Two's Complement - Gaming on Linux

Episode Date: January 10, 2026

Ben wipes his PC over Thanksgiving and installs Ubuntu for gaming. Matt recalls the dark days of himem.sys and IRQ conflicts. The universe was created last Thursday, and someone gets a hangover.

I'm Matt Godbolt. And I'm Ben Rady. And this is Toos Compliment, a programming podcast. So, Ben, you moved over to Linux, right? So what kind of problems do you have? It just works. Good afternoon, Ben. Good afternoon, Matt.

This is doing two things. First of all, is exposing everyone to what time of day we record this, you know, as we continue to leak personal information. 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 was. It's kind of the CINAC kind of TCP protocol thing. Yeah. Otherwise, I don't even know who you are. I just sort of stand around and it's like, who is this? I don't know. You don't recognize me. You've got face blindness and I just care.

This magic shiboliffe for me. 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 on that bold assertion. And you have a trip report of sorts to share with us. So do you want to remind us where you were and what you said you were going to do? Yes. So I'm going to 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? I'm going to have to update. 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 Thursdays.

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. 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 bones, dinosaur bones in the ground are just a joke that some omnipitome being is put there for us. It's not necessarily a joke. They just, when the universe was created, they were in the ground as they were. And, you know, all the, you know, 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 way away. 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. Okay. Fair. Hard to refute. It's one of those like, difficult to falsify.

Yes. Very difficult to falsify that hypothesis. Very, very difficult. In a similar vein to that, you subscribed your personal creationism is that all existence began with Windows 3.1. With Windows 3.1. And then, you know, had the Protestant Reformation in the form of Windows for work groups. No. You're not even going to talk about 95. No, no, no, no.

Well, yeah, so Windows ME, oh God. Yeah, right. Windows 2000. It was fine. All right, no, all right. Yeah. Get a little old face. Okay.

So, Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1. Fast forward. That was like maybe the beginning of like a reasonable windows that people would want to buy. And that was last Thursday. That was, and that all of that was created last Thursday. Okay. Yeah.

Fast forward to now Windows 10. Uh, all of the, even windows is have come and gone or six I've got on. Is that how many it is? I don't know. Well, I don't know how many there are because of the counting problem. Oh, yeah. There was no Windows nine, right? Because of too many things that maybe apocryphly search for the string Windows nine.

And then did work around for Windows 95 on the basis of that would cover 95 and 97 or whatever, something like that. Anyway. Yes. There have been. Windows 10 is now here. Windows 10. Well, Windows 10 is gone. Windows 10 is end of life, right?

It's not gone in my house. 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, and you know, I would. High mem.m.m.com.

Yes. Yes, and this was soundblaster drivers to load. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Yes. Getting a sound card to work on a PC was an exercise in understanding how computers worked. And this was exacerbated by the fact that my dad at the time was running a company. Your dad at the time, you've changed that.

You know, just like Windows, you've got to change that out every year. The license expires. They go, they go, end of life. Absolutely. You have to get a new one. This is a terrible start for an episode. I don't even know what's happening right now. Okay, so are your dad?

At the time, my dad, was running a company that did, like, video and audio editing software, and he would get all of these, like, experimental soundboards and video cards and other things from various vendors. 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? I'm like, yes. We couldn't get to work.

Yeah, right. 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 it 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. This is all before plug and play.

So it's like moving jumpers around the board and changing slots in there and trying to which IRQ is this thing on. Oh, multiple ones and they've 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. That is a thing that can be difficult to do, right? And, you know, for my own background,

it was always the left. than legal acquired versions of games on cassette tapes that they wouldn't load because their audio quality was so terrible. And then you'd sit there adjusting the azamuth 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. So yeah, again, or you were typing them in from a magazine so that we spent hours. But like essentially what you're saying is that we, us old folk, we suffered to play games. We had to earn it. How it should be.

Right. I can't see how this is going to segue into the. 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. Right.

At the time, he was my son. I'm feeling silly. This is too much. It's worth mentioning that you and I went out for. drinks last night. So I'm a bit hungover and a bit feeling was. Yeah. So maybe that explains of it. Anyway, yes. At the time, he, he, he, he was like, I don't want to use Windows 10. Right. This is, this is, I just don't like it. I don't like what Microsoft is doing with it. He didn't want to go to 11. I'm sorry. Like, I don't want to move off of 10 to go to 11. I don't want to use 11.

Does not want to 11. Yeah, I don't want the speaker to go up to 11. Uh, 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 crazy pieces of hardware and all the things. And I'm like, well, that's going to be an adventure, but I'm here for it. Like, if that's what you want to do, that sounds fun in a weird way and let's do that. We're going to learn a lot about how computers work my son. Yes.

