps because of “window management” being on left shift/ctrl/alt etc is annoying… but hopefully going through all the games that stuck to the Linux bindings, and rebinding them to Windows will work around it.

IIRC I can adjust the adaptive deceleration to negate the accelerate, I’ll have to re-read some of the possible solutions. But I may have to do it on a per usb socket/per device… which is annoying.

Thanks, Alms! I think half the problem is not knowing what is/is not installed/working. I like the “devices” in Windows that lets me know what is up and running. I think you are right about me not actually getting any benefit from the “Xfi” part of the soundcard. The sound and drivers work though. That’s all that matters. It’s more the not having the shadowplay on NVidia, Asus/AMD overdrive/overclocking settings/temp monitors etc only having Windows drivers. But that is all propriety stuff that the companies have not provided support for. Not a fault of a distro or OS.

I loaded up Psensor (from a repository), and it lists more than I could on a Windows machine, but still missing some of the sensors I know are on the system (no CPU fan showing for example).

[alms]

It’s more the not having the shadowplay on NVidia, Asus/AMD overdrive/overclocking settings/temp monitors etc only having Windows drivers. But that is all propriety stuff that the companies have not provided support for. Not a fault of a distro or OS.

AMD actually open sourced their drivers, and also provided manpower to help with development, but while gamers often have a habit of laughing at AMD, turns out it’s not trivial work to produce a driver comparable to that manufacturers themselves can put together.

With graphics drivers being a cornerstone of the gaming experience, that is one reason why Linux currently still isn’t a drop-in replacement for Windows, while still being good enough for general use.

If you remember, some time ago I posted about considering to switch my HTPC (which only runs an old nVidia card) to Windows 10 since it’s supported better there than either by nouveau or the proprietary driver. Mind, that particular card is almost 100% supported according to nouveau’s own page, and still it doesn’t provide the same experience as the age old driver I’m using under 10.

Sad, but it’s given me a number of headaches over the years (it would often break when updating) and I’m kind of sick of it. The ‘just works’ factor strikes back.

I loaded up Psensor (from a repository), and it lists more than I could on a Windows machine, but still missing some of the sensors I know are on the system (no CPU fan showing for example).

I’m assuming (never used it myself and a package search doesn’t bring it up on Debian) Psensor may be simply relying data from sensors/lm-sensors. That thing used to run a configuration script upon first installation but, as I said, the resulting configuration file often needed some manual work. If that’s the case:

man 5 sensors.conf

should give you some pointers. Note these days most man pages are available online so you might find it more comfortable to just look it up.