Zone of Mr. Frosti

A few years ago I wrote about Proton and DXVK and what it meant for gaming on Linux: https://mrfrosti.com/2020/08/06/gaming-on-linux-the-metagame/ . I figure it is time to revisit how its going.

I suspected at the time that Valve was pouring money and development into these projects with the goal of building a Linux backed cloud gaming service to compete with nVidia’s Geforce Now (aka the final resting place of the $1200+ GTX 4080s no one is buying), and the now defunct Google Stadia. Side note – when Sundar Pichai announced at a Stadia event that he wasn’t a gamer we should have all guessed it was dead on arrival.

Fast forward to 2023. Valve has unveiled and started shipping the Steam Deck – a portable PC running SteamOS using Arch Linux under the hood. It promises wide compatibility with games including Windows-only titles. Gearing up to launch, the number of Proton compatible games exploded on protondb.com . WINE, and DXVK, Proton, and related projects have seen rapid releases which bring big new features. There hasn’t been this much focus on Linux gaming possibly ever. But now that there is commercial interest in building products backed by these libraries, the ecosystem is being funded and is maturing rapidly.

It has been a while since I’ve dual-booted to Windows to play an online game. The sole exception would be the metastatic Xbox Live service which has spread into the Windows OS in a way that rivals the Internet Explorer debacle of Microsoft vs the DOJ from 1998. It’s a mess – even on Windows it barely works (usually open, crash, updates needed, crash, reboot, open crash, open, finally!). Almost every other gaming platform has some way to access and play its titles in Linux. Steam is at the forefront with a native Linux client, but Epic Games Store has support via Lutris, and Heroic. GoG allows downloads of Linux versions of its games, and has Lutris and MiniGalaxy support. Other launchers like Ubisoft, and Origin also run via Lutris with minimal fuss.

This has all built up to my latest purchase. I’ve had an nVidia GPU for as long as I can remember – probably 20 years now. This span was AMD’s dark ages. They’ve emerged now in a Renaissance era of Ryzen chips, and a new line of fast Radeon GPUs. I initially ignored them as the first generation of Radeon GPUs were not competitive with their green counterparts. However nVidia has made a number of decisions lately that have just given the game to AMD:

• nVidia GPU pricing has no basis in reality. My price point every generation has been around $500 for a high-end GPU, (but not bleeding edge). The 40x generation with an MSRP at $1,200 makes this a poor proposition. AMD has also gone up in pricing but is still considerably less than the competition. Scalping and crypto have exacerbated the pricing issue and I’ve yet to see the previous generation sell at even MSRP and stay in stock for long enough to add it to the cart. Side note: At Microcenter there were plenty of 40x series cards sitting ignored behind their locked glass case
• nVidia has continued to see issue after issue with latest generation. EVGA pulled out as a partner – further limiting consumer choice. The power draw has reportedly melted cables. The dimensions are the size of a mid-sized sedan, and won’t fit in many existing cases. Then there was the 4080 which was really a 4070 in all but marketing. Nice try marketing folks.
• nVidia “kind of” supports Linux. Their approach is a proprietary module you load into the kernel. AMD has their driver in the kernel. The driver quality discrepancy is quite large now in AMD’s favor. Looking at protondb.com and other Linux forums things work if you have AMD, and don’t work if you have nVidia. I have been unable to run Wayland on my GTX 1080 without artifacts, applications failing to paint, screen capture issues, etc. There is only so much the community can do with a closed-source blob.
• AMD was smart about having some ecosystem integration. nVidia only makes GPUs, and Intel is in the very early stages of making GPUs. AMD sits comfortably on both sides of the CPU/GPU fence and has a cool feature of resizable BAR with Ryzen CPUs.

This all culminated in my decision to support AMD with my wallet again (I’m a Ryzen owner) and go with a Radeon 6800 XT. It trades blows with a GTX 3080 in performance, aside from ray tracing and DLSS. nVidia is the clear winner there, but it doesn’t justify everything else. I would rather have a GPU that works flawlessly under Linux, at a lower retail price. And that is exactly how it played out. I bought a 6800 XT for $512 from Microcenter last weekend and put it in my Ubuntu 22.10 PC. IT JUST WORKED. Zero driver setup, I fired up a Steam game (Psychonauts 2) and it ran like butter. Windows gaming might be in the rearview mirror between my PS5 and my Ubuntu desktop.

