Gaming on Linux

So Ben, you've moved over to Linux, right? So what kind of problems did you have?

It just works.

Good afternoon, Ben.

Good afternoon, Matt.

This is doing two things. First of all, it's exposing everyone to what time of day we record this, you know as we continue to leak personal information.

Mm-hmm.

But also, it's confused anybody who thinks that we say only, hi, Ben.

Literally every time we meet in the physical world, those are the only two words we're allowed to say to each other.

That is how it works. It's kind of the SYN-ACK TCP protocol thing.

Yeah. Otherwise I don't even know who you are. I just sort of stand around and it's like, who's this? I don't know. Who are you?

I don't recognize me. You've got face blindness unless you hear the magic shibboleth from me.

Yeah. Exactly. Mm-hmm.

Well, my levels look really low. So I apologize to myself in the future for recording, having to edit this and probably do something hideous with the sounds. But we have a topic today because last time we spoke, you had a bold assertion and I believe that you followed through.

We do.

on that bold assertion and you have a trip report of sorts to share with us.

I have.

So do you want to remind us where you were and what you, what you said you were going to do?

Yes, so I'm gonna go back to the full history here. So in the beginning there was Windows 3.1. And then after that

Was that literally the first thing?

That was the first thing that was ever created.

Okay. Right.

Yeah, this is a weird form of creationism where the entire, this is Last Thursdayism, you know, Last Thursdayism, right?

No, I don't know Last Thursdayism.

Last Thursdayism is the belief that everything was created last Thursday in its state, in its existing state, and that there was no prior state.

Uh-huh. Right.

And I think that it's like, and every Thursday it like recycles again.

Oh.

So the universe just recycles every Thursday.

And all those dinosaur bones in the ground are just a joke that some omnipotent being has put there for us to have chocolate.

Yeah, it's not necessarily a joke. They just, when the universe was created, they were in the ground as they were.

Okay.

And, you know, all the carbon isotopes were in the state that they were.

Right, and all of the things in the entire observable universe were set with their velocities already pointing away from some... yeah. Okay, fair, it's hard to refute. I think one of those difficult to falsify...

Exactly. All the light has already been stretched out, pre-stretched, you know, and that's just how it was when it was created last Thursday. Right. Yes, very difficult to falsify that hypothesis. Very, very difficult.

Anyway, in a similar vein to that, you subscribed, your personal creationism is that all existence began with Windows 3.1. We're not even

With Windows 3.1. And then, you know, had the Protestant Reformation in the form of Windows for Workgroups. No. No,

Not even going to talk about 95, are we?

No, no, no, no.

What about ME?

Well, yeah, so Windows...

Windows ME, oh God.

Yeah, right. Windows 2000. Yeah.

No, it's fine. All right, all right. We'll take a little off-base here. Okay, so Windows 3.1.

So Windows 3.1. Fast forward, that was like maybe the beginning of like a reasonable Windows that people would want to buy, right?

Right, and that was last Thursday.

And then all of that was created last Thursday.

Okay, yep.

Fast forward to now, Windows 10. All of the

So seven Windowses have come and gone, or six. I've got one.

Is that how many it is?

I don't know. Well I don't know how many there are because of the counting problem, but you know, there was no Windows 9, right?

Oh yeah, it's not.

Because of too many things that maybe apocryphally searched for the string Windows 9 and then did some workarounds for Windows 95 on the basis of that would cover 95 and 97 or whatever, something like that.

Yeah.

Anyway, Windows 10 is now here.

Yes, there have been. Windows 10, well, now Windows 10 is gone. Windows 10 end of life, right?

Oh, that's right. It's not gone in my house.

So, wow, right. But Windows 10 has reached the end of its supported life.

Yep.

And, you know, I certainly grew up in a world trying to play games before Windows. I had a PC. I had DOS on that PC. And that required, you know, I would,

All the fiddling of himem.sys and autoexec.bat to try and get your Sound Blaster drivers to load, you know, yeah, happy times.

Yes. And this was, oh absolutely. Yes. Getting a sound card to work on a PC was an exercise in understanding how computers work. And this was exacerbated by the fact that my dad, at the time, was running a company that did like...

Your dad at the time.

Yeah. Not my dad.

You've changed that. You've got to change.

Yeah. Just like Windows, you got to change that out every few years. The license expires.

Yeah, that's right.

They go end of life. And you have to get a new one.

This is a terrible start to an episode.

