Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark | Hacker News Reader

Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

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832 pointshaunter536 comments

I just made the switch. I had been developing on Windows for the last couple of years, mostly to get used to the ecosystem. I wanted to be able to write C and C++ like I do on Linux, without an IDE and with the native toolchain (i.e. no cygwin). On top of that, I play Overwatch every night.

Windows just seems to have zero focus on performance though. React based start menu with visible lag, file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them, mysterious memory leaks not reflected in task manager processes.

I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough. I can run Overwatch via Steam and pull comparable FPS to Windows (500 FPS on a 3090 with dips into the 400s). Memory usage is stable and at a very low baseline.

It is nice to come back to Linux, and with games I don't really have a need to run Windows anymore.

The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.

I’m not naive, I know a ton of huge enterprises still run huge fleets of windows “servers” but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

I curious how profitable it has been for Microsoft so far. Are they making billions and billions from these dark patterns? I feel like they'd have to be making a fortune for it to be worth throwing their brand in the gutter like they have been doing.

One would assume but I do wonder how much long term damage they are doing for short term gains with this drive?

I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it.

At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose through quality degradation rather than Linux to openly out wit. There is still a long way to go and MS could turn their boat around but they would have to stop chasing this data scrapping scheme of theirs to begin with. But how addicted are they to that cash flow? They are probably far more interested in keep share holders happy short term than customers long term and that is not a brilliant strategy if you want to have a life time of decades.

The issues people cite all primarily affect consumer desktops. I don't think they see decades of lifetime there; it's a dying market, so they milk it.

I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The development of their competition is ad supported, community supported, or built into the price of hardware.

Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.

I would be MORE than happy to pay for an un-enshittified version of Windows. They won't take my money.

None of their products have a decent moat left, and all are heavily competed. Focusing on making azure competitive while accepting it is a commodity industry with commodity margins is how they stick around. But they will be a value stock, not a growth stock. That is ok, as long as you know that is what you are.

I think a lot of power users would prefer to pay somewhere between $50-$100 for a Windows license if it meant the enshittifcation wasn't included

> I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0.

The price of the windows license has been included in the price of PCs for literally decades now. Every computer you buy with windows preinstalled nets Microsoft a couple dozen dollars.

Everything I’ve seen suggests that Microsoft has entered the metaphorical private equity phase of investment in Windows. They’ve already given up any expectation of it being a viable competitor long-term and are purely focused on milking as much short-term revenue from the product as possible before it dies.

I’m sure windows will continue to exist and maybe be relevant for at least a decade. But it will be in zombie/revenue-extraction mode from here on.

My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel.

I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.

I jumped ship when WSL came to be. I was more a Cygwin user, all the features of linux but done differently. Been using FreeBSD for years now.

> "My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel."

There's no need because the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™ already happened and it's called WSL2. Meanwhile, the opposite has also already actually happened: SteamOS + Proton is a distro whose main purpose is to be a launcher for Windows apps on a Linux kernel.

Jokes aside, this chest-thumping is incredibly ironic for those of us who lived through the 1990s-2000s. First it was, "FOSS will eliminate all proprietary software and M$ (sic) will be crushed and Bill Gates will go to the poorhouse. Hooray!" Later, it became "Well, we haven't killed proprietary software but at least Linux / LAMP and Firefox are succeeding at taking down Windows and Internet Explorer. Hooray!" Now it's "Maybe Microsoft will consider switching its kernel to Windows. Probably. Someday. Hooray?" What's the backpedaling of the 2030s going to be?

Linux has won on phones (Android) and on the server side. I don't think Windows Server is seriously used for anything but Exchange/AD these days, outside of hosting specialized or legacy apps.

Windows also comprehensively lost the "exclusivity" moat. Most of popular apps are now cross-platform, because they need to run on Android/iOS/macOS. So desktop Linux is often an easy addition: Slack, Discord, all the messengers, Zoom, various IDEs, etc.

So Linux indeed won to a large extent. Just not in the way people expected it.

Even if you consider running on tightly locked down devices to support a monopoly a win, the adoption of the Linux kernel for Android has the same basis as it does for server adoption: people love getting the hard work of others for free. It's basically buying market share. I mean, if Microsoft also started giving away Windows for free and took a bunch of market share away, would you consider that a legitimate win for them?

Windows is still very present in the Enterprise, for many more reasons than AD/Exchange.

The Linux kernel won on phones, there is hardly any GNU/Linux on a Java based userspace.

And everyone that tries to force GNU/Linux via NDK, discovers that not everything Linux is supported.

This 100%. These threads are the same shit I was reading on Slashdot in 1999

There was also the whole "web apps are coming and they run everywhere" thing. Which actually did work out exactly as people expected it to, although it took longer than most predicted - but your average casual PC user spends most of their time in the browser these days.

However, while those web apps might run on Linux (or not, if it uses DRM like all those streaming providers), they increasingly only run in Chrome.

I don't see that making much sense, honestly. Windows kernel is super solid and well architectured. There are thousands of drivers for every peripheral on the Earth. And I don't believe that Microsoft spends that much on kernel development to be incentivised to cut it.

If anything, they invested into the opposite: possibility to run Linux binaries on top of Windows kernel.

I disagree. I think the end of the “world revolves around Windows” era of Microsoft has been hugely beneficial to the OS. Microsoft is way less hostile to other platforms now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.

It seems like the Windows team has been freed to add features that they want rather than adding features that fit into a narrative.

WSL, pre-installing git, adding POSIX aliases to PowerShell, iPhone/Android integration, PowerShell/.net/VSCode/Edge on Mac/Linux, not making Office on Mac complete afterthought shit on purpose, etc.

I disagree that Microsoft benefits the end user. Their IoT which took over the Embedded version of Windows is completely bloated in 10 and higher. Version 7 allowed for only installing necessities where their successors force XBox and other built in forced features. Windows 11 IoT is also forcing the creation of a Microsoft account instead of allowing an local account. IoT / Embedded does not mean it is connect and often air gaped. They are also often used to host products and should not have a Microsoft account assigned.

Microsoft's standards for quality keep going down hill. Windows 11 does not even allow the moving of the task bar from the bottom of the screen. Microsoft is end user hostile just like Google.

Isn’t Windows IoT a pretty niche distribution? Surely it’s less than 1% of Windows users.

Niche distribution has nothing to do with quality of distribution. The user base are passive users versus active users like daily office and game users.

The quality has gone done hill. Windows Embedded / IoT is often used to run your ATMs or some form of industrial automation. Windows actually has a real-time OS (RTOS) mode for just this.

The company I work has planned to replace Windows with Linux for future products and even moving active products to support both Windows and Linux during the transition. Only products that will stay on Windows will be legacy that are near EOL.

Personally, I would never use Windows OS for future products and solutions in these environments. Nor would I use it for network / server based solutions.

> now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.

Funnily enough, opening their stack to Linux probably made it easier to sell licenses for everything except Windows, since now you don't have to commit to a potentially unfamiliar hosting environment. Even SQL Server runs on Linux now.

I think that's true for the consumer side, but I believe Micrsoft still sees value in truly owning a complete system software stack.

Azure is still running on Hyper-V afaik for instance.

It does, https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...

I think their earnings are detailed here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q3...

IIRC Windows is considered “more personal computing.” It looks like that also includes:

> Search and news advertising, comprising Bing (including Copilot), Microsoft News, Microsoft Edge, and third-party affiliates

So, maybe that’s where they get their enshittification revenue.

But yeah, the Azure company should be worried about associating with this unfortunate legacy Windows thing.

Perhaps the aims of these dark patterns were not to benefit Microsoft overall, but perhaps an individual or a team? For example, produce good numbers for particular KPIs at the expense of unmeasured or unmeasurable aspects.

Goodness the file save dialog(s) on Windows - it makes it so hard to save a file into my personal space. It's unintuitive and you need to click through, I think a couple of dialog boxes before you get to 'Your Documents'.

And then you still have to wonder if “My Documents” is actually “My Office 364 One Drive Copilot Pro” or something

And people complained that GTK file picker didn't have thumbnails.

Two things can be bad! But the GTK file picker has improved and now has thumbnails, while you can't really trust MS not to continue to damage its file picker

In what application is it like this? I don’t find this true at all. It’s a completely customizable sidebar.

Office has a particularly annoying dark pattern when saving a file. It hides the regular save dialog behind a tiny button in a confusing UI embedded in the main window that is designed to misdirect the user into saving files on OneDrive.

Many other programs do still open the standard file dialog directly, but even there, the local drive amd directory hierarchy is hidden behind a folded "This Computer" node in the tree view that is itself below the fold most of the time.

Yeah, this is the only Microsoft application I am aware of that does this, and I actually think that most Office users want to save to OneDrive and that it makes sense in this context.

The median Office user is using it at work and your employer doesn’t want you saving documents in places you will lose them.

Ditto for universities and schools that provide 365.

I also stuggled with nvidia drivers on Linux until I discovered dkms.

My favorite has to be the Windows 8 era UI disaster.

How do most people log into a server? With a high-res physical touchscreen, or remote desktop?

So let's make a whole bunch of functionality impossible to access, because you have to bump up against a non-existent edge of a windowed remote screen, and literally make the UI not fit into common server screen resolutions at the time. I don't remember if 1024x768 was the minimum resolution that worked, or the maximum resolution that still didn't work. But it was an absolute comedy case.

I want to say that with only the basic VGA display drivers installed, screen resolution was too small to even get to the settings to fix it, but it's been a while and I can't find the info to prove it.

Windows struck the iceberg back in 8. It took until 11 for people to finally start to abandon ship in numbers.

I wonder if it was losing Jim Allchin that did it. He retired after Vista and I'd say he was in charge of Windows during its golden age. 7 was basically Vista SP3, and then things took a different direction.

But, to every coin there are two sides:

"I consider this cross-platform idea a disease within Microsoft. We are determined to put a gun to our head and pull the trigger."