Out of curiosity, I decided to fire up Control – one of the first games that supported ray tracing just to see how the 6800 XT fairs. I watched it all from the sidelines before there were Linux drivers or support for ray tracing. While the non-ray tracing version of Control is a one-click install via Lutris, setting up ray tracing support took a bit more research. I wanted to share my findings in case anyone wants to try the same. In Lutris you want to configure your system options and add the following Environmental variables:

• AMD_VULKAN_ICD=RADV (there is a “Vulkan ICD loader” select list for this that does the same)
• RADV_PERFTEST=rt
• VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr

I got a solid 45fps out of my 2560×1080 monitor with ray tracing on medium settings. You can independently adjust render resolution and engine resolution so it technically is upscaling this to a 3440×1440 but it has little or no impact on performance. All in all, I was impressed by the performance of a GPU that isn’t known for having outstanding ray tracing performance. To hit these numbers on an emulated Windows title is a testament to how mature this ecosystem has become.

I’m excited about the future of Linux gaming. The Steam Deck has really moved this into the mainstream. The driver support is there, the software is there, and many of the titles I’ve played recently even have native Linux builds (Warhammer III, Psychonauts 2, Hollow Knight, Wasteland, Desparators, Pillars of Eternity, Slay the Spire, Deus Ex, and more added all the time. It is hard to even know which games are native vs running in Proton/DXVK because the performance is about the same. In fact, I played about 2 hours of Warhammer III before I realized I was running it through Proton needlessly because there is now a Linux build available.

So if you are nervous about taking the plunge, or curious how AMD GPUs would fair, or how ray tracing works on Linux there you go! Happy gaming!

We recently bought a house with an extra room in the basement. The other rooms were all the same paint color, carpet, lighting and other finishes. We decided to take one of the rooms and give it some personality by turning it into a home theater. We could have just ordered a TV, some speakers and a couch and called it a day but the room needed some character. Our budget for this project was $15k but we soon realized we would only need about half of this budget and get everything we wanted.

After considering a few options we decided on a dark blue paint (Behr Superior Blue) for the entire room and an accent wall with board and batten. Aside from waiting for a TV sale, the room was transformed inside of just a few weeks. I went with an LG OLED for its superior contrast – something that I’ve been envious of after having seen my friends. There is no LED dimming – and glow with an OLED. But it is costly – and this was our biggest line item on the home theater. I paired this with a Klipsch R-625FA floor speaker pair with the R-12SW subwoofer and R-52C center channel and R-41 bookshelf speakers for the rear. Powering this is the Sony DH790 receiver. For furniture we chose the Larna Park Taupe sectional couch with ottoman. This was our second biggest expense with the speakers+receiver being third. Final touches include a Quaniece console for some additional storage and a pair of the Beaker Plug-In Black Wall Sconces, and Britton series ceiling fan from Home Depot. Stay tuned for the total cost!

Day one was preparation and and supply run to Home Depot. We watched a few YouTube DIY videos and decided on a 3 1/2″ primed pine board and 6 vertical battens and 2 horizontal battens for a total of 12 of the 3 1/2×8′ boards. This was roughly determined by how large we wanted each square of the grid and using an online calculator. This takes the guesswork out of positioning, padding, and board widths and just tells you how far apart to space them. First run of boards, 1 gallon of paint, liquid nails and other materials was ~$200. I was fortunate to be able to get a brad nailer and air tank from my father and law so that was not a tool I had to purchase. To make cleanup easy I decided I would buy a new painting kit for $10 and chuck it in the trash when I was done. Cleaning a paint roller takes forever, and it never works as good the second time anyway. You will also need some other basic materials – tape measure, saw, level, hammer, screwdriver, caulking gun. I’m not including these in the cost of this project since I use them for everything.

First we took down the existing crown moulding on the intended accent wall. We had a decision to make on 1) taking down all the trim, 2) taking down just that trim and joining it to the board and batten or 3) building the frame below the existing crown moulding. We opted for number 2 after pulling down the crown from one wall and seeing we had a sizeable gap between the drywall and ceiling. That would have been a lot to contend with across the entire room. Cutting back the crown I used a saw to make a 90 degree cut so it could fit flush against the batten frame. Brad nails about every two feet, and liquid nails on the back of the board.

The room is so plain – yuck! Day two is when the project really took off. We put up our first vertical board being very careful, measuring everything multiple times, and generally moving slow. It soon became a routing however. Don’t think that your wall height or width is the same and measure each cut individually. We did all the vertical boards, using the brad nails and liquid nails on the board backs. Next we measured and cut the horizontal boards. A few of the videos said use a spacer board but I found it unnecessary. Instead we just measured each board placement and attached. A laser level makes the horizontal boards go much quicker. We made a line all the way across (you want to true level, not parallel to the ceiling/floor. This was pretty much the second day. As a nice end of day bonus the TV and the speakers both arrived.

