Hacker News Reader

Comment by primordialtruth | Hacker News Reader

the author's premise of 'its been working okay for me!' isn't sufficiently convincing. Linux is great for gaming... if you dual boot Windows for when it's not. i was fooled by the contemporary optimism and set my new rig up as Linux only, to discover that some games will just not work, or not work well, or be unable to play multiplayer, or require arcane hacks, or require specifically-versioned, bespoke compatibility layers...

we are getting there, and i look forward to a glorious future where we can kick the pile of dogshit that is Windows to the curb, but that day ain't today.

View on HN

Last time I tried to totally banish Windows (it's only on my gaming machine), Linux hated my ~3-year-old AMD card (as in: a known-that-whole-time but unfixed driver bug that reliably made X and Wayland randomly crash a couple times a day, and more often if you tried to game on it). Buy a new card and hope I don't overlook a similar problem in my research, or reinstall Windows. So I reinstalled Windows, having lost about a day of my time, over a week or so of trying to make it work, all for no benefit whatsoever.

I've been running GNU/Linux only, no Windows, since 2012, and while there are one or two games in my library that don't work, I have nothing to complain about. Dragon's Dogma just works, Fallout New Vegas only needed DX9, Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin just works, Neverwinter Nights 2, X3: Albion Prelude, Baldur's Gate EE, BG2EE, Starbound, Devil May Cry 3, Oni, Homeworld,... so many games either just work or require clicking 4 times in Protontricks.

GNU/Linux has come far since I first started, my Radeon HD7770 first needed the proprietary garbage driver to run, which was a pain; but ever since it got supported in AMDGPU it was smooth sailing. I have an R7 card now and it also just works under AMDGPU. Meanwhile my roommate running Windows 11 had a bunch of pictures in her 'My Pictures' directory, got a message from MS saying 'oh, your OneDrive is nearly full', and when I removed the files from her OD, the bastards had the gall to remove them from her PC. Like, she has a 1TB SSD, why would you try to sync files on it to a 5GB cloud storage? And then she naively said 'oh, maybe I should just pay to get more storage', and I flipped my lid.

So yeah, 'a couple of games don't really work' is not a very convincing argument compared to the anti-user hostility MS exhibits in my opinion. But then, I could be wrong.

> So yeah, 'a couple of games don't really work' is not a very convincing argument compared to the anti-user hostility MS exhibits in my opinion. But then, I could be wrong.

All it takes is one game for some people, see console exclusives.

I'm mildly curious what games you are hitting snags with? I am still a console user, but the Steam Deck has been amazing at how well it does.

For me, it was Nioh. It would crash when using certain abilities, and cutscenes would just not work. It looks like it's still an issue for some people: https://www.protondb.com/app/485510

I use Windows 10 LTSC now for my gaming PC.

Most of the games using anti cheat systems. It even affects Windows VMs with GPU passthrough.

The only games that I still need Windows for are racing sim games. Wheel support in other operating systems isn't very good / doesn't exist.

Fortnite won’t work due to Epic’s anti cheat.

Tarkov (though I don't play anymore).

This is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, as well. It's not even that the developer is hostile to it, they're just tied up trying to hold the rest of the game together with glue and toothpicks and haven't taken the time to figure to figure out how to get their (not terribly effective) Battleye plug-ins to work.

I was able to kick Windows, but because I chose a game with multiplayer and anti-cheat, it was still problematic. It's still not perfect because to avoid stuttering in wayland I have to launch gamescope in the TTY. The steam overlay also doesn't work.

Finding this out over the course of a few evenings though wouldn't have been possible without my extensive previous linux experience.

It's very very very quickly getting there and soon these things will be ironed out.

Let's not declare victory too soon and have tons of people angry they deleted their windows and now can't get linux to work for playing their multiplayer games with DRM/anti-cheat though.

It works well enough that Valve is selling a Linux console that's flying off the shelves.

> Linux is great for gaming... if you dual boot Windows for when it's not

Preach. Say it loud so the folks in the back can hear.

Eventually dual boot gets annoying as well. So most people just get two boxes linked via a kvm and run linux on the older box and windows on the new box. Or they give up gaming altogether.

I just gave up on the games that didn't work and ditched Windows. There are enough supported great games to last a lifetime, the few that don't aren't enough of a reason to deal with Windows.

That's okay, I can stop dualbooting once win10 is out of support and the hassle will be gone!

Though I've been refunding games that don't run on proton sometimes as well, because dual booting does indeed get annoying! Perhaps, if missing out on the Deck userbase isn't a motivator enough, we can add some more lost revenue to the motivators convincing devs to use cross-platform or ideally linux-native environments.

Or I'll just stop gaming. Parasite publishers have ruined most of the fun I get from video games the past decade or so, and their product certainly isn't good enough to convince me to go through 5+ ads every time I boot windows for the experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com