While I agree that Microsoft has not been the greatest at delivering customer-friendly stuff, and has built in a lot of revenue streams to their (mostly not-paying) users like Bing and cloud upsells, I think that your take is overly cynical to the software.

Windows 11 has some really legitimate improvements that make it a really solid OS.

It’s not surprising that Microsoft isn’t focusing on Windows as a server OS as they don’t expect anyone to deploy it in a new environment. They know it has already lost to Linux and that’s why .NET Core is on Linux and Mac, why WSL exists, etc. Azure is how Microsoft makes revenue from servers, Windows Server is a legacy product.

The whole “server OS has the weather app installed” thing is pretty irrelevant since enterprises have their own customized image building processes and don’t ever run the default payload. It’s really not worth Microsoft’s time to customize the server version knowing that their enterprise customers already have.

Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things. They’ve delivered a whole lot of really nice and generally innovative features to those spaces. Windows has really nice gaming features, smartphone integrations including with iPhones, even doing some long-overdue work on small details like notepad and the command line.

I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud or done anything like that.

> I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud

Have you tried performing a fresh Home install recently without command line hacks? It's now impossible for a normal person to set up Windows without creating a MS account, forcing them to dip a toe into their cloud service connectivity and facilitate taking the next step towards paying them. They don't "force" you, but they sure will nag you incessantly about it, plopping that shit in Explorer, the Start Menu, tossing One Drive in the menubar at startup, shoving it in your face on login after a big update, etc. It's a pathetic cash grab everywhere you look.

A lot of this isn't very relevant to my personal use case and/or has not been my experience.

- I have had my Microsoft account connected since early in the Windows 10 days so that I can use my Xbox library. For my personal use case it doesn't really bother me that I have to login. Sure, most competing commercial OSes don't straight up force you to login, but as an example I never really used my Mac laptop without the Apple ID logged in because it has some pretty clear benefits and essentially no discernible downsides. It has some downsides that mostly boil down to what-if scenarios and thought experiments. To me, Microsoft forcing you to login with an account is not a big deal in the context of commercial paid software with a paid license. I can certainly understand why it might be a big deal in a different context. I can certainly see why my own Linux laptop is more appealing to not have this requirement. However, I specifically use Windows for a lot of commercial stuff - Steam, Xbox, etc. Being logged in was going to happen anyway, at least for me.

- As far as being nagged to pay, use Edge/Bing, or buy cloud stuff from Microsoft, all of that has been extremely easy to dismiss permanently. I have not needed to use any power user tools or scripts.

- It's an outdated notion that OneDrive is tossed in the menu bar forever. In Windows 11, OneDrive can be uninstalled entirely like a standard app. When I open my Start Menu and search for "OneDrive," nothing comes up besides an obscure tangentially-related system setting. It's literally not there.

- Sure, various new things have been presented to me along with new updates, like Copilot and the like, but I have been forced into none of it. When I visit Settings > Apps > AI Components, nothing is installed. When I type "Copilot" into the Start Menu, nothing comes up besids Windows Store search suggestions (apps I have not installed) and a keyboard key customization setting. Copilot is literally not there.

- I think there’s actually a good argument that upsells like OneDrive/Copilot (again, in my experience easy to dismiss once a year and uninstall permanently) that solve complicated problems for the median user (secure backups, document storage, AI assistant) is a decently tasteful way to fund a commercial operating system. All of that stuff is optional, and I can just say no, while paying for annual point releases (e.g. Mac OS X) kinda sucked.

It was interesting to read your comment and find myself disagreeing with every single point you made. I'm not invested enough to argue about anything of it, it's really just a meta observation that stood out to me: Obviously it's still possible to have substantially different points of view on even the most basic aspects. I guess that's a good thing, at least it feels kinda reassuring to me. We could both be right, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

> Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things.

Sure, Microsoft seems to have some great developers behind Windows and those developers are improving the underlying operating system. The trouble is that Microsoft is also using Windows to push their other products. Coming from a Linux environment, I find that pushiness unbearably crass.

On top of that, Windows' main strength has always been application support. I don't even know if that is relevant anymore with commercial developers shifting to subscription models (for native applications) and web based applications (for everything else). The latter makes Windows nearly irrelevant. The former makes open source more desirable to at least some people.

I've also noticed that things appear to flipping when comparing Linux to Windows. I can take a distribution that is intended for desktops, install it, and expect almost everything to work out of the box. It doesn't seem to matter whether it is printer or video drivers or pre-installed applications. Meanwhile, I'm finding that I have to copy drivers to a USB drive and drop to the command line to get something as simple as a trackpad or touchscreen to work under Windows. Worse yet, I've had something similar happen with network adapters. Short of bypassing the OOBE, a Windows installation will not complete without a working network adapter and Internet connection. Similar tales can be told for applications: there is a never ending stream of barriers to climb to get software to install ("look, we care about privacy since we are asking you half a dozen questions about what you're willing to share," while ignoring dozens of other settings that affect your privacy) or prevent advertising from popping up. You don't deal with that nonsense under Linux.

I don't know what the future of Windows is. I don't much care, as long as I get to use the operating system I want to use in peace. That seems to be much more true today than it did 20 years ago.

> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows.

[1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.

I wonder how much of it is to collect data and sell ads compared to just getting people to start utilizing what is now Microsoft's core resource, which is cloud services.

For them, getting you using onedrive is a (huge) step towards getting you to pay them for more storage using onedrive, and to also allowing them to use their advantage as the OS provider to get you using features that both keep you from moving away from Windows and keep you from moving to dropbox or another cloud competitor that normal consumers commonly use. For example, onedrive desktop sync tied to your Microsoft login, so you can log into a new system and have it put your preferences and files in place.

Having more data to monetize people is useful, but I would bet that they value the the lock-in of integrated services far more, as that's where they can possibly grow (by offering more services once you're less likely to leave), and growth is king.

It's the same thing Google does (and Samsung also attempts to do with their custom apps and store) with Android, but at the desktop level. Apple is able to do it for both desktop and mobile.

> The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.

And backwards compatibility.

They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.

Yep! I can compile a program on Windows and expect it to work on any Windows OS from the past ~15 years that has the same CPU architecture. Linux? Each binary is more provincial. I want to try some of the tricks like MUSL though; haven't explored the space beyond default compiler options.

Ironically, you can run almost any vintage Windows or DOS software on any modern GNU/Linux OS too, using compatibility layers.

>backwards compatibility

They are getting worse at this. I bought a Surface Laptop Studio 2 two years ago. Windows Mail and Windows Calendar, two nice minimalist programs from Microsoft, were actively killed in this time. If you open them, it will redirect you to a new ad-laden Outlook app. If you somehow get a workaround going through the registry, they still fuck with it because the (incredibly simple) UI somehow has network dependencies.

I use MailSpring for email and no longer have a native calendar on my fairly expensive laptop from Microsoft. This is actually what drove me over the edge to switch to Linux for my workstation. Unclear exactly what I'll do for my next laptop but it won't be from MS.

That's not a lack of backwards compatibility, that's an app purposefully self-destructing itself!

What I'm talking about is, if your widget factory uses some app to calibrate all the widgets which was written by a contractor in 2005, it probably still works fine on Windows 11.

That detail is definitely true, I just think that in practice the frustration with behavior like this from MS will trickle down(/up/whatever direction). Like the benefit of Windows as a regular user or power user was also that after the pain of dealing with whatever shit MS decided, you could configure it more-or-less however you wanted and it would not change. It will be delayed in the corporate world but it will happen.

I used some software called Project 5 from Cakewalk back in 2006, as well as VST plugins. I can still install it and use it on Windows 11. Meanwhile, basic plugins from that time stopped working on Mac OS X Lion.

Just use Thunderbird Portable as email client.

Since M$ is doing away with simple free apps (such as Mail) and forcing users to move to cloud-based expensive apps, you can use FOSS (Free and Open Source) alternatives -- especially the Portable ones (e.g., apps from PortableApps.com) that don't need an install, they can run off a USB drive, and app+userdata can be easily backed up without fuss.

https://alternativeto.net/software/mail-calendar-people-and-...

I tried Thunderbird first, but unfortunately it was kinda heavy and was fairly unreliable, which kinda tracks with my experience before (at least on Windows). Mailspring works fine and is also open source.

Couldn't find a decent minimalist calendar program that integrated well with Windows. People say they like OneCalendar but I refuse to use the Windows Store, I even got WSL set up without it lol

Try Vivaldi. It's a "kitchen sink" browser in the same vein as Opera used to be back in its days of glory, so it comes with an email and calendar client that can be optionally turned off:

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-mail-calendar-feed-reader-a...

But you can also just use it as an email client and ignore the browser part.

The Vivaldi web browser tab groups are a killer feature. It's my main browser because of this.

Vivaldi's email client is kinda clunky as well and has no way to show just my "inbox" (mail without any labels) from Google as far as I can tell, just one big unread chunk. And the calendar seems to just be a column on the left of the browser.

Either way, MailSpring works fine for email, and I've recently discovered Fantastical for a straightforward calendar program.

But it's absurd that I have to do this at all. At a minimum, if I buy a laptop, Microsoft should not be able to actively break it without refunding me 100% of the purchase price.

My "favorite" part about the new Win11 email client is that it pulls your emails to their servers.

Windows has changed the kernel interface more often than Linux.

This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.

Glibc provides binary compatibility to newer versions too.

Shims exist in both, “windows compatibility layer” for example, but pulseaudio can emulate ALSA- and pipewire can emulate pulseaudio and ALSA.

It’s actually a quagmire, but I would contend that either has solid story for backwards compatibility depending on the exact lens you’re looking at. Microsoft is worse than Linux in many ways.

Microsoft sort of only wins in the closed-source, “run this arbitrary binary” race - if you totally ignore the w10/11 UWP migration that killed a lot of win32 applications, but drivers for older hardware are much more long lived under linux.

What win32 apps were killed by UWP migration? When UWP was added win32 wasn't removed. Win32 applications still work.

> Microsoft sort of only wins in the closed-source, “run this arbitrary binary” race

That is actually a big win as some manufacturers only provide binary blob drivers and a lot of commercial software is distributed as binaries only.