Day three we prepped for painting. This involved some drywall repair to other sections of the room, sanding, removing face-plates, spackling, and caulking. A wood putty is used on the batten board joins to make it look like a single piece of wood. This has to be applied, allowed to dry, then sanded flush. The spackle took a few passes – applying then letting dry only to build on top in some of the worst places. A lesson learned here was apply caulking to the interior squares. We were not going to do this at first, but it was super quick, and it looks fantastic – especially where the board and the wall had a gap.

Day four was a continuation of our paint with an emphasis on the detail work. We taped off our edges and really tried to cleanup our lines and fix some dripping and sparse areas. This step seems to be the biggest factor in what looks like a DIY project and what looks like a professional project. You just have to keep going and getting more and more precise in your results. Cumulatively you want to look at the paint and have anywhere you look be sharp lines and cleanly applied.

Day five the sectional couch arrived in the morning. We went with a two tone gray and dark brown to match the dark blue paint color. The sectional dimensions work well with the room fitting almost perfectly on the back wall in front of the batten. I absolutely love how much room the sectional provides – the entire family can comfortably sit and watch a movie together. We mounted the TV on the opposite wall with a slim profile wall bracket to make it just blend in like a hanging picture

The slim mount actually had two settings – one with a more aggressive tilt. The TV is so thin however it felt better to have it on a very slight 5 degree tilt to optimize viewing. The vertical on the TV was around 68 inches so we bought a console that was 88 inches so it didn’t look dwarfed by the TV. This has some shelves and doors to hide the controllers, cables, and provide a buffer for the wall to keep people from bumping into the TV screen.

Next up was the speaker installation. The Platin Monaco speakers were unfortunately a big disappointment. Lots of popping, dropping, crackling, and speakers getting “stuck” on a note like a computer freezing. The nail in the coffin however is that WiSA doesn’t support Dolby DTS which is the surround sound format that virtually every Blu-ray disc uses. These went back and were replaced with a more aggressive sound system – but for roughly the same cost by catching a good sale on the speakers, and using an Amazon gift card on the receiver. I took a gamble on WiSA but if you care about your audio then move on to a wired system – no comparison and I’m not even a trained ear.

Running all the speaker wire was one of the hardest projects. I had a door frame on either side of the wall with the TV so getting to the rear speakers was an undertaking. I initially bought some 1/2″ cable raceways and painted them all and was going to tuck the speaker wire inside them. This might have worked well, but the new sound system came with a large 10″ subwoofer that I wanted to locate to the other side of the room between the couch and the wall. Wherever the rear speaker cables went, the suboofer monoaural cable needed to go to. And at lengths > 30″ it is recommended it be shielded – which of course means extra bulk. They were too tight a fit for the raceway, and after painstakingly getting it somewhat crammed in there I realized that the adhesive was not sufficient to keep this stuck to the walls/ceilings. I didn’t want a larger raceway either and I still didn’t want cable staples with visible cable. I ended up debating options and fished the cables under the carpet at the doorway, and tucked them under the baseboards along the rest of the wall the best I could. It was the third or fourth option but I’m happy with it. You don’t notice unless you step on the cable without wearing shoes.

The final step was crimping all the speaker cables, and connecting my speakers and giving it a run for its money. After about 30 minutes of Dunkirk on Blu-ray I realized I wasn’t getting signal from my left speaker. Stupid mistake – on checking the speaker I realized I neglected to connect the left channel – having connected only the Atmos/height channel further up the speaker. Easy remedy.

One other pain point was getting the PS5 to output 4K+HDR via a receiver. The receiver sits between the TV and PS5 and I get all the niceties that entails – synchronized power on/off, and the TV remove controlling the PS5 and the receiver volume. However the PS5 kept informing me that do output HDR I needed to drop to 1080p. I was thinking the receiver was just not going to support this feature when I found a Reddit post of a user with the same issue resolving it by setting the HDMI port the PS5 is plugged into into “enhanced” mode in the AV options. After a restart the PS5 immediately picked up 4K + HDR completing the build.

The painted cable raceways that I abandoned were not a complete loss however. I did use one of the larger ones under the TV instead of using a gang plate and running cables through the wall. This pairs with the batten somewhat unintentionally and is a whole lot easier than fishing cables. The sconce cables were also secured using some of the cable raceway meant for the speaker cable and cleaned up that installation. The discarded raceways even got involved in fishing the cables under the carpet!

