That tracks with what I have seen with my own cards. I suspect some of it is because there were specific driver versions that many distros favored for stability reasons that may have left some performance on the table, but that’s just my personal speculation.
As others have said, Nvidia cards are OK in Linux now, though AMD is better assuming you aren’t doing anything AI adjacent with the card.
The 9000 cards don’t offer much of value other than running a bit cooler IMO. The fact is that the good 7000 cards aren’t really available in retail anymore, so it only matters to people (like me) that already have a good 7000 series card. If I didn’t have one and was looking for a new card I would have no problem picking up a 9000 series card as long as the price wasn’t ridiculous.
Quod Libet can do all of these things to my knowledge. It is currently my favorite linux music player.
A 33MHz DX 486was great. If you got stuck with a slower SX CPU, things were frequently not so hot.
I’ve had great luck using Intel NUCs as home servers and HTPC boxes. Since those are now gone, I have found that Beelink is the most cost effective replacement when I needed to revamp the setup. My biggest complaint on them is that the cooling fans on them are not super reliable and it is not easy to find compatible replacements. I had to order them direct from China and there are a few wiring incompatible variants. I ended up with one of them being the wrong type and I had to resolder the leads to match the existing broken fan.
Fwiw, mine has worked with no issues on any of my Linux PCs.
I definitely had issues with my 3070. I ran it in Linux for 4 years before recently switching back to AMD. It was usually only minor issues like it not playing well with certain DEs, but sometimes certain driver versions would make my system unusable/unbootable until I could roll them back. I am glad some people never had it happen, but pretending like it wasn’t a thing just makes you ignorant.
I have used both AMD and Nvidia cards on Linux for a long time and with Nvidia it’s mostly fine now days, but their driver situation tends to be fine until the rare time that it isn’t. I switched back to AMD last year due to the occasional driver issue that left me dead in the water. And by occasional I mean like once every year or so, not something common. It is entirely possible that you’ll never have much of an issue, but I started to take note of my Nvidia driver versions and and especially noted when GPU drivers were updated so that I had some notion of where to try to roll back to if I ran into issues. I haven’t had any issues like that with my AMD cards for a long, long time in Linux (with Windows obvious the situation was more of the reverse of this).
I agree with you fully, sadly. I still buy a portion of my games on gog, especially during their seasonal sales, but more “just in case Steam dies” and to give financial support to gog so that they can stick around and keep doing what they are doing. Hopefully they (or a third party like Lutris or Heroic) will eventually get playing gog games on par with Steam.
It isn’t as seamless as Steam, but using Lutris or Heroic are the way to go if the games doesn’t have a native Linux version available on gog
I was lured to use it during those days as well because of all the cool and wildly different screenshots I had seen. I did manage to get it working and looking super cool, but it was fragile and complex. It was so easy to fully break it in my experience. I tried to use it again about 8-10 years ago and while it was easier than the 90s, it was more trouble than I was willing to put up with for a DE these days. Especially since Gnome (with extension) and KDE could trivially look nice.
I was an early Plex user and I ditched it completely when they first started the cloud account bullshit. There weren’t as many good options at the time, but I just switched to a very simple dlna media server that my TVs supported. Now of course we have a wealth of options and Plex makes even less sense to me, but I can see lots of people will keep using it due to inertia.
Yeah, DBeaver used to be unusable, but it is quite decent these days. I was really unhappy with Datagrip, so I decided to give it another try and I am glad I did.
As far as this tool goes, I don’t love the idea of having my tools in the browser, so this won’t work for me, but it is a cool project nonetheless.
Unsurprising, but still shitty. Par for the course for the company these days.
This is true, and is why I annoyingly have to keep robots.txt on my unpublished domains. Google does honor them for the most part, for now.
I only switched to an AMD GPU this year after 5 years using Nvidia cards. I assure you my situation is more common than yours. Your experience is also why people keep saying “Nvidia is OK now”, meaning quite clearly that it was absolutely not great before.
With Nvidia, once you got it installed and stable (if you were lucky your distro made that happen), it might stay good for many months to even a year. Then BLAM, some update catastrophically breaks your system and you’re stuck booting from a thumb drive trying to un-fuck your system. This was especially rough for me as I used my main system for work and gaming, so it had my Nvidia GPU in it.
My system has been smooth sailing since I switched to AMD. The drivers are in the kernel so it should be about as easy as it gets and shouldn’t be as finicky about which distro or DE you use. Now keep in mind that I am also on a top 7000 card, not a 9000 card, so I can’t speak to them from experience, but I haven’t heard any horror stories.