Binary applications do not include drivers. I only mean applications, drivers do not transfer cleanly between versions of Windows.

To answer your other question though; Any GDI that is not accessible through DirectX- The Contacts API, Timers API, BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service), The inbound HTTP server API, NDF (Network Diagnostic Framework), SNMP.

AllocConsole and ReadConsole are gone, NamedPipes (something I used to use extensively) are gone. Toolbar and Statusbar APIs are gone and direct manipulation APIs for the Desktop.

I mean, I can keep going.

Surprising amount of drivers do transfer between versions of Windows, even if not officially supported. But yes, most break at some point.

I'm able to run binaries compiled over 20 years ago on the latest version of Windows most of the time. They do require enabling compatibility mode and sometimes installing legacy features.

I don't know, if APIs you mentioned are available in compatibility modes, but at least named pipes can still be enabled.

But Windows is going downhill lately, so backwards compatibility isn't what it used to be. Improving backwards compatibility for running old binaries would make Linux adoption easier. I hope that Linux PCs market share keeps improving to cross the threshold where it becomes an economically viable platform for most of commercial software.

>AllocConsole and ReadConsole are gone

...sorry, what? I use these intensively and they are still available to use.

You are describing limitations on sandboxed UWP apps, but Windows still supports regular Win32 just fine, and everything that you describe is available there.

I still run 30 year old games on Windows and write new software using WPF and WinForms even, and it all "just works", much more so than similar attempts at software archeology on Linux.

It's really too bad that Microsoft is hell bent on shoving ads, AI, and dark patterns everywhere in what could otherwise be a decent boring "it just works" OS.

> Windows has changed the kernel interface more often than Linux. This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.

Every Windows release I compile code straight from a Windows programming book from the 90’s. The only changes I made last time was a few include statements and one define.

Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support. While Linux will probably run on most hardware. It doesn't run well. Like you may just immediately give up half or more of your laptop battery life if you switch from Windows to Linux on a particular machine, even if you use a lightweight and up-to-date environment and use TLP and whatever else to tweak kernel settings. I used Linux on my personal laptops for many years. No amount of tweaking could make it perfectly smooth and have comparable battery life and cooling.

New apple-silicon Macbooks also get such good battery life and performance now that if you are switching from Windows to a Unix-y personal computer, is is increasingly hard to not say that you should go to Mac.

> Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support.

I once had to patch uvc to support a webcam that wouldn't work natively on Linux. It would advertise one version of the API but implement another. That didn't affect windows which probably already knew and had proper patched drivers for it.

We can all but wonder why, but my guess isn't that there is some sloppy dev there and windows is just making up for it. It all seems very deliberate to undermine Linux. And it's plausible given Microsoft's bottomless pockets.

So it wouldn't surprise me that these companies are actively hindering Linux compatibility. So much for a free market with open competition.

I believe that Linux is just a low-priority target. There are so few users on Linux that it's not worth investing in Linux support unless you specifically target Linux crowds.

Makes sense

If you start thinking about a conspiracy, the first thing you should do is ask yourself how much effort it would take to keep it under the lid without anyone leaking.

As the other commenter said, way more likely that Linux is just a low priority for hardware manufacturers.

> Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support

My experience has been that I can generally just install Linux on a machine and pretty much everything will just work straight away, but with Windows, I have to go and find the relevant Windows drivers to get things like iSCSI working.

When did you install your last Windows? Like 20 years ago?

"I had to patch drivers to get the dot-matrix printer working, and it didn't play nice with the PS/2 used by my mouse (the big one that goes on the nice mousepad)"

I recall lots of reports of printers and scanners becoming unsupported during one of the Windows version upgrades (possibly the Windows 7 upgrade?).

Likely Vista, that's the last time they did a lot of breaking changes around drivers.

> And backwards compatibility.

I have plenty of printers that have stopped working on Windows over the years, my current Brother laser doesn't have drivers that Windows will allow to be installed anymore. Its fine with Linux, so I just print share it as a generic so the Windows clients can connect.

I don't think Windows Server has ads by default in the menu (don't remember for the weather though), the default are pretty sensible there since it's a minority OS that has to compete while desktop Windows is a monopoly free to inflict whatever it wants onto users without having to fear any kind of consequence.

Using Windows as a server feels like using your lounge room as a commercial kitchen. I can never shake the feeling that this isn't a serious place to do business.

I have this impression from years of using both Windows and linux servers in prod.

Perfectly put.

> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

Server and LTSC SKUs don’t do that :)

I just installed windows on a new laptop and somehow my user directory was setup in a OneDrive subfolder and backed up to their cloud. Between that, Microsoft basically demanding I use their online account to log in, Windows harassing me to finish setting up my computer every time I turn it on because they want me to change my default browser and buy subscriptions, and the random forced update restarts I can't seem to fully disable, I've had it. So I finally made the full time switch to kubuntu. Also, it's a brand new $1k laptop with 16gb of RAM and Windows uses half of it. I'm closing apps to save the RAM. Kubuntu uses 2gb.

one thing to remember is that window servers are deployed with GPO pre-configured, so you don’t usually see these unless admins leave them at their defaults. plus enterprise/education can turn off tracking using the same mechanisms

Out of curiosity, why are such high fps numbers desirable? Maybe I don't understand how displays work, but how does having fps > refresh rate work? Aren't many of those frames just wasted?

I think it was just to show that the performance is comparable to Windows, implying that it also will be fine for games/settings where fps is in the range that does matter.

I run a 500hz monitor. Generally, you want your FPS to match your refresh rate.

Huh, I didn't know those existed now. I think the last time I was shopping for a monitor, 144Hz was the new hotness.

Things have come a long way since then!

Not OP but got quite a bit of experience with this playing competitive FPS for a decade. You're right that refresh rate sets the physical truth of it, e.g. 180 FPS on a 160 Hz monitor won't give you much advantage over 160 FPS if at all. However reaching full multiples of your refresh rate in FPS – 320 in this instance, 480, and so on – will, and not only in theory but you'll feel it subjectively too. I get ~500-600 FPS in counter-strike and I have my FPS capped to 480 to get the most of my current hardware (160 Hz). Getting a 240 Hz monitor would make it smoother. Upgrading the PC to get more multiples would also.

If you have a 60Hz display and the game is locked to 60fps, when you take an action it may take up to 16.67 milliseconds for that action to register. If the game is running at 500fps, it registers within 2 milliseconds, even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later. At extremely high levels of competition, this matters.

Also, there are 540Hz displays.

A game doesn't necessarily have to process input at the same rate as it displays frames, does it?

It doesn't and well programmed games won't be tied to fps that way. I'm not sure anything past 300 fps plausibly matters for overwatch even with the best monitor available.

That's correct, and the most competitive multiplayer games tend to have fixed tick rates on the server, but the higher FPS is still beneficial (again, theoretically for all but the highest level of competition) because your client side inputs are sampled more frequently and your rendered frames are at most a couple ms old.

I think you're missing the point. The game could be processing input and doing a state update at 1000Hz, while still rendering a mere 60fps. There doesn't have to be any correlation whatsoever between frame rate and input processing. Furthermore, this would actually have less latency because there won't be a pipeline of frame buffers being worked on.

Tying the input loop to the render loop is a totally arbitrary decision that the game industry is needlessly perpetuating.

No, I'm explaining how most games work in practice.

You're right a game could be made that works that way. I'm not aware of one, but I don't have exhaustive knowledge and it wouldn't surprise me if examples exist, but that was not the question.

I would not at all be surprised that there are examples out there, although I don't know of them. Tying the game state to the render loop is decision made very deep in the game engine, so you'd have to do extensive modifications to change any of the mainstream engines to do something else. Not worth the effort.

But a greenfield code shouldn't be perpetuating this mistake.

That's a super interesting discussion

On most modern engines there is already a fixed-step that runs at a fixed speed to make physics calculation deterministic, so this independence is possible.

However, while it is technically possible to run the state updates at a higher frequency, this isn't done in practice because the rendering part wouldn't be able to consume that extra precision anyway.

That's mainly because the game state kinda needs to remain locked while: 1) Rendering a frame to avoid visual artifacts (eg: the character and its weapon are rendered at different places because the weapon started rendering after a state change), or even crashes (due to reading partially modified data); 2) while fixed step physics updates are being applied and 3) if there's any kind of work in different threads (common in high FPS games).

You could technically copy the game-state functional-style when it needs to be used, but the benefits would be minimal: input/state changes are extremely fast compared to anything else. Doing this "too early" can even cause input lag. So the simple solution is just to do state change it at the beginning of the while loop, at the last possible moment before this data is processed.

Source: worked professionally with games in a past life and been in a lot of those discussions!

I can give an example. I'd heard that Super Meat Boy was hard, and it was, but it turned out, if you ran it at the 60hz it was designed for instead of 75hz, it was considerably easier. At 120hz it was unplayable.

You kind of understand how the game loop is tied to the refresh rate in games like this, though. Practicing "pixel perfect" jumps must be challenging if the engine updates aren't necessarily in sync with what goes on on screen. And in the really old days (when platformers were invented!) there was no real alternative to having the engine in sync with the screen.

In the model I am describing there would be whole game state updates on every tick cycle, completely decoupling the frame rate from the response latency and prediction steps.

Doing that will increase input latency, not decrease it.

There are many tick rates that happen at the same time in a game, but generally grabbing the latest input at the last possible moment before updating the camera position/rotation is the best way to reduce latency.

It doesn't matter if you're processing input at 1000hz if the rendered output is going to have 16ms of latency embedded in it. If you can render the game in 1ms then the image generated has 1ms of latency embedded in to it.

In a magical ideal world if you know how long a frame is going to take to render, you could schedule it to execute at a specific time to minimise input latency, but it introduces a lot of other problems like both being very vulnerable to jitter and also software scheduling is jittery.