The ceiling fan was also a late purchase when we realized it had a wobble at higher speeds. Instead of trying to balance it we realized that the rest of the room had so much character that the contractor model fan just didn’t fit any longer. This was a relative simple swap and has the added benefit of being much quieter while operating and comes with a remote control.

We are really happy with the final product and having done it ourselves we saved quite a bit of money. All said and done we spent about $6800. Having done it ourselves there is an extra feeling of pride and attachment and we are ready to show it off to family and friends. Had we paid to have it done we might have had an electrician run wiring and a new switch for the wall sconces but the plugin ones seem fine – especially with a dark paint. This should make a great room for movie watching, and some gaming sessions on the PS5 and Switch. I do wish the room had already been run for cable but fishing them under the carpet only took an hour or so and I’m happy with the result. The only real disappointment with the project was the WiSA speakers. But I took a gamble with a new technology and instead ended up returning them and got some seriously amazing sound as a backup. Another unintended side effect – these particular sconces rotate downward and the make the perfect reading lights. I’ve been starting my mornings reading my book, listening to music through the speakers, and enjoying the couch.

Future additions include floating shelves instead of the bookshelf, with space underneath for the subwoofer. The monoaural cable is already run for that area because I’m planning on this happening in the near future. We also have some movie art to hang still. Also a fun concession stand stocked with movie theater staples like candy, drinks, and a popcorn machine centerpiece will be right outside the door in a little inlet we have next door to the converted movie theater. It should pair well with our next project – the wet bar with beer and wine storage!

Updates! (January 2022)

Floating shelves are installed, and the rear speakers have been lifted to the same listening height has the front. Pictures are finally up on the wall too. Very happy with how this project turned out. It took months to get all the right pieces but well worth the wait.

Someone recently gave me a gift certificate to an online delivery service. There was nowhere to redeem it on their website. The FAQs had instructions describing links that didn’t even exist. Then it occurred to me – this is an app only feature. Then it struck me – why?

I have been doing full stack development for almost two decades now so it has been interesting to watch some industry trends. When smartphones really started gaining traction we had the App Store race – even when many of those apps just served the website in a web view. Reminiscent of the Dot Com era where everyone needed a website – even if there was no business value in having one just because. Steve Jobs even famously pushed back against the iPhone SDK and wanted developers to use HTML+CSS+JS to build their experiences on his device.

Lets discuss what some of the challenges are when working at a company with an app:

Adding a new feature on the web is as straightforward as merging your feature branch, and deploying. All clients instantly get the update the next time they visit the website. No updates required. Except we threw that out that amazing benefit of distributing software over the web and went back to release cycles with the app images. Worse, there is now an intermediary standing between you and your customers in the form of an app store approval on Apple devices.

Related to release cycles, you also have to deal with legacy version support as not all customers auto-update their apps, or even can auto update to the latest version of your app because of OS restrictions on their devices. This means a long tail of support as you have to keep around legacy code until some threshold of your users are updated and you are comfortable disenfranchising the rest.

As a full stack developer I design the feature, and then the native app teams… redesign the same feature using native screens. This duplication of features costs time and resources. Worse still it is per platform – desktop, Android, and iOS are all separate. Thanks goodness Microsoft failed with their Windows phone or there would be a THIRD native app team. In many ways I think the duopoly at play here cemented the feature workflows we have today. Lets say 10 phones succeeded – no way we wouldn’t have figured out how to build something once and have it work on all the phones (hint – its HTML+CSS+JS). But just two vendors plus desktop? We can turn a blind eye to triplication.

One idea I’ve been thinking about recently is how these native teams integrate in with the other product teams. I’ve traditionally seen the iOS and Android teams almost exclusively partitioned off as their own product teams. But they aren’t products – they are platforms! Perhaps it is better to embed native developers into the product teams from an organizational standpoint.

Now why you may ask do we have these native apps at all? Remember Steve Jobs infamously didn’t want them. Yet in the year 2021 everything is an app. The web just serves as a funnel to the app – how many times are you annoyed to download the app? Is the web not capable of these app experiences? For the most part the web is on par with native app functionality. Javascript has come a long way and can access like sensor data, geolocation, offer speech to text, provide push notifications, camera access, and single page app experiences that rival anything you can do in a native app. Many HTML transitions and animations are hardware accelerated so even on a mobile device you get a super smooth experience. How about the layout considerations on the smaller screens? Responsive layout has this solved too with many ways to adjust your website layout based on different screen sizes via media queries.

