Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC, put Linux on it

Re:Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC,... by z3t4 on Thursday January 01, 2026 @09:28PM (#46460721)

I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive. GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pcie lanes available, so if you already got a gaming PC with many slots and dont need top performance it could still be worth it to get two more cheap gpus and use multi seats - for those building a mini lan gaming room at home.

One annoying thing is that linux cant run many different GPU drivers at the same time, so you have to make sure the cards work with the same driver.

Properitary 3rd party multi seat also exist for Windows, but Linux has built in support and its free.

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Re:Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC,... by seg_lol on Thursday January 01, 2026 @11:47PM (#46461522)

This is awesome!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration

I am super curious about your setup. I played with MS years ago, but I lost the need. It is a super cool tech that I'd love to see its efficiencies embraced in some way.

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Re:Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC,... by z3t4 on Friday January 02, 2026 @06:42AM (#46463824)

Install an old GPU, Connected a monitor to the extra GPU, connect mouse and keyboard, Use the loginctl command to list available devices/usb ports and attach them to a seat.

I suggest using Arch linux although loginctl should be available in all distributions using SystemD now.

If you don't have enough USB ports you can use a USB hub, some monitors comes with USB hub. And some with built in sound, or you can use wireless headset.

My main issue was that driver support was dropped for my oldest GPU card. So one day when I upgraded the OS it just stopped working. So to be on the safe side get another GPU like the one you already have.

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Re:Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC,... by ngcc_hk on Friday January 02, 2026 @11:07AM (#46466168)

Sorry being IT guy I wondered about the logic. I understand the need to align. But if one fail all fail and children like customers … not the patient kind? Or you have two system within each … then across the …. Sorry cannot stop my mind spinning.

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Re:Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC,... by kiddico on Friday January 02, 2026 @01:48PM (#46467993)

The kids will get over it lol

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Re:Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC,... by z3t4 on Friday January 02, 2026 @08:09PM (#46471653)

[delayed]

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Re:Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC,... by seg_lol on Friday January 02, 2026 @05:27PM (#46470240)

So for a GPU with say 4 display ports, I can run 4 sessions off the same GPU provided I can get enough USB ports.

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Re:Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC,... by z3t4 on Friday January 02, 2026 @07:56PM (#46471554)

It might be possible one way or another, although I used separate gfx cards. You might find a different x server that lets you do it using a single card. I suggest getting an extra hard drive, install grub so you can dual boot, install the experimental OS on the extra hard drive and start fiddling. I also dual booted different OS in order to experiment with machine learning when the kids was sleeping, as I got multiple gpus, although the old ones where crap it was a good learning exercise.

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Re:Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC,... by ThatPlayer on Friday January 02, 2026 @08:37PM (#46471849)

Modern GPUs aren't constrained by the number of ports. You can use DisplayPort MST (hubs) to output multiple displays off a single port.

But most GPUs are limited to being able to run 4 displays. Except some AMD Eyefinity can do 6

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Re:Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC,... by ciupicri on Friday January 02, 2026 @05:10PM (#46470048)

I hate it so much that multiple video cards are needed and you can't just use the multiple outputs of a single video card.

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