And then did he? 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 just to like, 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 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. they give like games different tiers.

You know, it's like the platinum tier games like work pretty well and all these things. And he's like, yeah, you know, maybe there's some games, but it's like, this is all kind of worked well for me. And so I was like, okay, maybe this is not the most insane thing in the world. I too do not want to install Windows 11 on my computer. And I've had Windows 10 on it for a very long time. And I'm like, all right. Well, over Thanksgiving, I am going to wipe my PC completely and install.

I'm going to install Ubuntu 24 on it, and then I'm going to install Steam, and then I'm going to allocate the next four days of my life to trying to get a video game to work on it. That was the mentality that I had going on. Our non-American listeners, I was going to say readers. I mean, possibly some are reading along with the transcripts. But for our non-Americans, Thanksgiving is the last Thursday of November, so that you effectively 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 do Thanksgiving is 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. 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 broadly thought day one, install Linux, day two, reinstall Linux. Day three, re-install Linux. Day four. Download the NVIDIA drivers and the open source version of,

of the NVIDIA drivers and recompile them on my computer with different flag set because that's what it's going to take to get these to work. 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. Yeah. And it worked. Hmm. That was it. That was the end of the story. Is it just worked? And then I installed another game and that just worked. No, you, I think probably, Probably you must have, no, that what, 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? Yeah, this is just the gaming PC that I had Windows set on. With an Nvidia card. Yeah, it's got a 20, 2080, RTF 280 in it, which is not a new card, but it's, you know, it's pretty good. And it has just worked. And then Steam worked. I mean, Linux has been relatively reliable for me. But then there's forever quirks.

Like, you know, my current desktop machine has, and I'm going to look down. One of the RtXs is, I don't know which one it is, but Ubuntu, 20, whatever I'm on, 25.10. If I lock the screen, it never unlocks ever again. That's it. It's done. You have to reboot it from the outside. So, like, you know, and I kind of put up with this for most of my life, you know, you know that I, always been the guy suffering with the Linux laptop going, ah, it's fine.

I just have unplug it and plug it back in again at eight times until eventually it notices that there's a second monitor or whatever. And that's right. 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. Yeah, right.

That's always been fine. But certainly the graphics has been an issue with like Nouveau being like, oh, the default driver is the open source one that is, you know, okay. I'm sure folks are working really hard to make it work against all odds of NVDA wanting to be close source. But then 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. And it just works. And then Steam works and the game just worked. And so are all the games running under a variety of wine? 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.

It's like, oh, there's going to be an emulator dealy and you're going to, no, it just click the install button and it just worked. 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. It's mind blowing. It's mind blowing.

So. So I was going to say. So I've done this with like three games so far. Which games? Which games have you done? Factorial, obviously. Vactorial, obviously. Arc Raiders was another one that we were playing.

And then I have installed, but I haven't actually run battle tech yet. Is that what it was? No, there was another, was it? You know, faster than light, you know, that game? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was, what's the success? Into the breach? Is that the one I don't know?

There's some other game I installed. I haven't run yet. But so far, and so I've been playing a lot of art graders lately, and I've been waiting for it to crash. I've been waiting for it to glitch out. I've been waiting for like the inevitable, you know, like crazy error.

I suppose, you know, the funny thing is, you know, wine is not an emulator, as famously as what it stands for, right? it is not trying to emulate or simulate. It is literally just implement. It's a re-implementation of the Win whatever 32 API and whatever things and direct X and whatnot. And as convergent evolution has gone on

and hardware and software have kind of gotten closer, presumably there's a thinner and thinner wrapper over like essentially what you need to do to send to the graphics cards. All the graphics cars do the same thing. Here's a big draw list of stuff to do. You go do it, whatever, that kind of thing. And like you're phrasing things. The complexity now is it.

like here's a pixel shader, here's a vertex shader, here's a whatever shade, you know, that aspect. And that is pretty much the same across any system. And then the rest of the game is doing its level best not to interact with the operating system as much as possible because that's the slow bit that you don't want to do. It's not like you're calling get-cher to get the keyboard or whatever. So I suppose it makes a lot of sense that yeah, here's an API that's well-under- stood 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. You say you play through a bunch of time. Yeah, I think I have like 150 hours or something in this game right now. And I don't think it's ever crashed once. 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, you know, 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.

Right. Right. I've got two monitors going and I've got like Firefox and one and like the full screen game on the other. And on the other monitor, yeah. Yeah, you got to look at the maps. I mean, you know, I'm not going to go find this stuff myself. I'm 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 amazing. So obviously I want to try this with a lot more games. I was going to say, you know, 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.