So if it isn’t technical (or in large part not a technical hindrance) why do we need these apps?! The answer I think is money. Google and Apple don’t get 30% cuts on payments made on the web because the web is an open platform. They only get that money from their walled gardens. These companies have unfathomable amounts of money and market the hell out of these app stores. I don’t see anything on the scale of that amount of money marketing the web. Despite these same companies sitting on the committees approving web standards and implementing them in their own browsers (on their own operating systems!) .

It feels like the web has been neglected thanks to an advertising campaign of FOMO that rivals the Dot Com era domain name grab. The more apps I try the more I’m convinced this app I downloaded didn’t need to be an app at all. And its worse for it with slower release cycles, duplicated development (that could have been spent elsewhere), and a general inconvenience to the user being bombarded to “Download the app”. No thank you.

I’ll leave you with a wild ass prediction – in 10 years we will look back on apps like how we look back on Rich Internet Application platforms like Silverlight and Flex. It will seem silly that we needed to rebuild what the web already provided us. If Google and Apple really wanted these features they should have just integrated them into their browsers – not made a whole new platform. We will realize that the customer does NOT benefit from an app drawer of 100 icons that we have to hunt and peck the right one to do some task. The web was here before apps, and I believe it will be here long after apps. The native app developers will be happy to know they aren’t out of a job – they can happily find work on the web teams once the platform partitioning falls away. All it takes is a realization that the web is ok, and we don’t need to spend extra money just to give 30% of it to Google or Apple – they will be just fine.

I’m remember being twenty. I was excited by what the day held. I can work anywhere. I can go any place. My life can be anything I want it to be. I just have to finish my degree. Then my real life will start. I just need to decide where to live and buy that house. Then my real connection with my community will start. I just need to find what makes me happy to work on then I’ll have the perfect job and Monday will feel as good as Saturday.

Now I’m in my thirties. It is a little harder to get up each morning. It takes a little longer to get going. I have committed to my job and at this point I don’t know what else I’d do and make this kind of money. A door closes on other careers. Maybe it doesn’t, but I don’t have the energy to get up and check if it is still open – even just a crack. If it is, am I passionate enough about anything to restart?

I have my own family now. I have kids and I want them to have a relationship with their grandparents while they can. I want them to have the memories that I have of going to grandma’s house and reading comics, and playing with different toys, eating cake and cookies, and staying up later than I should have. Of feeling like a VIP. That means of all the places I could have lived, the radius of where I can live with this choice is a lot smaller. Within an hour or so is about as far away as I want to get.

I remember being so excited by remote work. I thought I had found the unicorn job. This would free up so much time to pursue other hobbies, and invest in my personal relationships. The work week would just barely register on my mind for the week. Except that now I don’t know as many people and I’m not meeting any more people so that social circle is shrinking every day. The connections I hoped to form with my neighbors didn’t pan out. We seldom speak, and we don’t share much in common. And the work is the same in an office or at home. The work week is still the dominating force in my scheduling.

The real struggle now isn’t maintaining any of the things I set out to achieve in my twenties. I have a house, and a family, and career. What I struggle with is what’s next. Or what else. Or maybe it is the same question?

And will I have the energy to pursue the Next Thing even if I find it? Or will I never find it because just like those other doors I haven’t the curiosity to get up and peek? Is the next thirty years staying the course? I’m mostly happy, and healthy but I feel under utilized. On paper everything looks good. But I’m struggling to feel that sense of accomplishment internally.

I retire. I live in some dream place. Then what? I’m contemplating what the lesson is here. What should I have done? I hope at the end I have a connection to my family. That was about it. And in a few generations my great great grandkids will struggle to remember my name. Some silly job he did that is now obsolete.

I think that is what bothers me the most. Everything we’ve forgotten. Each life seems to be its own independent arc. And looking down from the apex is really making me question its purpose.

Joe Biden Jr was sworn in as the United States 46th president today. I found the speech an extraordinary one in its call to unity and healing. This is what a president sounds like. The following excerpt I found particularly moving, and it encapsulates to me what it means to be part of the American dream:

And together we will write an American story of hope, not fear. Of unity not division, of light not darkness. A story of decency and dignity, love and healing, greatness and goodness. May this be the story that guides us. The story that inspires us. And the story that tells ages yet to come that we answered the call of history, we met the moment. Democracy and hope, truth and justice, did not die on our watch but thrive.

That America secured liberty at home and stood once again as a beacon to the world. That is what we owe our forbearers, one another, and generations to follow.

So with purpose and resolve, we turn to those tasks of our time. Sustained by faith, driven by conviction and devoted to one another and the country we love with all our hearts.

President Joe Biden – inauguration speech – January 20th 2021