2008/03/15 rss
About a month ago, I decided to try to run only Linux on my main desktop machine (again - this happens once every few months or so). This time, I decided to use Ubuntu, since 7.10 was recently released and sounded pretty nice, and I wanted to get used to working with Ubuntu anyway since all the machines I manage for PLUG are running it as well (and some are desperately in need of an upgrade). I had tried a few months before with Gentoo, but this didn't turn out so well, mainly because of problems with Wine and multiple monitors. Anyway, I installed Ubuntu, and off I went.
Things worked well at first - in fact, everything went pretty smoothly compared to what I had expected, even installing the proprietary nVidia Linux drivers (I had a GeForce 7900 GT at the time; more on this in a bit). My multi-monitor setup even worked pretty nicely with a small amount of poking at nvidia-settings (sadly, the Ubuntu screen resolution tool was unable to grok the multi-monitor setup for some reason). Sauerbraten worked amazingly, even better than on the same hardware running Windows (probably due to OpenGL + multi-mon weirdness with the nVidia Windows drivers). The only problem was that it would not go fullscreen on a single monitor while letting the other one still display desktop and windowed applications. I settled for Sauerbraten in windowed mode, which worked pretty well in the end as long as it started up in the right position (it grabbed the mouse, so I couldn't really move the window once it was started). I was a pretty happy camper, not even worried that I was missing important emails or anything, since I moved all that to Gmail recently.
Then the problems started. I was content to play around with Sauerbraten and a few other native Linux games for a short time, but soon I had the urge to play some of my Windows games. I installed whatever Wine version Ubuntu had in its repository (pretty recent, if I remember right) and started installing games. First came Steam, which worked decently after a bit of tweaking. Based on previous experiences, I set Wine to use "desktop in a window" mode, which at least avoids games trying to go fullscreen over both monitors. I tried Portal, and it actually ran decently fast (nowhere near native on Windows performance, though), but the Wine relative mouse movement problem pretty much killed my ability to play it - if I moved the mouse at all quickly, it would zip right out of the window, and then I'd click, focusing on some other app. This was not really usable at all, and the same thing happened with all the other games I tried too - CS:S, Psychonauts, GTA:SA. Some of these had other problems as well, mainly graphical weirdness and a definite slowdown compared to Windows on the same hardware (notably, GTA:SA did load amazingly quickly, but it ran very poorly, even on my rather high-end hardware compared to what the game was designed for). Plus CS:S wouldn't even work online at all - I could sit in a server I created and shoot at bots, but that's no fun. All this added up meant that I essentially couldn't play any of the many games I own. This was a deal-breaker by itself.
Then, my nice new GeForce 8800 GT arrived (I had ordered it before I started playing with Linux again). This was the straw that broke the camel's back. I shut down, installed the new card, and booted up, expecting everything to work fine, since the nVidia drivers generally support all their cards, not just a single model. But sadly, the version of the proprietary drivers that Ubuntu packaged was not new enough to support the 8800! I found this a little odd, since the 8 series is not all that new. I decided to try to update it anyway, but I couldn't find any way to do this within Ubuntu's package system, so I just bit the bullet and grabbed the newest driver from nVidia's site. This broke all sorts of fun things, as it edited the X configuration files, and somehow afterwards the GUI login wouldn't even come up. I eventually hacked around on the configuration files for a bit by hand and got it to work, but it all broke again after a reboot.
So now I'm back on good old dependable Windows (Vista now, actually, since I drank the Kool-Aid and wanted to try DirectX 10 with my new card). This is not to say that it was a total failure - I started to get more used to developing solely on Linux, so now my fancy, expensive Windows machine is becoming more of an expensive X terminal connected to my router/server machine (which has always been running Linux - Gentoo, actually, for about a year now) when it comes to development. But for the forseeable future, I'll still be using some form of Windows for my desktop, since the situation with games is just not going to be fixed anytime soon. I don't want to be too harsh on Wine, as I'm sure it does a great job on most kinds of applications, but as things stand now, it's essentially unusable for running (my) games. Plus I don't want to wait some indeterminate amount of time for Wine to support some new feature needed by a newly released game; I want to play it as soon as I get my hands on it. Maybe someday I'll be able to afford two decent desktop machines with monitor, keyboard, etc., and space for it all (or at least a KVM switch, but I don't know of any of those that works with dual monitors) so I would be able to separate gaming from everything else, but for now, I'm stuck with Windows or Linux, not both, and Linux can't do everything I need, so the choice is easy.
(For those still confused, the title is a line from a Monty Python skit.)
[category: /linux | permalink ]