I don't even know what's happening right now.

Okay, so are your dad, comma, at the time.

So at the time, comma, my dad... was running a company that did like video and audio editing software. And he would get all of these like experimental sound boards and video cards and other things from various vendors.

Yeah.

And then they would do tests on them. And then when they didn't quite work out the way that they wanted, he would bring one home for me and like give it to me. Like, hey, you want this super high-end, you know, $10,000 sound card? And I'm like, yes.

That we couldn't get to work. Yeah.

Yeah, right. Exactly. That's a prototype or whatever, right? And so that just made the problem 10 times worse. And so like, you know, a large part of my childhood was just trying to figure out how to play games on this computer that had this weird combination of unreliable and unstable, but also super powerful and expensive hardware in it. Right.

Right. And this is all before plug and play. So it's like moving jumpers around on the board and changing slots in there and trying to like...

Oh, yeah. Yes. Which IRQ is this thing on? Oh, no, multiple ones.

Yeah.

And they got to be set like this. And it's, oh, my God. So that experience, like, viscerally created this, you know, thing in my mind of, like, it can be hard to play video games on a computer.

Right. Right.

That is a thing that can be difficult to do, right?

And, you know, from my own background, it was always the less than legal acquired versions of games on cassette tapes that but then wouldn't load because their audio quality was so terrible.

Right. Mm-hmm.

And then you'd sit there adjusting the azimuth alignment screw of your tape recorder to try and move the head up and down to some point where you could get it to actually load in and work correctly.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, again, or you were typing them in from a magazine so that you spent hours.

Yes, uh-huh.

Essentially, what you're saying is that we... us old folk, we suffered to play games and that's how it should be.

Yeah. Yes, we had to earn it. Yeah, right.

Can't see how this is going to segue into the topic.

Oh, it's going to be perfect. It's going to be perfect. So fast forward to the end of Windows 10 and the introduction of Windows 11. And my son originally was like, hey, I...

No longer your son.

At the time, he was my son.

I'm feeling silly.

This is too much.

I think it's worth mentioning that you and I went out for drinks last night, and so I'm a bit hungover and feeling a bit worse for wear.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so maybe that explains a bit.

Right.

Anyway, yes.

Yes. At the time,

At the time, come on.

He was like, I don't want to use Windows 10.

Right.

I just don't like it. I don't like what Microsoft is doing with it. I don't like, or wait, I'm sorry.

Oh, 11, you mean? He didn't want to go to 11. This Windows does not go up to 11.

Like I don't want to move off of 10 to go to 11. I don't want to use 11. Yeah. I don't want the speaker to go up to 11. So I'm not going to do it. I am instead... going to use Linux as my primary operating system for gaming. And immediately all of this sort of post-traumatic stress disorder from when I was a child and had all these like, you know, crazy pieces of hardware and all the things that I'm like, well, that's going to be an adventure, but I'm here for it.

You are going to learn a lot about how computers work, my son.

And let's do that. Yes. Yes.

You said. And then... did he?

Yes. Well, so he set this all up and he installed a bunch of games. And for a while, he was dual booting Windows and Linux, and I think he maybe technically still is. But he started playing all these games in Linux and they were like, yeah, you know, it's like Valve,

Right.

Has, you know, like the Steam Deck and a bunch of these things that are based on Linux and they have like this sort of like verification system and they give games different tiers. You know, it's like the Platinum tier games work pretty well and then all these things. And he's like, yeah, you know, maybe there's some games, but it's like, this has all kind of worked well for me.

So for our non-American listeners, I was going to say readers, but I mean, possibly some are reading along with the transcripts, but for our non-Americans, Thanksgiving is the last Thursday of November, so effectively you had a run-up of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday before you had to go back to normal job, I see.

Right, right, right.

Right.

I'm going to just like, because the way we we do Thanksgiving is we we make a huge meal for Thanksgiving and then we just eat the leftovers for the next four days. And so I have no cooking to do or very little cooking to do.

Fantastic.

It's all just like hang out and do stuff. And what I was going to do is I was going to get games working on Linux on my computer.

So you've broadly thought day one, install Linux.

Mm-hmm.

Day two, reinstall Linux. Day three, re-reinstall Linux.

Yes.

Day four...

Download the NVIDIA drivers, yeah, the open source version of the NVIDIA drivers and recompile them on my computer with different flags set because that's what it's going to take to get these to work.

Yep.