Game has to process the input, but it also has to update the "world" (which might also involve separate processing like physics) and then also render it both visually and audio. With network and server updates in-between things get even more complex. Input to screen lag and latency is a hardcore topic. I've been diving into that on and off for the past few years. One thing that would be really sweet of hardware/OS/driver guys would be an info when the frame was displayed. There's no such thing yet available to my knowledge.

> If the game is running at 500fps, it registers within 2 milliseconds, even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later.

Okay I think I follow this, but I think I'd frame it a little differently. I guess it makes more sense to me if I think about your statement as "the frame I'm seeing is only 2ms old, instead of 16.67ms old". I'm still not seeing the action for 16.67ms since the last frame I saw, but I'm seeing a frame that was produced _much_ more recently than 16.67ms ago.

Thanks for the explanation, it helps!

This is mostly like high fidelity audio equipment, or extreme coffee preparation. Waste of time for most people.

I used to play CS:Go at a pretty high level (MGE - LE depending on free time), putting me in the top 10%. Same with Overwatch.

Most of the time you're not dying in a clutch both pulling the trigger situation. You missed, they didn't, is what usually happens.

I never bothered with any of that stuff, it doesn't make a meaningful difference unless you're a top 1%.

But there's a huge number of people who play these games who THINK it does. The reason they're losing isn't because of 2ms command registrations, it's because they made a mistake and want to blame something else.

I'm sure that's true, but low latency can just plain feel good. I don't play FPSses at all, and I can totally understand how low latency helps the feeling of being in control. Chasing high refresh rates and low latency seems a lot more reasonable to me than chasing high resolution.

> even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later

Note that this is only the case if you have vsync enabled. Without vsync you will see the action (or some reaction anyway) +2ms later instead of +16.67ms, just not the full frame. This will manifest as screen tearing though if the screen changes are big - though it is up to personal preference if it bothers you or not.

Personally i always disable vsync even my high refresh rate monitor as i like having the fastest feedback possible (i do not even run a desktop compositor because of that) and i do not mind screen tearing (though tearing is much less visible with a high refresh monitor than a 60Hz one).

Yeah it felt like I got caught in an early 2000s timewarp for a second. It was nice.

To certain extent for online games it can be advantage (atleast it feels like it to me). AFAIK The server updates state between players at some (tick) rate when you have FPS above tick rate then the game interpolates between the states. The issue is that frames and networking might not be constantly synced so you are juggling between fps, screen refresh rate, ping and tick rate. In other words more frames you have higher the chance you will "get lucky" with latency of the game.

You want your minimum FPS to be your refresh rate. You won't notice when you're over it, but you likely will if you go below it.

In Counter-Strike, smoke grenades used to (and still do, to an extent) dip your FPS into a slideshow. You want to ensure your opponent can't exploit these things.

osu (music beat-clicking game) has a built-in screen frequency a/b test, and despite running on a 60hz screen I can reliably pass that test up to 240hz. It's not just having 60 frames ready per second, it's what's in those frames.

I don't understand how this works, I guess? If your screen is 60Hz, you're drawing four frames for every one that ends up getting displayed. You won't even see the other three, right? If you can't see the frames, what difference does what's in them make?

[E] Answered my own question elsewhere: the difference is the "freshness" of the frame. Higher frame rates mean the frame you do end up seeing was produced more recently than the last frame you actually saw

Also, your input gets registered faster (happens earlier) in the game world.

I don't think I understand this part.

Why does the rate at which frames are rendered (by the GPU?) relate to the speed at which input is registered?

[E] Ah, I think another comment [1] up in a different branch of this thread answered this for me

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794453

Tying the input and simulation rates to the screen refresh rate is an old "best practice" that is still used in some games. In fact, a long time ago it was even an actual good practice.

> Out of curiosity, why are such high fps numbers desirable? Maybe I don't understand how displays work, but how does having fps > refresh rate work? Aren't many of those frames just wasted?

The reason is triple buffering:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multiple_bufferin...

I just quote the central relevant sentences of this section:

"For frames that are completed much faster than interval between refreshes, it is possible to replace a back buffers' frames with newer iterations multiple times before copying. This means frames may be written to the back buffer that are never used at all before being overwritten by successive frames."

If you're not using V-sync, if a new frame is rendered while the previous one wasn't fully displayed yet, it gets swapped to the fresher one half-way through. This causes ugly screen tearing, but makes the game more responsive. You won't see the whole screen update at once, but like 1/5th of it will react instantly.

I used to do that until I switched to Wayland which forces vsync. It felt so unresponsive that I bought a 165hz display as a solution to that.

I run mint as well and really love it's esthetic. I prefer AMD GPUs on Linux and they have always "just worked".

I know how to use the terminal to enforce deep sleep on laptops, but thats about all I do setup wise.

Uh, AMD drivers have most assuredly not always not just worked. They do now, and they have for something like 10 years, but before that they were a steaming pile of locked in garbage.

not to split hairs, but I think the parent is justified in saying they “always worked” if they’ve been this good for a decade.

If I was 10 years younger than I am today, my perspective would have been that it “always worked” and at some point we have to acknowledge that there has been good work done and things are quite stable in the modern day. 10y is not a small amount of time to prove it out.

An aside based on what you have mentioned. What the heck happened to Windows file manager? I mean it used to be that Windows was rock solid while Linux variants had various parsing performance/stability issues. Now it feels like it is the complete opposite.

In Win 11 I am constantly finding the whole explorer locking up just copying files via USB because of reasons unknown. Where as on my Linux machines, I have absolute faith that it will just handle it or at the very least not just stop spinning in the background in zombie land, not dead enough to die but not alive enough to do anything. Windows is in a very unfortunate place right now, I do hope they will wake up and try to get things back on the road but I am very doubtful considering the leader ship they have nowadays.

if you haven't enabled the checkbox starting explorer in a new process which isn't super easy to find, it will basically be one process running most of the windows ui, which means when they write shoddy code, the ui tends to hang

They rewrote Explorer for Windows 11, in the process fucking it up completely.

There is a regkey to go back to the Windows 10 explorer, but you'd have to google that.

I never understood why file search is SOOO bad on windows (mac too). Its so damn slow and even feature wise I never figured out why it was so difficult to just search for files in this directory

I still don't understand how search just can't file files with the string I write in the search bar on the name. Or menu items either.

Some file browsers on Linux have this problem too, and the KDE launcher had it for years (it's fixed now).

For a look into a parallel universe of what could be, check out Everything[0]. Super fast search that should be embarrassing for Microsoft.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(software)

It's a must have for me on Windows. Now that I'm on Linux, Fsearch is a pretty good replacement.

It is quite honestly faster to start WSL then use grep or find.

You don't need wsl, just install rigrep or the powershell equivalent of find

And there really is no excuse, take a look at this indie dev blowing the default explorer out of the water: https://filepilot.tech

"Everything" is another that puts the default search to shame. I've also seen people who just have a script that pumps all new files into a txt file every so often and runs bruteforce ripgrep on it, which gives instant interactive results. It's really hard to imagine coming up with a search routine that is as slow and unreliable as what ships with mainstream OS file managers.

The “Everything” application is what you want:

https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

One of the most powerful and unique tools for windows ever.

The only thing I miss being on OSX, I hate its search.

It regressed compared to Windows 10 too - I have a folder with photos, I normally have them sorted by date taken. On windows 10 I would open the folder and they were always sorted correctly the moment I opened the folder. Maybe there was a point in time at the start there the system had to sort them for the first time but ever since they were always shown correctly the second I opened the folder. On windows 11? Every single time it opens unsorted, the photos are in some random god knows what order, and literally 10 seconds(!!!!) later they suddenly move themselves to the correct position. Every single time. That's with maybe 200 photos? On a machine with 16 cores and 64GB of ram. People coding on 16kHz chips decades ago could do this faster than whatever microsoft is doing.

it's also worth mentioning that windows 10 search was a huge regression from 7 and xp.

File search is also the fastest thing among all the 3 OS it's not even funny. Just use the Everything search app and a good file manager that can integrate Everything.

I switched a couple months ago. This is my third time trying to switch to desktop Linux, and things are very different this time.

I installed CachyOS and all of my hardware just worked, including NVIDIA/Wayland. No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning, and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net.

The Diablo 4 issue is present on Windows as well, and ironically, there isn't a fix on Windows for those affected. On Linux, a DXVK config change solves the bug.

Not really missing anything.

> No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning

Windows really needs to catch up with this. Multiple monitors have been a thing in Linux pretty much since the beginning of X.

Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793218

Don't hold your breath... This is configurable in Linux (at least I recall Xfce and KDE having display position config built in for years).

> Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

I regularly move my work Win 11 Pro laptop between three different multi-monitor (hdmi) setups, and it works flawlessly. I don't recall any problems with Win10 over many years either.

What am I missing out on?

My last 2 laptops have really struggled with win10/11 multimonitor support. Explorer would often crash, taskbars would not populate, behaviors weren't consistent, taskbars would reset themselves, settings would change randomly after reboots, not including updates resetting all my settings and having no real way to disable updates cuz windows would re-enable them.

did i mention explorer would crash pretty often? like, half the time I plugged in a docking station it would crash explorer. That then reset all the settings. lol just a mess.

Pop OS! is a simple plug and play on any setup i've tried it on, over usb3 or hdmi/dpi. Works great.

Multi-monitor mostly works fine for me in Windows 11, but I do have consistent issues when dragging windows between displays with different dpi scaling. They have the same resolution but the dpi scaling on the laptop display doesn't match that on the two 27" displays next to it.

Adobe Acrobat in particular takes multiple seconds to drag a window from the laptop screen to one of the attached displays when a PDF is open. Now, this is on a 6 year old laptop due to be replaced, but it was fairly high spec when it was purchased (64 GB, RTX 2060, NVMe SSD). It really shouldn't be making me wait on 2d rendering of a document.

My non-corporate desktop has 3 screens, screen#2 is shared with a corporate laptop (via a KVM, but the issues happen without it as well).

If I switch that monitor to the other machine, Windows re-arranges ALL windows to appear on the new "primary" portrait-oriented screen#1, some maximised to fill the screen, some not. They stay there after the other screen is reconnected.

