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Comment by hiddencost | Hacker News Reader

I only have a windows machine for gaming... Eyes on Valve as they March towards Linux being a first class gaming platform.

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I recently took my windows desktop apart and put the graphics card into my home server. Used PCIe pass through with proxmox to create a dedicated Linux VM that just hosts my steam library, and stream games to my steam deck which is plugged into my keyboard/monitor/mouse.

It works great! And I can use the deck as a normal PC for web browsing/slack/discord etc.

There’s nothing I need windows for anymore thankfully.

It's pretty dang close. The only games I've had problems with in recent years were non-steam. Once Overwatch died and everything I was playing was in Steam I found myself rebooting into windows a lot less often.

Getting your hardware working right is still the biggest problem. The games work great, occasionally audio/video driver issues necessitate some fiddling. (advantage to the Deck is that this goes away.)

I've been daily driving (and gaming on) Linux for 2+ years now.I still keep a Windows 10 install around to run games which I can't get to work in Linux, but those are fairly rare. I spend 95% of my gaming time in Linux and, the vast majority of that time it "just works" without any problems. I highly encourage you to try it out!

It is Windows gaming on top of Linux kernel.

Most importantly, it's away from most Windows userland, with cloud accounts, licenses, ads, and other unwanted stuff.

Running software written by game studios using Windows userland.

I don't see how that's relevant. The game studios can use whatever OS they want. It's not about "windows was never involved", it's about "I'm not subject to their BS"

It is being delusional, that is how relevant it happens to be.

Delusional about what?

The Windows API is just that: an API. An interface. Who cares whether it's implemented by Windows or Linux or whatever else?

Keep believing that, it did wonders for OS/2.

Make a point instead of pithy remarks.

I already did, you just aren't paying attention.

No, this is not how this works. You have to actually explain yourself here so that others can address your point. Nobody wants to imagine arguments from a half-sentence.

IDK, the original Doom was largely created on a NeXT computer, with everything different from x86 and DOS.

It was an explosive hit of DOS-based PC gaming market nevertheless.

The tooling was created on NeXTSTEP, the game engine was on MS-DOS, using Watcom C/C++ and 4GW DOS extender, not UNIX running on MS-DOS.

It's so far behind though. Linux still doesn't support VRR or HDR.

HDR is coming. The OLED steam deck supports it, for example.

I'm on Fedora 40 KDE, both VRR and HDR are supported.

I have had both freesync and gsync workingwith no fuss for literal years. First with a 1070 and then with a 6800xt. I have never owned an HDR monitor so I can't personally speak to how well that works, but apparently it works just fine on the steam deck.

Even if it didn't, the number of people for whom HDR support is a make or break feature is likely not very high. Non developers use linux daily with the steam deck. I set up my mom with my xps 15 with Ubuntu on it when her laptop mobo died. While she wasn't a huge fan of having to learn a new UI, she was able to use it without issue for facebook/email/netflix/taxes/online banking for a few months until a good deal on a replacement came up and I got my laptop back.

I don't think if you are objective you can call linux so far behind windows. They are on par, each has their own annoyances and strengths, but for the average person they are just web browsing machines anyway.

I switched to Linux earlier this year. I was a little worried about which games wouldn't work, and I didn't need to worry.

The Steam client works just fine, although I do have to "force compatibility" and choose Proton. So far the games have played fine, including big games like Cyberpunk 2077.

For non-Steam, I'm using the Heroic Game Launcher, and it works great. I'm not missing any games, and I certainly don't miss the Windows BS.

Yes. Gaming, app development / testing for Windows, Powerpoint use (cloud powerpoint was one of the most atrocious experiences ever when I tried it.) It's down to three use cases. Everything else happens on Linux.

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