So I started out, I was like, all right, let's wipe the computer, install Linux, that's easy. Fire up Steam, install a game, run the game, and it worked.

Yeah.

And that was it. That was the end of the story is it just worked. And then I installed another game and that just worked.

Hmm. No, I think probably you must have... no, that's not how it is.

I know, it's very disorienting.

How, but so you're telling me that Linux installed okay on, what did you install it on? A gaming PC, is this?

Yeah, this was just the gaming PC that I had Windows 10 on.

Okay, with an NVIDIA card in it, right?

Yeah, it's got a 2080 RTX in it, which is not a new card, but it's, you know, it's pretty good.

Okay. Okay. No, but it's, yeah. And it has just worked. And then Steam worked. I mean, Linux has been relatively reliable for me, but then there's forever quirks. So like, you know, my current desktop machine has, and I'm going to look down, one of the RTXs, I don't know which one it is, but Ubuntu 20, whatever I'm on, 25.10.

Mm-hmm.

If I lock the screen, it never unlocks ever again. That's it. It's done. You have to reboot it from the outside.

Right.

So like, you know, and I kind of put up with this for most of my life. You know that I've always been the guy suffering on with the Linux laptop going, ah, it's fine.

Yeah, yeah.

I just have to unplug it and plug it back in again like eight times until eventually it notices that there's a second monitor or whatever.

Yeah, right.

And that's, but it sounds like you had a very good experience, both of Linux, the base platform, installing it on your computer and it just working, finding your peripherals, finding your monitors, finding your mouse, keyboard, everything. I mean, that's never really been a problem, but you know...

Yeah, right. That's always been fine.

But certainly the graphics has been an issue with Nouveau being like, oh, the default driver is the open source one that is, you know, OK. And I'm sure folks are working really hard to make it work against all odds of NVIDIA wanting to be closed source.

Right. Yeah.

But then, you know, you want to run a game and it's like, well, I'd like to draw triangles quite quickly, please. And, you know, NVIDIA are good at that. Yeah.

Yeah.

And it just worked. And then Steam worked and the game just worked.

It just worked.

And so are all the games running under a variety of Wine?

Yep. Yeah, I think Steam's thing for this, which is integrated into Steam, again, as best I can tell, because I didn't have to do anything. I didn't have to go figure out, like install some packages and configure a bunch of things.

That's remarkable.

It's like, oh, there's going to be an emulator delay and you're going to... No, it just clicked the install button and it just worked.

So you literally...

Yes.

It sounds like an advert for Steam now, but like you just downloaded the thing and then you logged in with your Steam account that you were using in your Windows machine and then you just went, okay, get the games, and then you clicked it and I can't believe it.

Yes. It's mind-blowing.

That's miraculous.

So I have... Well, I was going to say, so I've done this with like three games so far.

Yeah, which which games? Which games have you done?

So Factorio, obviously.

Factorio, obviously. I mean...

ARC Raiders was another one that we were playing. And then I have installed, but I haven't actually run Battletech yet. Is that what it was? Oh, there was another... Was it... You know, Faster Than Light, you know that game?

Uh-huh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there was, what's the successor? Into the Breach? Is that the one I'm thinking of?

Oh, no, I don't.

There's some other game I installed I haven't run yet. But so far, like, and so I've been playing a lot of ARC Raiders lately, and I've been waiting for it to crash.

Okay.

I've been waiting for it to glitch out. I've been waiting for, like, the inevitable, you know, crazy error that no one knows what it is.

But I suppose, you know, the funny thing is... you know, Wine Is Not an Emulator, as famously is what it stands for, right?

Mm-hmm.

It is not trying to emulate or simulate.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

It's not like you're, you know, calling getchar to get the keyboard or whatever. You know, so I suppose it makes a lot of sense that, yeah, the... here's an API that's well understood for drawing things to the screen. Here's an API for reading the input on the keyboard. And then the middle bit is the same and always has been. But still, it's remarkable that it works as well as it does. You say you played through a bunch of time with...

Yeah, I have, I think I have like 150 hours or something in this game right now. And I don't think it's ever crashed once. Right?

That's really great. And edge case stuff, I would imagine, are things like, you know, interacting with storage, interacting with network play, doing stuff like unplugging or plugging in an extra mouse or full screening and not full screen. Those are kind of the edges, the weirdy edgy things that I would imagine.