Possibly because the screen being switched is the "primary" screen? At least it's consistent behaviour between both Win10 AND Win11, which is nice.

Multimonitor support and bluetooth are the two biggest reasons I ditched windows a couple years ago.

I have no idea how multimon got so, so bad on windows.

Then bluetooth ...wtf? Again, how did they get so bad?

I don't do a ton of multi-monitor stuff with Windows these days, but I certainly have done a good bit of it. It worked OK on my desktop at home with three screens, and when I sometimes plug an extra monitor into my laptop at work it seems to put things back how they were last time.

But I don't recall a time when Bluetooth was "good" on Windows -- like, at all. I've spent somewhere in the realm of 20 years now dinking around with it. As far as I can tell, it has always been a miserable experience.

I do that all the time. So it seems to be something hardware-specific, not that it makes it less annoying.

> Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

I've never seen this work correctly. My work dock breaks monitor ordering on MacOS reliably and Gnome+Wayland frequently. I don't remember if it broke for Xorg. My home monitor setup breaks mouse behavior in borderless fullscreen and libreoffice scaling on KDE+Wayland.

Why can't I lock my computer and have Windows turn off my displayport monitor without having it turn itself on and off every few minutes until I log back in?

Why can't I turn off the power button on my monitor and then turn it back on to keep using it again without having to shut down my PC, turn off the PSU switch, press the power button to fully power it down, then bring everything back up? I just want my monitors off when I'm in bed...

> and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net

Funnily this is the same thing I tried to do just last month, Installed CachyOS after not having Linux on my desktop for a very long time, tried installing Battle.net and just ran into too many issues and haven't come back yet (to be honest I didn't try too many avenues to fix it).

If you don't mind me asking what was the tinkering you had to do to make this work? Thanks!

I added the battle.net installer as a non steam game in steam and it just worked. Proton is really good.

I was trying to do it through Lutris, I'll give a non-steam game in Steam a shot, thanks a lot!

It really is hard to overstate just how much progress there's been in the past few years. I first started using Linux in late 2012 (with Ubuntu 12.10 being the first version that actually came with my laptop's wifi firmware in the default installtion; when I first tried 12.04 I had to plug it into ethernet just to download it), and by that point, graphical stuff mostly worked without needing a ton of manual work, and it was past the era where I would have had to compile a custom kernel or something (although a few years later I did learn how to do that just for the fun of tinkering when I got a macbook with a wifi driver that wasn't released in a stable kernel for another few months), but when I started getting into gaming in the later part of the decade, I had to spend a decent bit of time learning about Wine, Crossover, Lutris, etc. Over the course of the next few years I started playing around with Proton in Steam, even for games that aren't released on Steam, and nowadays I don't even have Lutris or Crossover installed, and I can't remember the last time I tried to play a game that Proton couldn't run.

At this point, Valve has done enough to make Linux gaming viable that they might have permanently bought my goodwill. Right now I mostly play on my Steam Deck an equal mix of games that are and aren't from Steam (streamed from my desktop with Moonlight, which itself is a third-party app rather than from Steam), but even if they started trying to lock things down more, I'm not sure I'd be able to get mad at them. So much of the investment they've made into the ecosystem has been in the tooling itself that isn't exclusive to them, ostensibly for the purpose of entering the "handheld desktop" gaming market (not sure what exactly to call it, but playing the same PC games on handhelds is demonstrably different from a handheld console with a separate catalog), but they did it in a way that benefited a lot more than just that. I don't pretend they're a perfect company, because those don't exist, but as far as companies go, this might be the first time I actually identify as a fan of one.

> React based start menu with visible lag

That surprised me. But seems not true? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688

The Windhawk Start Menu Style[1] uses XAML to modify the Start Menu, and I doubt that they are translating XAML to React

[1]: https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler

I wouldn’t be so sure…

https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-xaml

Oh, interesting.

Clicking through to their source, it seems true enough despite their protests.

Its not entirely built with React Native, but React Native does seem to be responsible for at least one element of the start menu that appears initially when the menu is presented.

Does HDR work though?

If using a modern variant of Wayland and if the app supports it: yes. Both, especially the latter are pretty big buts.

Barely works on windows too, though

On Wayland+gnome/plasma I’ve had great luck with games, Firefox is almost there with some bugginess, and video playing apps that use mpv like plex work great. It’s definitely not perfect and you may dive into configuring per app flags to make them utilize hdr, but the easy stuff generally works

Does anybody have security concerns about running games with Proton/Wine? Games already have a massive attack surface and I can imagine there are some nasty bugs lurking in the compat layer that would enable RCEs not possible on Windows. This is kind of holding me back from making the jump.

There are. But there are many more such bugs in DirectX on Windows, and it’s a much bigger target. If a national intelligence organization wants to burn a Proton zero-day on my Steam Deck, cool!

You can trivially sandbox your Steam installation with pretty much zero performance overhead, if you install it through Flatpak. Using an app like Flatseal, you can then configure Steam to only have access to a designated drive with next to no further contact to your PC. You can individually disable access to networking, audio, D-Bus, USB devices, Bluetooth, shared memory and even the GPU itself if you're really freaked out. No command line needed.

That being said, I just run Steam natively on NixOS and have never seen any issues. The biggest RCEs I'm worried about are Ring 0 anticheat nuking my desktop like CloudStrike.

>Steam installation with pretty much zero performance overhead, if you install it through Flatpak.

In reality that isn't true. Flatpak steam runs like poo for a lot of people. Really, flatpak should be avoided if there are other installation methods, in general.

Flatpak works fine for me on Arch. I use it mainly to avoid needing 32bit libs installed. Once steam goes 64 I’ll go native.

> file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them

It's crazy, open a directory full of .mp4s and sometimes the list briefly appears but then it goes completely blank, just to start listing them again one-by-one taking about one second per entry, while being unresponsive to input.

I have this exact same problem with OGG files. Either their parser has some insane bugs or they are starting an isolation VM per file to run the parse. Either way, unusable.

CreateProcessA() on Windows is very slow. A significant portion of the perceived speedup for development tasks is that fork() takes on the order of microseconds, but creating a Windows process takes ~50ms, sometimes several times that if DEP is enabled. This is VERY painful if you try to use fork-based multiprocessing programs directly.

I recently converted a large SVN repository to Git using git-svn.

Started on Windows. After five days it failed for some reason so I had to rerun it (forgot an author or along those lines, trivial fix). Meanwhile I looked into why it was so slow, and saw git-svn spun up perl commands like crazy.

Decided to spin up a Linux VM. After fixing the trivial issue it completed in literally a couple of hours.

Some people use WSL as an epicycle to fix this.

Interesting, I wonder why DEP would degrade process creation performance. My understanding is it's just a flag in page table entries to forbid execution, I am not sure how this could impact performance so much (except that data and code now have to be mapped separately).

I did the same, I had jumped into POP OS instead, which is also Ubuntu based, then a year back I got into EndeavourOS an Arch based distro, and have not looked back since. I use it on everything I can put Linux on.

Plus one for an Arch-based system, way better than Ubuntu/Debian for gaming. All these Nvidia driver issues totally disappeared when I switched.

Rolling release is a hell of a lot better in this context. SteamOS is Arch, IIRC.

For me it wasnt driver issues, moreso “you need glibc to be a version that Debian / Ubuntu cant upgrade without it being potentially problematic” just to run 3D printer slicer software. I said screw this give me bleeding edge and give it to me now. I had been itching to try something slightly more bleeding edge, Fedora was on my mind but it did not work out as I wanted it to.

> I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough.

Mint is seriously going to sabotage the momentum Linux is having right now.

You might like XFCE which to me is basically windows XP. It’s available in Debian install or as Xubuntu.

I used XFCE for years and liked it but it was so buggy and unmaintained. I recently switched to KDE and I am very satisfied with it.

Interesting. I haven’t ran into bugs but I also haven’t tried KDE.

I had the panels crashing a lot, and the desktop switcher was always bugged with multiple screens.

me just realizing that React start menu thing I saw last week was not a joke… o.O

Can I transfer my Overwatch battlenet account to steam? I really want to jump ship too.

How is Proton with nVidia drivers? I have a 3080.

Those are the last 2 issues keeping my home desktop on windows-land

You can also add external games to launch via steam too, so you might be able to do it without transferring.

> Can I transfer my Overwatch battlenet account to steam? I really want to jump ship too.

Seems like you can just keep using the Battle.net account on GNU/Linux. You just add the Battle.net installer as a "non-steam game" (bottom left of the games list). Then, you start it, add your account, install the game and it "just works". I used it on the steam deck to play D4 beta and D2R on my CachyOS desktop.

> How is Proton with nVidia drivers? I have a 3080.

My battle-hardened 1060GTX served me for years. I recently upgraded my whole rig from Debian + Intel + Nvidia to full AMD and the RX9070XT works very well, with the caveat that I had to switch to a newer kernel on CachyOS to support it. That was 4 months ago and the situation now should be resolved, so you can prob use any old normie distro.

Thanks for the tips! I will try when I have some time.

Any chance of triggering anticheat on battlenet if I do this? Like does Blizzard has an official stance on it?

People oversell how much windows just works. It only does so because it comes pre installed. I regularly reinstall my wife's and it's always more of a pain in the ass than Linux.

I made the switch more than a year ago and it's been basically problem free.

Almost all modern games work flawlessly through proton and I get better compatibility for really old stuff through lutris than I ever did on windows (I used to have to run a win 3.1/95/98 vm to play certain older games, now I just use lutris/wine).

The only stuff that doesn't work is multiplayer games with unsupported anticheat - it's always a crapshoot when something new and multiplayer launches. My backup plan for those if I really want to play them is to just get them on PS5.

There's no game that I want to play badly enough to put up with DRM on consoles or rootkits (anti-chest) and DRM (windows) on my computer

The other day I tried Midtown madness, something that has become a bit of an issue to run on Windows. It took less than a minute to install and booted first time via Wine. It is amazing seeing just how well it works and feels almost like a native binary.

