With the...events unfolding for Windows 10 "fans" across the world in October I decided to take a stab at running Linux on my workshop PC

For reference the machine is an HP Z4 G4 workstation, it's roughly 5 or 6 years old at this point. Roughly a 10th gen Intel for reference.

The first hurdle was the Nvidia P4000. Despite installing the "correct" Nvidia drivers, Firefox kept refusing to decode video in hardware.

From what I was able to piece together from other folks, it's because of Vulkan

Apparently Linux folks are so...afraid? of patents around H.264/265/etc that they've started pivoting to doing video decode on the GPU itself using Vulkan. Which...okay. But my GPU is too old for that. So I was stuck

So I slapped an Intel ARC A770 in there which I had laying spare. Because of course I did.

I ended up with working video *decode* but not *encode*. Because Intel is trying to upstream all of that into LLVM but also oops they're firing legions of people around the world

I think the people that most strongly are advocating for "just switch to Linux!" to Windows 10 users need a new slogan

"Lower your standards, ye who enter here"

Linux on the Desktop is compromise

Linux on the Desktop is a minefield of broken glass

Linux on the Desktop is "guess I'll just have to learn to live without"

To be clear, I don't say this as a "defense" of Windows, far from it.

Just that the asinine "hype machine" around "Linux on the Desktop!" is such a fever pitch that it has drowned out any kind of reasonable criticisms even from "the faithful"

You are going to have broken hardware

You are going to have broken *software*

And you're just going to have to decide if that's more tortuous than un-fucking Windows 11

As for me? Well. I'll be back over here, as I was before

@CursedSilicon I routinely tell people the only reason I run linux on everything is because I started doing that 28 years ago. I have _muscle memory_ for these problems that others do not. Its hard to recommend to newcomers. But then again, computing in general is hard to recommend to newcomers right now.

@errant The last time I tried it (a year and change ago) I ended up falling face first into a bed of spikes

Because oops XFCE doesn't yet support Wayland. And all the browsers and everything else have deprecated X11. So *Youtube* would lag when I had a terminal on screen compiling code ON A REMOTE MACHINE

@CursedSilicon
<snark>
With the reboot of Commodore, maybe we'll see a return of AmigaOS!
</snark>

@frang Fucking Christ I hope that dude jumps into an AI generated dumpster full of shit where he belongs

@CursedSilicon ahh, see you'd need to know about setting GDK_BACKEND to x11 or setting the ozone parameter on chrome to force the browers to x11.... I blame freedesktop.org for a lot of this. They pushed wayland too fast and didnt care how much of other people stuff they broke.

@errant Nope! Afaict back then it was "go use Wayland because we've stopped supporting X11 hardware decode (except under Vulkan. Which needs Wayland now)

@CursedSilicon that doesnt quite add up, but I dont doubt that you ran into a wall where even someone of above average skills would get stuck. Its full of them. All of the code to do GPU backed hardware encode/decode (nvenc, not vulkan) is still there but you need to know how to set that up as the default and thats not well documented at all.

@errant It *might* have been specific to AMD? But at the time I specifically grabbed a like...RX 6400(?) on the expectation Mesa drivers would work better than proprietary ones

@errant https://airlied.blogspot.com/2022/12/vulkan-video-decoding-radv-status.html I did find this from back in '22 which seems to line up with what I was failing to get working

@bersl2 Hi

@CursedSilicon oh gods the cursed name of radv. Bleh.

@errant It's a great Sideshow Bob Rake Moment

"I'm going to get an AMD card, they have *better* Linux drivers! And I don't have to worry about a binary blob!"

*THWACK*

@CursedSilicon nvidia does their own bullshit tbh

my guess is also in part that switching to vulkan is partially down to that too, since nvidia doesn’t directly support vaapi

it doesn’t help that there’s around 4 drivers for nvidia gpus, but i know that my gtx 750 supports vulkan. i would be surprised if any of the functional drivers enabled the needed extensions though, i don’t think i have ever gotten it to accelerate video except through nvenc/nvdec.

@CursedSilicon @errant ah yes, chromium's shitty codec implementation on linux. it literally never worked for me. not on nvidia, not on amd, not on intel either. it's just kinda how it is for chrome-based apps still

@brainwormqueen @errant Firefox had the same issues IIRC

@CursedSilicon This is actually a Nvidia issue! Nvidia refuses to implement VA-API in their drivers, so we have issues like this… There is this unofficial driver that is a very hacky solution to the problem, and it kinda works… I guess… It takes a non-zero amount of effort to set up as well!

Nvidia on Linux still sucks, and it will continue to suck for quite a while. Until either Nvidia decides to support it properly (lmao), or NVK becomes daily-drivable!

@avali To be completely fair, I've had issues in the last year-and-change with all three major vendors

- Nvidia's hardware video decode is (was?) broken. And requires the workaround you pointed me to (which really should be documented on the Gentoo wiki)

- AMD (in June of 2024) required me to pivot from XFCE and X11 to a KDE Wayland setup just to have (minimized) youtube not lag while I was compiling code on a remote host over SSH

- Intel's cards are "half-baked" due to mass employee firings

@avali On reflection, "fair" wasn't the right word

Yelling about GPU vendors feels more like being Mom on Futurama

I hate all three of them, but for different reasons