Well, and I'm like tabbing out of this game all the time, you know, I've got two monitors going and I've got like Firefox on one and like the full screen game on the other.

Right, right. So full screen on one because you're cheating on the other monitor, yeah?

And I, yeah, you got to look at the maps. I mean, you know, I'm not going to go find this stuff myself. I don't have time for that.

Not crazy.

Right. So yeah, I'm like moving my mouse back and forth between these things. And it's like, it all works great. It all works amazingly great.

Wonderful.

So obviously when I want to try this with a lot more games and, you know,

I was gonna say, I haven't really kept up with the games world recently, but I'm pretty sure there's more than three available at the moment.

There's probably, I mean, there's many more than three games in my Steam library that I have purchased and never played.

At least five?

So that...

You just collect them. Okay.

I kind of... you say that, but it's just sort of, ooh, I have this game. One day I'll maybe start it.

Brilliant. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, I've gone sort of depth-first on this, right? It's like I've proven that like, you know, 150 hours in, there are no major issues, right?

That is brilliant, yeah.

And so now it's like, okay, let's try...

But you mentioned before, I think in the last episode, there's a sort of rating for each game. So presumably the game that you just talked about is the one that has like an A, or S, or have a...

Oh, is it Platinum? It's, you know, actually, I don't know. Let's find out. It might only be Gold.

Go have a look and we get to hear you and your mechanical keyboard clicking away.

Yes, there's going to be some of that.

Or not, actually.

What does it say?

There we go. There it is.

Game details. Yes, it is Platinum, so it is the highest rating.

OK, so that's like the highest level of compatibility that they've got.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So what about, what other games might you want to play on Steam now?

You know, I mean, Baldur's Gate, that's probably another one.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, was that on Steam? I never know which things are.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've, I know that I installed a bunch of, yeah, Baldur's Gate would, what does it say?

Yeah, that is Gold.

What does our survey say? OK.

So maybe I would have more problems with that.

It would be interesting to see how you'd get on with that on Linux.

Yeah.

Oh, that's fascinating. I didn't realise Baldur's Gate would work.

Yeah. And so the other great thing that this has done is, for a while, for a long while, I had this machine set up in a dual boot configuration because I have a Linux laptop. I have a Lenovo Linux laptop, but it is a little long in the tooth. It is not the most powerful thing in the world. And having, you know, my desktop PC be available for when I want to try to develop things on Linux is nice.

Yeah.

But, you know, you're like booting back and forth and, you know, I've always had sort of weird problems with like USB keyboards not being recognised during the boot process. And so you like can't change the GRUB menu because the whatever is going on in the PC right now, it just doesn't quite pick it up.

Yeah. Especially if you're plugged in through like a hub of some description like that.

Yeah, yeah.

I've definitely had that before now.

Yes.

It's usually when I'm trying to unlock, I only notice it when I go to unlock the drive password or whatever, and I'm typing away and I'm like, oh, wait, and then I have to open the laptop lid and actually tap it on the laptop's physical keyboard, for example, and that kind of stuff.

Yeah, yeah, and it's made worse, but I like, I have this kind of complicated setup where I use my monitors as USB-C hubs. So then if I have a laptop plugged into them, the mouse, keyboard, everything just all works. But then if I don't and the PC is on, then it like takes over the inputs and then everything switches over and it just, and it like all works like 99% of the time perfectly. But the one place where it doesn't really work great is in that boot menu. And so it was always kind of a pain, is my point, is to go back and forth.

Yeah.

And now I can just have one computer with one operating system that does everything that I need to do. And if, you know, the price of that is that occasionally I have some games that I have to futz with. But again, I've done zero futzing so far. So like.

Zero futzing required. I mean, so I think like, you know, you and I have definitely, I mean, obviously you told us your origin story and the amount of pain and suffering that you were prepared as an adolescent to go through to play games, right?

Right.

There's a lot. And then as an adult, your patience runs thin to some extent. You just want to enjoy the game. And so the map screen's up on the spare thing and you really don't want to have to do any futzing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But hidden in there is a little bit of internalised, well, occasionally my keyboard doesn't work the right way, but that was only for the boot thing. So yeah, I guess that goes away, but yeah, no, that's great. I mean, I, of course, I think we alluded to this last time, I've sort of taken a quarter step backwards, like I've been Linux only since the late 90s. My kids have got, when I set them up with Linux machines, and then eventually of their own free will, I...

Well, you can get, can't you get Overwatch on Steam?