The majority of popular PvP shooters use anti-cheat which does not work on Proton, so "almost all modern games" seems like overselling it to me.

But the stuff that does work, works well. I play Helldivers 2 via Proton on Fedora, and i experience far fewer crashes and instances of weird behaviour than friends on Windows or Xbox.

ARC Raiders is currently all working perfectly for me. Such a blessing. I hope it stays this way.

This has been my experience as well.

I don't play a ton of modern games, but my wife and I played through the HD remakes of Myst and Riven, released in 2021 and 2024 respectively. I didn't even look at the Proton compatibility before buying the games because for single-player stuff then Proton has gotten so good that I almost never have to worry about it. I don't really play multiplayer games (outside of the original Doom or Minecraft with a friend or my wife, both of which have native Linux clients), so there hasn't ever been an issue for me.

My gaming box is a NixOS JovianOS thing, and I even get very good results using the official Microsoft adapter for Xbox One controllers. I really feel no desire to go back to Windows at this point.

>JovianOS

Zero meaningful search results?

https://github.com/Jovian-Experiments/Jovian-NixOS

When I was younger I also was like that.

As I got older, my interests in games decreased. That and also because I am too dumb to make wine work with games nowadays; it was easier in the 32bit era. :\

But the real problem is lack of time. There are so many things to do and so little time. Today's games are also not as interesting IMO. Most of them are just "who has the better 3D engine".

Games these days, just as before, are fantastic. Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Expedition 33, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring(Nightreign), etc. And I've not even listed quite a few of my favorites cause they're not popular enough for most people to have heard of them.

Weird to say you don't game these days but also make blanket statements about games these days :p

Outer Wilds… man, what an experience.

If I could choose a single game to experience again, it would be Outer Wilds. I played it with my partner, streaming it over Discord, and it was a truly amazing ride, start to finish. Loved the DLC as well.

Hearing the theme still gets me emotional and very sentimental.

I should really play the DLC!

BG3 runs natively on Linux (sorta, the proton Linux runtime) now! Not sure Larion can do wrong at this point.

> And I've not even listed quite a few of my favorites cause they're not popular enough for most people to have heard of them.

And you choose then to NOT give those games you love more exposure and share them with the rest of the world?!

I'll start: windows version of Uplink game works great in proton, and if you install uplinkos mod on it, it's a super fun Hollywood-style hacking game: https://www.moddb.com/mods/uplink-os

Uplink's not really a 'game these days', though, it's been around for a while. Better examples may be Digimon Story Time Stranger or Le Mans Ultimate.

Heh, sorry. Someone else asked for a list so I made a short one, figured I'll send it here as well :) They range in obscurity, but I'd not rate any of them as "mainstream".

In no particular order and in no way an exhaustive list:

Lies of P.

Baba Is You.

Ender Lilies/Magnolia.

Rain World.

Pillars of Eternity 1/2.

Return of the Obra Dinn.

What Remains of Edith Finch.

the "We Were Here" series.

1000xResist (played this one just a month ago, what a game).

Katana Zero.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

Sayonara Wild hearts.

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark.

AER Memories of Old.

Thanks for sharing - I love bloodstained, such a good game!

Please tell me your more obscure favourites :)

Hmmmm, sure. I'm not sure if I'd label them "obscure", they've all got a couple 1000 reviews on Steam. But they're certainly not mainstream to the level of my previously listed games(, with Disco Elysium not really being mainstream either tbh, but people know of it to some degree).

In no particular order and in no way an exhaustive list:

Lies of P.

Baba Is You.

Ender Lilies/Magnolia.

Rain World.

Pillars of Eternity 1/2.

Return of the Obra Dinn.

What Remains of Edith Finch.

the "We Were Here" series.

1000xResist (played this one just a month ago, what a game).

Katana Zero.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

Sayonara Wild hearts.

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark.

AER Memories of Old.

If you liked Obra Dinn you should try out 'The Roottrees are Dead'. Very similar 'fill in the gaps via investigation' core gameplay loop, but I found it more engaging/less repetitive.

Oh I've got my sights on it alright. Looks really interesting but just not been in the mood for such a game as of late :)

For 90+ percent of Windows-only games I wanna play, the process for getting them to work on Linux is the following:

1. Hit the download button in Steam

2. Wait for it to download

3. Hit the play button

Granted, my taste in games doesn't include things like generic AAA first person military shooters, which are the ones which tend to be the most difficult to get to work due to stuff like anti cheat. But it sounds like your taste doesn't include those either,

and for me, the one (rather niche, I might add) game that didn't "just work" was working just fine after trying a different Proton version - which is literally as simple as opening the "Properties" page and using a drop-down menu.

There are a lot of indie or other types of games that escape this. I mostly play games with local multiplayer, so I'm hanging out with people and playing at the same time. Recently got into Brotato, which has no 3d engine at all lol

The unfortunate reality is that, depending on your personal preferences, "most modern games" require such a ring 0 anti-cheat. Any game that has a matchmaking mode with a competitive option requires a rootkit.

As an aside, I recently found Riot Games' Vanguard installed on my Linux ESP partition... after having installed the game on my windows partition. It rooted every OS it could find mounted. Incredible.

Modern games are not just shooting stuff in competitive mode.

There exist a gazillion of other games too, without anti-cheat.

GP said "depending on your personal preferences" and clearly didn't imply all "modern games" are competitive shooters.

Then depending on your personal preferences, all modern games are farming simulators.

How did you find out that you had a rootkit?

I am having 20 fps more in Linux with 4k screen when compared to 2k in Windows. Didn’t believe my old GPU could get better over time.

I find this hard to believe. Generally speaking, games run slightly slower on Linux (that's on Arch with latest Nvidia drivers). Usually, the difference isn't really noticeable, and several rigorous benchmark show that even though average FPS is single digits lower, the standard deviation is also smaller. This may be due to Nvidia not performing as well on Linux, the worst impact I have seen is on Helldivers 2 (at least 15 to 20% lower FPS).

If you have an older game which still uses dx9, dxvk can give a decent little performance boost - even if you're running on Windows. It's kind of magical that adding a translation layer is able to improve performance.

In more modern games using dx11/12, I've always noticed a small loss like you'd expect. I haven't properly benchmarked any but I suspect a game with native Vulkan support would do pretty similarly, and might come out on top due to CPU load.

> an older game which still uses dx9, dxvk can give a decent little performance boost

Old games already run at insane frame rates on modern hardware, so while it's impressive from a technical standpoint, the performance boost is largely irrelevant. Even with a small loss, Proton is completely worth it -- no more Windows spyware, activation/registration nags, cloud/AI bloatware.

Meanwhile nothing epic will work on mint (at least I can’t get them working), there are frequently broken components of games (eg. phasmophobia mic won’t work), most multiplayer stuff with anti-cheat won’t work.

Whenever I see someone say “most modern games work flawlessly” I know they’re full of shit or just don’t do much gaming.

Don't get me wrong, I’m not going back to windows, but it’s not the panacea that people pretend it is. Often enough it doesn’t “just work” and you have to hunt down some additional command line args to get games to run.

It works fine under Arch and its derivatives. Everything aside from kernel anticheat games runs fine.

I've never tried Mint, the two distros I've definitely experienced the vast majority of steam games just working out of the box were Fedora (earlier) and OpenSUSE (currently). I'm not lying. Although it's probably also worth mentioning I have a fairly modern AMD GPU (6800xt) - ymmv on NVidia or older cards.

IMO the biggest barrier to linux is disappearing - the requirement to know how to use the command line. You still have to use it, but you don't have to know how to use it anymore with the introduction of LLMs.

I also have switched my primary desktop from Windows to Linux, and now when I have an issue, I just ask an LLM. I play pretty fast and loose with just chucking commands it gives me into the command line. I'm pretty well versed in linux sysadmin things, but LLMs make it so easy I don't even bother trying to solve things myself first.

I have a few people in my friend group who aren't well versed, but they're able to navigate linux just fine by doing this same approach.

There's still friction, don't get me wrong, but it's a different type of friction. On Windows there are far fewer bugs, but there's friction introduced due to it being non-unix based (especially when it comes to code/doing any sort of model training) and due to anti-patterns Windows keeps shipping into the OS. On linux, the friction is just bugs. You can address / fix bugs for the most part, but you can't fix Windows' friction points.

You don't really have to use it. Not for most of the things that a typical desktop user would need to do. It helps though.

While you don't have to use it much, if you spend a year daily driving Linux, it's a near certainty that you'll have to use the command line.

disagree. it depends heavily on what the user is doing.

that's like saying if you daily drive windows it's a near certainty you'll have to edit the registry or use powershell/cmd.

It's useful if you know what you're doing but it isn't required anymore at all for most people. Most people just use their machines for the browser or office software. No reason to use command line for them, ever.

> No reason to use command line for them, ever.

That hasn't been my experience. I suspect that most others who also daily drive linux would find it remarkable if someone used Linux every day for a year and never needed to open a terminal to install anything, fix anything, reset anything, update anything, follow any instructions given by any software they found and wanted to use, etc.

My parents have been using Ubuntu for 15 years continously and never used the command line a single time, I even had to retire the computer first as it was too old.

Arch + Claude Code has been working amazingly well for me. I tried switching from Windows in the past and it never clicked. Now it's been great.

NixOS has been even better since it sees my whole system config and doesn’t need to derive the state from queries. I started with hello world and iterated into my perfect desktop env over a week.

Windows coasted on decades of entrenched users from two sources: games and Microsoft Office.

Google docs demolished one of those.

As someone who had a 20yr break from MS software until a recent new job, I'm not sure it was Google who demolished Office.

I reckon it was MS. I can't believe how confusing/confounding/frustrating the modern MS Office and it's cloud integration is. I swear Office 2003 was miles better. And it seems that way with the UX of just about all their stuff now.

I would run into little functionality limitations/frustrations with the Google suite, but I wasn't prepared for how far ahead the UX is compared to MS tools.

