Open source chess in 2017

The best chess GUI (which able to do computer tournaments ) in Linux is windows Arena GUI run through wine, it forces people to compile windows versions of engines. All other chess GUI for linux are laughably pathetic, buggy and unusable.
I've spent the entire day to muck with Scid vs PC, Xboard, "Arena for Linux" and few other guis: they either don't work or crash.
Scid vs PC crashes on tournaments with large amount of engines and generally a resource hod, because its built on tcl/tk.
Arena for Linux has numerous bugs which prevent it from running tournaments longer than 100 games.
Xboard besides being a pain in the ass to install, isn't usable for tournaments at all(it can't handle UCI engines well and config files on Ubuntu)

GAHNOO LINOCKS

On the other notes Small tournaments in Scid vs PC work fine:its the only linux chess gui program to have easy setup and config. Its the large scale fast tournaments with 100+ engines stall.
Tcl/tk overhead is ~20% of one core, so it doesn't explain the stalling.
The workaround(besides compiling for windows) is to makes dozens of small tournaments and average the statistics out.

The popup windows for each game are really annoying in Scid vs PC, they waste CPU time for nothing. I can't seem to find any settings to turn it off.

These popup windows for fast games take 25% of cpu time and are really annoying.

Asshole Design level of Scid Vs PC designer.
1.A tournament with 0.1 sec/move
2.thousands of games each end in 2-3 secs.
3.For each game a two! """HELPFUL""" popup window opens with Analysis and closes after 0.5 seconds.

Its a common pattern with Linux software, being useless by default with most annoying and unintuitive options turned on and settings hidden deep in text files.

Best open source chess is frozenchess

>>7
As opposed to the numerous api's Microsoft's left undocumented in Windows until Wine came along and reverse engineered them?

So are you going to make bugfixes to one of these, or write your own from scratch?

>>10
I just wanted to test some chess theory by making 200 compiles of Stockfish with altered eval parameters and a giant tournament to determine which one has best ratings. Its likely i won't be running it after that.
As far as anyone concerned, Stockfish eval is considered less precise than its closest rivals and it wins due depth and speed:but i have some ideas on what the "bad eval" parameters are and the means to test it.

Currently 5102 games of ~40k completed and Scid didn't crash once. Impressive.

>>9
Wine is a difficult beast to work with.
The "apis they figured" out often break in next version, so people are forced to keep dozens of different versions installed.
I've tried to run modern Starcraft(that uses the B.net app) through it and after much tinkering admitted defeat(the 1.16.1 patch works fine because its uses the old framework)

>>13

Wine is a difficult beast to work with.
The "apis they figured" out often break in next version, so people are forced to keep dozens of different versions installed.

You're better off just dual-booting in that case.

Besides scid writing 2mb of logs every second and my window manager not responding to a mice outside application windows, its been 12K games running. I have no idea how to turn of engine logs and i'm on a SSD drive.

Apparently the option to disable the log files is as follows
1.open the analysis engines window
2.Set the log size to 0(default 5000)
Such Intuitiveness. Much Open Source.
I bet 99.9% never read the logs, but its effects of wearing down SSDs are appreciated more.

>>16
For reference a normal, human-oriented program would
1.NOT Create log files without explicit permission.
2.Allow the directory of log files to be selected: i want to write to /tmp/ which is set to run in RAM.
3.Write log during a tournament. This is not the time for debugging by defaults.
5.NOT CREATE A HALG MEGABYTE LOG FILE FOR EACH GAME anD EVERY ENGINE each few second.*this absurd behaviour occurs each 3 seconds, after which the log is purged(so it never usable for reading either).
The idiocy of dozens log file(per engine) being rewritten each second and purged is such a disappointment in design.


Thankfully now its disabled.

>>14
Nope. Staying botnet-free for now.
Games are not that important for me to switch back.

>>18
Alternatively, you could have it run in a VM instead.

>>19
Nope again. With Spectre/Meltdown and various new cache exploits incoming VM are not that secure anymore. I'm running unpatched kernel.

>>20
Well Wine isn't that great and it's convoluted as fuck to run multiple instances in order to run shitty Windows applications that you could probably find *nix equivalents of.

Actually, on second thought, it seems like no matter what, chess is shit on a computer. Might as well go back to using an actual board.

>>22
I don't actually play chess(i'm not that good at it), just investigated some computer chess theory subjects.

>>23
I see. I don't see much of a solution, maybe the whole ``IT industry'' will have one gigantic crash like console video games had back in 1983-1984. It's probably an inevitability at this point.

>>24
Online advertising is a massive crash waiting to happen, even "big data" can't make it profitable or worthwhile anymore.

Scidvspc author had the bright idea to limit maximum rounds to 10!!! (Arena can do thousands)
So you can't run a long tournament, you have to do dozens of 10 rounds each and merge stats manually.I should note ArenaForLinux had to be restarted every 20 games(even if games take literraly 2seconds) or it stalls(with weird empty new tournaments) and leaks memory.
I'm now fighting xboard configuration.

Xboard tournament turned to be a mess that crashes and stalls at anything.
Try to configure parameters when starting tournament? GUI Stall
Can't create tournament without a FILE created beforehand manually with some some tournament data. Xboard apparently doesn't create one automatically.
Scidvspc is x10000 more stable and user friendly.
The only good thing about xboard is it can be used for analysis and it has low CPU overhead.