I don't know if you can. I know that like there's a very anti-cheat, kernel level anti-cheat thing that pops up that requires them to be like super, you know, user every time.

No, maybe not. No, you can't. I bet you can't. Yeah.

And that's a bit of a, you know, especially if playing competitively, like they are, but you know, so anyway, they've got a Windows machine. And then I had to install Windows in order to get a video editing package that didn't absolutely suck. Even though, I think we talked about this before, it in theory works on a version of Linux, just not my version of Linux.

Right, right.

And it was just like, ah, you know what? I don't want to have this. I just want to have an appliance that runs video editing and does it somewhat well. But I really wish I didn't have to do that. I prefer not to. I mean, I've already got Windows 11 and it is a... I can understand why. I was going to ask you earlier, so why didn't you want to upgrade to Windows 11? Maybe I should still ask that because, you know...

I mean, you know, we all sort of know the answer to this, but it is... Providing a lot of things that I don't need or want, I think is just going to be the summary of that.

Right, right, right. It is providing...

Like a Microsoft account, for example.

Right. And, you know, to the extent that we are both broadly in favour of the appropriate use of artificial intelligence, LLM-based technology, it's a choice thing, an opt-in thing, rather than a, you must forcibly opt out or maybe later on everything.

Right.

Which is, that's got to be the most grim anti-pattern of recent times, isn't it?

Yeah. Oh, it's so bad.

I mean, not just that, but like, yeah, the "would you like to leave a review for our software?" You've got yes or maybe later. And you're like, never darken my door again with this question.

Right. How do I put a no solicitor sign in the software to just tell them to leave me alone?

Right. Right. So anyway, I mean, we somehow have managed to make a 25 minute conversation out of "it just worked".

Right. It just works.

We could have just done that. And then I cut straight to the closing music and then we could be done with this. But...

Maybe, you know, actually, I feel like we should, that's almost like the cold open of this is you play the, you do the "it just works".

You want us to. All right.

And then you play the outro.

I'll see what I can do. I'll see what editor Matt can do. Now we'll leave all this in so that people can hear that we planned this. It gets incredibly meta then. So let's do the recording now. Then people can laugh at this. So Ben, you moved over to Linux, right? So what kind of problems did you have?

It just works.

There we go. All right, that's what we'll do. And then we'll cut to the closing music. And then, all right, we'll do something. Fab.

Beautiful.

Well, I think we're kind of getting towards the, not an actual stopping point then, really bizarrely.

Well, I mean, one other data point here is that, like, as I said before, this is all inspired by, you know, my son, Will, and he plays lots more games than me because, you know, he is a more interesting person than I am.

Oh, of course, yeah. So your sample size of three is bolstered by the fact that he has dozens or so, yeah.

Right, right. And I think that he has maybe run into like one or two problems, but nothing that he couldn't solve by himself. And he is definitely not, you know, he's not one of the computer nerds in the family. Right. Like he's a smart kid, but he's not like, you know, into programming and stuff like that. Yes.

That's, yeah.

Right. Like for him, the Linux environment is more of a means to an end. And for me, it's a little bit more of an end unto itself in some ways, right, because we're nerds and we like these things.

Yes. We like that kind of, yeah, we enjoy the complexity that it affords us and, you know, secretly we're like, oh, I wonder if I move the jumper, will it work this time on the PCI board?

So I think basically at this point, he hasn't had a problem yet that wasn't just solved by updating some apt packages and like you're done.

That's really quite excellent. So 2025 then was the year of the Linux desktop.

Perhaps it was, or at least the year of the Linux gaming PC.

There you go. But apparently not the video editing one, which...

That's going to be 2095. The Advent?

That's, yeah, you're probably right. Well, on that note, I better go and edit some videos as a, you know, by the time this goes out, I will be halfway, if not all the way. No, yeah, about halfway through all of my, the Advent, which has been going very well.

I have been enjoying those, by the way.

Oh, thank you.

I think they're very good. Yeah. I like them.

Thank you. Yeah. We are, this again reveals how close to the wire we are recording this one before it goes out to people. But, yeah, it turns out it's a lot of work to do something like that. Who'd have thought, right? I have the utmost respect for people who churn out content regularly because it's killing me.

It's tough.

But it's fun. It's fun to see it. And it's been well received. But that is a separate thing from this wonderful podcast of ours. So I think we should leave this here and I will see you soon.

Sounds good.