If someone's needs are so basic that the crappy Google docs apps can meet them, then they could've been just as happy with LibreOffice. Google docs is not remotely competitive with MS office.

you'd be surprised how many users are covered by basic needs.

For docs yes, but spreadsheets power users are everywhere in every organization in the world. Sure they are not the majority of employees, but they are often very high up in the management chain and you will only pry them out of MS Excel from their cold dead hands.

I am not a power user of excel in any way and even I can see that google sheets doesn't match it in features and performance.

I haven't needed Microsoft Office in 15 years.

I've built and worked at multiple companies that are entirely in the Google Workspace ecosystem.

If there's some "missing feature", I haven't found it or needed it.

You’re being practical, but papering over the archaic terminal interface by automating it with LLMs is basically a dystopia. Technologists should fundamentally innovate terminals instead, such that the CLI is friendly even towards newcomers.

I agree with your first statement, but raise an eyebrow at the second. The desktop already is the "friendly" version of the CLI.

I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".

Well I am betting on Terminal Click [0] which is my own experiment. I need to do a better job with the landing page, but if you invest three minutes watching the trailer you can let me know your honest reaction.

You’re right for now… what I currently have won’t magically put noobs at ease. This is a really tough nut to crack.

[0] https://terminal.click

Sure, LLMs may save you time but you will learn less. It seems that you even recognize this problem.

two sentence horror

As strange as it sounds, I think Valve is extremely well-positioned to ship what becomes one of the first true Linux desktop experiences. There's a huge demand for gaming x ai development, both of which have similar hardware requirements, and Valve is already polishing their linux experience with Steam Deck. If they launch their own desktop with a properly managed OS and hardware, I think it would legitimately become a contender among a very wide range of users.

Valve, the monopolist, should not have more control over the Linux ecosystem.

If they make their own distro, though, they're not really gaining more control. They're just enabling even more choice for someone who's looking for alternatives.

Let's say, hypothetically, that Valve releases SteamOS to the general public, and it's received generally well, and it becomes much more common for people to use "that Linux thing" than it is today. Then let's say, hypothetically, that Valve turns evil and... I dunno, starts charging money for updates? At that point you've got a large population already using Linux, I'm sure there would be a pretty big migration to Ubuntu or some other mainstream Linux desktop.

Valve, the monopolist, is releasing their secret ingredient (Proton) as open source, and actively maintaining it. I can't see how that could make Valve a monopoly on Windows-on-Linux gaming, actually the opposite.

I think that comes with risks, they will need to do a lot of work to manage expectations which is likely to be an unending uphill battle getting users to read and absorb any notice you put in front of them. If there's ever an official version of SteamOS that installs as broadly as most other linux distros along with a general/minimally trained audience, they can't do Deck certified on how well each game works on your system, and I can see challenges for "why does this game I bought on the steam store not work on my steam system?" especially if it's the hot new multiplayer game that targets windows with windows-only anticheat.

PC does have a fair amount of users that want it to operate in a console-like way when it comes to usability, the moment you tell them to fiddle with a runtime or experiment with the command line variables you lose them. That's to say nothing about handling stuff that lives outside steam, because PC gaming shouldn't equal Valve. The Deck is a nice manageable subset to deal with and fairly small enthusiast audience

I assume jjcm was talking about Valve shipping dedicated hardware, e.g. a Valve-branded gaming laptop which boots into SteamOS. That could help them achieve the same level of "Just Works" that Apple gets with macOS.

The problem is still the desktop itself. Basically none of the existing Linux desktop components are mature, either design or technical wise and more often than not, both.

Deck works because most games are self contained, allowing them to have a default game mode that bypasses the desktop entirely.

They can ship the same destop/window manager combo they ship on the Steam Deck, where you can switch between the "full screen mode" (don't remember what it's called) and a proper desktop. I'm sure most people stay in the full-screen mode, it has all the settings and everything, even works with an cursor if I'm not mistaken, but can fallback when you need a terminal or whatever.

As I understood GP's comment, the crux is "a very wide range of users."

Right now Steam Deck works because of a focus on a very specific use and users. A general purpose desktop requires a lot more, and right now even the most mature linux desktop (GNOME, Plasma etc) have their rough edges and learning curve.

Steam deck is currently my primary computer. You just try to not use sudo at all. So I use nix to install all my software. From firefox to htop. It can get annoying because one of my scripts was trying to detect Mesa the other day and didn't work with nix installed mesa, otherwise it's perfect.

10 years ago Linus pointed out that most distros willingly break application compatibility all the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc

I'm not really following desktop Linux, is Linus' assessment still accurate?

Linux had mature stable desktop stacks in the past, but they kinda sucked.

Churn (and consequent ongoing immaturity) seems to be the price we've paid in the last 10-15yrs of "progress" making them suck less. I hope it settles down a bit soon and we get to enjoy more longer term polish on these improvements though.

> Basically none of the existing Linux desktop components are mature, either design or technical wise and more often than not, both.

What do you have in mind specifically? GNOME 3 is very mature, and has a consistent, polished design that far surpasses Windows 11. In fact, in view of recent macOS redesigns, I am tempted to say that it surpassed it too.

I mean, yeah, sort of. But a lot of the design is still really bad. I am saying a lot, because I found one I like, Zorin. It is a properly pretty Linux distro. They are the first Linux distro that I feel actually have understood the value of spacing between icons and other places. Every single other Linux distro I have tried feels cluttered and messy. It is so simple, just a little more room for things, balance margins and padding just a little bit better. Gah. (And yes, I feel liquid glass on mac is a huge setback in terms of UI beauty)

I'm totally on board with a gaming-focused distro from Valve. I'll switch the second they get proper Nvidia GPU support. So far, no luck with that.

I was really proud that my kids (8,10,12) all have used linux for gaming for the last several years. Steam runs perfectly for most games.

And, they know how to to use "flatpak update" to update the sober runtime for Roblox (I know this is not steam, but it is an example of how well other things run on linux). I'm so proud (and ashamed they play Roblox, but choose your battles).

But, Fortnite.

I tried to run a Windows VM, but that was a poor substitute.

Is there an option for Fortnite on Linux?

Fortnite might be a battle worth choosing. I wouldn't want to carve my children's gray matter into grooves of cosmetic microtransactions of psychological warfare.

I actually totally agree. This was because a friend who lives a thousand miles away also plays it (and his parents have different views on what Fortnite means). I'm sure gaming companies optimize for peer pressure effects, because that's so powerful.

...and yet they play ROBLOX, which is undoubtedly 100x worse.

The problem is DRM, so there is no good answer.

The problem is anti-cheat, not DRM.

Anti-cheat is effectively the same thing as DRM. Both are just ways for the software publisher to override the user's control of their machine.

DRM can work on Linux, it's just developers choose to not enabled support, and in some cases (Epic Games) actively update games so it won't work with Linux.

What would it even mean for DRM to not be able to work on Linux? Modules would have to disappear, source code would have to become unmodifiable, and Linux would have to remove anything related to rights/privledges/contexts, I suppose?

But yes - the problem is Epic doesn't target Linux with it, not that it would be infeasible for Epic to support playing Fortnite on Linux if they changed their minds.

Epic Anti-Cheat fully supports Linux[1]. I believe what the GP comment means is that the Fortnite publishers opted not to tick the “allow Linux” checkbox on the developer portal website.

There is probably more nuance behind that decision than I’m giving them credit for, but from a technical standpoint it’s just a checkbox.

[1] https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/game-services/anti-cheat/usin...

In full agreement. The problem for GP was never supposed to be highlighting a technical limitation, just the continued problem existing with that nonetheless.

This really sucks... Fortnite is a must-have for many people (myself included).

Fortnite is a problem because of kernel level anti-cheat, trying to get it work on Proton....will probably be a long time.

The solution is: buy a Playstation.

Yeah. Consoles should be consoles. It should be considered unacceptable for a general purpose computer to run kernel level DRM.

This is why I consider it a (security) feature that these anti-cheats don’t work on Linux.

What if you want to play with keyboard & mouse?

Connect keyboard & mouse to the console

Many PS5 games have keyboard and mouse support, Fortnite being one of course.

We've been playing Fortnite by "streaming" from xbox cloud gaming (for free) over the last couple of months. For the most part it's worked great. Sessions are limited to one hour, resolution is relatively low, and depending on the day/time... there can be more than a little input lag.

But this truly was the one game my kids couldn't play from Linux that they wanted to.

Amazon prime gaming and GeForce Now also allow linking epic accounts to stream games. I've read GeForce now offers a free, somewhat limited tier as well... but we haven't tried it yet.

Is strange using a game streaming service from proper Linux-only gaming rigs... but I think that’s the only real option right now. :)

27% of that 3% is the Steam Deck / Lenovo Legion Go S. So most Linux players are in fact not on the Steam Deck.

> 27% of that 3% is the Steam Deck / Lenovo Legion Go S. So most Linux players are in fact not on the Steam Deck.

If that is true then one of those other two claims has to be false:

1. Using the latest months recorded share (Oct-2025 - 3.05%): 4,026,000 estimated "monthly active users" for Linux+Steam.

2. Market research firm International Data Corporation estimated that between 3.7 and 4 million Steam Decks had been sold by the third anniversary of the device in February 2025.

27% of 4M gives us 1M Steam Deck + Legion users. Yet 4M were sold. That begs the question: How could it be? Do 75% of Steam Deck users run Windows? Have 75% of Steam Decks ended up in the landfill? Are the sale figures estimates wildly off-base?

Isn't the more obvious answer that the market research firm got their number wrong?

#1 Is MAU. I wouldn't find it out of the realm of possibility that only 25% of owners played in the prior month. I wonder what this is for other consoles. I personally contribute to bursts of playing then months of not even touching some of my consoles.

Alternative options:

- International Data Corporation is overestimating the amount of shipped Steam Decks.

- Modified Steam Decks (i.e. running Bazzite) don't report themselves to be Steam Decks

- Most likely: most Steam Deck users opt out of participating in the Steam Hardware survey/analytics.