So that. You just collect them. I kind of, you say that, but it's just sort of, oh, I have this game. One day I'll maybe start it. But, yeah, I mean, I've gone sort of the depth first on this, right? It's like, I've proven that like, you know, 150 hours in there are no major issues. That is brilliant. 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 ace, You know, actually, I don't know. Let's find out. Go have a look. We get to hear your mechanical keyboard clicking away. Yes. Or not, actually.

What does it say? Game details. Yes, it is platinum. So it is. Okay, so that's like the highest level of compatibility that they've got. So what about what other games might you want to play on Steam? Now, you know, I mean, Boulder's games. That's probably...

Oh, yeah. Is that on Steam? I never know which things are. I know that I installed a bunch of... Yeah, Baldus Gate would... What does it say? What does our survey say? That is gold.

Okay. So maybe I would have more problems with that. It would be interesting to see how you'd get on with that on Linux. Oh, well, that's fascinating. I didn't realize a Baldus Gate would work. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

And so, and the other great thing that this has done is, for a while, Well, for a long while, I had 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 my desktop PC be available for when I want to try to develop things on Linux is nice. Yeah. But you're like booting back and forth. and, you know, I have always had sort of weird problems with, like, USB keyboards not being

recognized 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 out. Especially if you're plugged in through like a hub. Yeah. Yeah. I've definitely had that before now. 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 link. 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 have this, like, I have this, like, kind of complicated setup where I use my monitors as USBC 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. And now I can just have one computer with one operating system that does everything that I needed to do. And 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.

Zero fencing required. 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 it. Play games, 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 spam thing.

And you really don't want to have to do any funcing. But hidden in there is a little bit of internalized. 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 do this last time.

I've sort of gone taking. a quarter step backwards. Like I've been Linux only since the late 90s. My kids have got Windows. Well, I set them up with Linux machines and then eventually of their own free will I came down and I'm like, where did you get Windows from? Oh, I found some key. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. This is not how you do this. And we bought proper, you know, keys for it and installed it because they wanted to play games. Now, yeah, yeah. Them, those games are like Overwatch and other things, which I don't know. They're not steam-based. Well, you can't you get overwatch on Steam?

I don't know if you can. I know that like there's a very non-relying anti-cheat, kernel level anti-cheat thing that pops up. That requires them to be like super, you know, user every time. And that's a bit of a, you know, especially for playing competitively,

like they are, but, you know, so that was, 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. Yeah. Even though I think we talked about this before, in theory works on a version of Linux, just not my version of Linux.

It was just like, do 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?

Yeah. 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 same way 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 favor of the appropriate use of artificial intelligence, LLM-based technology, it's a choice thing, an opt-in thing rather than a you must force a. opt out or maybe later on everything, which is that's got to be the most grim and

recent times, isn't it? 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. How do I put a no solicitor sign in the software to just leave me alone? Right. Right. So anyway, I mean, we somehow have managed to manage to to make a 25 minute conversation out of it just works. 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. You know, actually, I feel like we should, that that's almost like the cold open of this. You want to see. All right. You do the, it just works. And then you play the outro. I'll see what I can do. I see what editor I can do.

Now we'll leave all this in so that people can hear that we planned this. Yeah. It gets incredibly meta then. Yeah. So let's do the recording now. Then people can laugh at this. So, Ben, you, 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 do. And then we'll cut to the closing. Yeah. We'll do something. Beautiful. Well, I think we're kind of getting towards the, not an actual stopping point.

I mean, one other data point here is that, like, as I said before, this was 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. Yeah. Yes. Is bolstered by the fact that he has dozens or. 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, a, 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, right? Like for him, the Linux environment is more of a means to an end. And, you know, for me, it's a little bit more of an end unto itself in some ways, right? Yes. Because we're nerds and we like these things.

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? Yeah. So I think basically at this point, he hasn't had a problem yet that wasn't just solved by updating some app packages and like you're done. That's really quite excellent. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Yeah. But apparently not the video editing one, which. That's going to be 2095. That's, yeah. Yeah, you're probably right.

Well, on that note, I better go on and edit some videos. 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. The advent, which has been going very well. I have been enjoying those, by the way. Oh, thank you. Very good.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, this, again, reveals how close to the while we are recording this one before it goes out to people. But, yeah, I... It turns out it's a lot of work to do. something like that. Who'd have a thought, right? I have an 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,

to be 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. You've been listening to Tooscompan. A programming podcast by Ben Raydie and Matt Goddob. Find the show. transcript and notes at www.2.2.2.2's complement.complement. Contact us on Mastodon. We are at twoscomplement at hackyderm.io. Our theme music is by Inverse Phase. Find out more at inversephase.com.