Why?
Windows is what most gamers use and need
Windows is what most gamers use and need
For instance: VR on Linux is still a shit show, with only one company kinda supporting it and not doing a very good job of it at that.
> They fully support Linux
No power management for base stations, the Index camera doesn't work, asynchronous reprojection causes issues, no automatic audio switching, and a host of other little issues.
Yup, fully supported.
With the incredible success of the Steam Deck, PC game publishers would be stupid to ignore it.
VR isn’t there yet, but VR isn’t a massive industry anyways. And besides, Valve is the PC VR company. Anyone predicting that VR is never going to work well on Linux is being foolish. As soon as Valve decides to allocate resources to Linux VR, the problem will be solved. And they have every incentive to do so, since they’re clearly all in on Linux gaming.
Sorry man, this is false, most games have anti-cheat that simply won't work with linux out of the box, you may get titles a year later (early depending on sales performance) and the ones you get rarely work perfectly out of the box.
The only place the "vast majority" statement may hold is if you count the endless amounts of simplistic/indie games, and do not consider the highly rated, highest selling titles.
The steam deck surely is helping, can't argue against that, as is SteamOS in general, but we are far far away from parity between the operating systems.
My guess is you are thinking more of multiplayer gaming, where as they are thinking more about the singleplayer games.
Elden Ring, Spider-man, Horizon Zero Dawn, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Stray, etc all work great on Linux.
Single-player games don't typically need any sort of anti-cheat features, so usually work as expected easily.
Multiplayer games are a whole other issue though, and most of those (imo) do NOT work well on Linux at the moment.
And as for the games you listed I would not say they work great on linux, they require tweaking, adjustments, driver updates, switching to experimental builds, etc..
I am not saying gaming isn't possible on linux, I'm saying it isn't as easy, and the results are not on par out of the box with windows. And the things you have to do getting it working are going to typically be provided by game developer support, but by community members figuring it out, and then that having to trickle out to forums and the like.
ProtonDB would typically agree, you can look at the games you listed and see that many of them require specific adjustments to get decent frame rates, avoiding lag spikes, etc...
Now, given the option of having a gaming partition that runs windows and is only used for gaming, or trying to force the games to work on linux. What do you think the majority of gamers would rather even those who are privacy minded.
I'm hoping in the next 5 years are so that this will change, and that windows looses its grip on this market, but currently I don't see many people switching their platforms over what windows is doing.
This is false. Most games do not have anti-cheat systems because most games are not multiplayer games.
The trash that is the multi-player games add ons what has ruined tons of games and no just because of compatibility.
I believe so. I couldn't find statistics but going by the new releases on Steam and seeing the pre-existing releases, most games on Steam are single player games.
Like even now, you can check the games released in 2022 and see how many of them are multiplayer.
It is far easier to limit your ad experience, and have a dedicated windows gaming machine than it is to switch to linux for gaming.
https://www.protondb.com/explore
Of course, you'd know all this if you've ever tried to play on Linux yourself. You know what they say about people who live in glass houses.
And something working and something being supported are vastly different.
And this may come to a shock to you but many people who want to play games don't want to tweak setting to make that work on a unsupported operating system.
This isn't a case for can you do it, this is based around the vast majority of games work fine on Linux, I don't think the average gamer would include making game specific tweaks as fine.
By contrast, XP was very customizable. I used to like BBLean.
I'm sorry to hear that
NVidia and AMD usually design their GPUs together with Microsoft, OpenGL and Vulkan then play catchup with extension spaghetti until some subset of it gets available as standard feature.
https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php
https://opengl.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php
At least with Vulkan they learned why proprietary APIs have profiles.
Didn't know Vulkan had them too. TIL.
https://www.protondb.com/explore
This is a list of games (by default sorted by popularity) and their compatibility with Linux. Some games work great, but there are major games like PUBG and Destiny 2 that don't work at all. Some major games like Apex Legends require tweaking to work.
If you're a hardcore gamer, then you need Windows because the games need Windows.
Though this may slowly change over time since Valve put out the Steam Deck which runs Linux.
Most single player games work well, most multiplayer games don't.
Both are very valid ways to play games, but it can give different gamers very different experiences with what's supported.
You can be a hardcore gamer and not play any of those.
There are very different type of gamers out there, don't forget about us, people who play single players!