Last year, I didn't participate in the Steam Hardware survey on my Deck, only on my PC. This year, I participated on my Deck and my desktop, but not my laptop. I still have three devices running Steam. To any survey, it'll look like the amount of Steam devices doubled even though I'm only reporting 67% of my devices to analytics.

I’m Linux gaming bazzite on my tower. Sees at least as many of us as steam decks.

Another alternative

- may depend on the period being measured.

I haven't looked at the article or their methodology, but if they were measuring over a certain period of time, a few hours, or even 24 hours, it will still likely only pick up a proportion of Steam owners.

Even more likely: A sizable portion of Steam Decks sold are not played every month.

The third is close but it's even more likely that they just weren't prompted to survey at all rather than opting out. They're surveys, not automatic data harvesting, they don't represent things like Facebook's "total monthly active users". They're just a random sample of users, not a population count. Steam does sometimes report things like monthly active users in their annual reports, but haven't ever broken that down I don't think, but you can just infer it from the surveys.

I also have steam on multiple devices including a steam deck. On desktop I'm pretty much always logged in and I play games frequently, but most months I'm not selected for a survey. I use my steam deck less frequently and have maybe only gotten the survey prompt on it once or twice.

You REALLY don't need to care about querying the whole population for these kinds of statistics. Steam has a MAU of at least 132,000,000 users. To randomly sample from just 17,000 users (0.0012% of the MAU) would provide a 99% confidence the sample is within +-0.5% the actual value. Given that you've personally been selected multiple months, they are almost certainly well and above a sampling rate worth worrying about.

The survey does have other statistical noises/biases/errors though - but none nearly as large as this "gap". E.g. internet cafe reuse of the same machines by different accounts means if you're hoping for a "hardware popularity survey" instead of a "hardware users use popularity survey" then the number won't always make sense.

Why would it be strange that there are steam decks that sit unused ? I have a switch and a PS 5 that go untouched for months (even with a 4 year old who I occasionally let play some games). I think most people in my friend group are similar in that they have some gaming gear but rarely the time to use it. Still nice to have once you do.

These stats are probably skewed by how much people play. Competitive FPSers and MMOers play a lot, and the genres are the least friendly to Linux for various reasons.

They likely stopped using them altogether.

I have a Steam Deck. Haven't booted it up in months. It convinced me that I could game on Linux, now I game on my Desktop.

Similar thing happened to me. I borrowed steamdeck, realized that i don't like handhelds but i liked gaming on Linux. So i bought a laptop that replaced my macbook for work but it games better than steamdeck.

I use my Steam Deck as a game console, connected to my beamer and with 4x PS5 controllers. Works great for that with the Steam game mode. But yes it's been a long time since I played anything on the big screen.

Or, you know, most steam deck users aren't using them constantly and so they don't get picked up in the survey.

That is incredible! If you had asked me I would have guessed at least 80% were from Steam OS handhelds.

It's weird how Steam doesn't automatically set the toggle that lets you play most Windows games through Proton instead of having that be an opt-in you need to know about. It really is extremely stable and polished these days.

They do now: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/06/steam-update-brings-ac...

I've only ever needed to enable Proton for non-Steam games. Are there Steam games that don't have Proton enabled and need it to be manually enabled by the user? (I've only used it on the Steam Deck)

It already was the default for SteamOS, but not for overall Linux until recently, I believe.

I start non-Steam games with Wine and they run just as good.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=category&i...

Proton is based on Wine so that's not surprising. If you're already using Steam you might as well use Proton, though.

Sometimes also a game will have a native linux binary but the Windows version with Proton works better (or at all) anyway...

They do

I just wish they had to toggle to use proton by default for all games, regardless of if a Linux version exists. There have been several games where I ended up with the buggy abandoned Linux version (Rocket League is a particularly egregious example of this) instead of the much better supported Windows + Proton version.

Another example of this is Left 4 Dead 2, ironically made by Valve. The Windows client is far better, but unfortunately Valve hasn't fixed a bug that prevents joining VAC-secure servers when playing on Proton. This means you need to find an "insecure" server or host your own game.

Civ 5 is another sad example. It has a native port by Aspyr, but it's clearly inferior to getting it to work with proton (and not just for lacking mods).

Same with Civ6, native version has some game breaking bugs but Proton works flawlessly.

Civ7 we don't talk about.

An interesting example was Borderlands 2. The game originally had a native port by Aspyr, which worked quite well. 5 years pass and they release a new update and DLC - but they neglected to update the ports. 5 more years pass, then at some point in the past year or two they just plain removed the native Linux packages. They didn't announce it or anything so not 100% sure when. So these days when you install it you always get the (updated) Windows build under proton.

I'm a little sad we lost the native version, but on the other hand running it under proton just works, as I'd been doing for years, and the game would never have been updated otherwise.

Steam and Ubuntu has worked really well for me, big picture mode + hdmi switch has made for a very-close-to-console experience

I am playing mostly single player campaign type games (Assassins creed, RDR2, etc) which certainly improves the picture.

If steam really wanted to put a knife in games on windows, it would develop an anticheat and give it away for free. That is AFAICT the only thing keeping people on windows for modern, multiplayer games.

Reliable Anticheat rootkits are just not possible on Open PC platforms. Consoles should just add proper keyboard+mouse support and competitive online players can move over...

Consoles support kb and mouse. Most popular fps games support it.

Nowadays you can mix&match however you like. I have one game that is available on PS, PC and mobile. You can use keyboard, mouse and PS controllers in this game on all of the platforms and it works the same. For now, I mainly play it on linux (it's not linux native game, heh) with ps4 controller.

I really wish there was an (k)Ubuntu-like Linux distro - apt-based, semi-annual updates, kde default or selectable - but without all the stupid Ubuntu-isms like snap and alpha quality rust coreutils and whatnot. I run Gentoo and Debian for myself, but I'd like something normie-friendly I can put on other peoples machines and not get a ton of support questions.

Is SolydK not good enough? There's also Mageia if you can stomach RPM instead of Deb (I prefer RPMs, but recognize it's a matter of personal taste).

Tried Mint?

Imho the future (or present) of normie friendly distros is in atomic linux. Fedora Silverblue, Bazzite, Aurora, SteamOS. It seems to me that Ubuntu on desktop is traditional but quite behind. For normies its gonna be some Fedora based distro and they choose Gnome or KDE.

Fedora looks interesting I admit, but having used Gentoo for ~20 years and Debian for ~10 [1], Fedora feels like a new pair of uncomfortable shoes.

[1] And then one day you find / ten years have got behind you...

That is exactly Linux Mint ( https://linuxmint.com/ ) . I encourage you to give it a try. It is what I have settled on after 25 years of using linux, and trying near about every distro in existence.

I'm aware of Linux Mint, but I always dismissed it because of Cinnamon without giving it much thought. Looks like KDE can be shoehorned in without much trouble.

Consoles also bring a lot of headache when it comes to modding, though.

I zeroed my (last ever) Windows gaming rig just yesterday. I’ve been eyeing Bazzite but ended up going with Pop, since I’ve previously had good experience on it with Nvidia.

What finally let me do it was moving all my social gaming to PS5. Ime it’s really only games with anti-cheat requirements that can be a crapshoot on Linux. I can’t really recall ever running into other issues with anything on my (Linux-based) Steam Deck over the past couple of years. I’ve emigrated from my home country so gaming is important to me as a way of staying in touch with friends and family - something I wasn’t willing to risk by switching away from a working setup. A PS5 is a convenient and reasonably economical way to address that.

Feels pretty great to know that after 40+ years of relying on it - some good but a lot bad - I’ll never have to touch Windows again.

Evidently it's not all Steam Deck either; I checked our internal stats and on PC yesterday 1.24% of Warframe players were using WINE and another 0.76% were playing on Deck!

Cool! I have fond memories of playing Warframe on Linux with my 1050ti ~5 years ago.

Kudos to the team for keeping us in the loop, I apologize for the strange crashlogs my OOM killer sent.

Just want to say that a decade ago Warframe was the first game I ever played on WINE when I was first learning Linux in school. If it hadn't been so friendly and easy to keep playing I wouldn't have the skills and job I do today. Thank you!

I’ll never forget a rep from Warframe joined the teamspeak server I was in for a Planetside 2 group back in 2012 to pitch us on playing the game. :)

Coming from PS1, I am still waiting on PlanetSide 3 :(

Biggest hurdle for me to do this is just multiplayer games. I wish Linux would offer a solution to that. No idea what it would look like though.

Contrary to most Linux advocates I’m a big believer in giving studios the tools they need to defeat cheaters and I don’t care much about system integrity if it means fairer games.

The anticheats themselves typically do support Linux, it's the devs that don't choose to use them

Well EAC for example is user space only because it has to be, which some games decide is not an acceptable level of security.

Those are generally not the same anticheats with the same levels of functionality. As an analogy it's like saying Excel supports iPad. Or a gaming example that used to be way more common: Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 is supported on Game Boy Advance.

It's a game and it is Tony Hawk, but it's not really comparable as Tony Hawk on PS1.

they have the tools they need to defeat cheaters, they just choose to go about it in very invasive and lazy ways because people still buy their product.

then people complain when the product sucks and is invasive.

This is just factually incorrect.

The anti-cheat creators other than Valve aren't bothered to invest into making a Linux kernel anti-cheat, and most Linux users would be unwilling to allow one to be installed either.

>No idea what it would look like though.

It looks like attestation. Linux needs to be able to assure game developers that the kernel their game is running on is actually protecting the security of their game.

Even on Windows they are losing despite the invasive anticheats.

I suspect the answer to cheating will ultimately be big brother and hiding information from the client.

The server should stop sending positions of undetected enemies - this requires rethinking game engines due to the predictions they perform.

The server should log every single action by every single player (full replays) in perpetuity, train models on it to detect outliers, classify some outliers as cheaters and start grouping them all together in lobbies.

Another idea would be to conduct automated experiments on players at random. Such as manifesting "fake" entities behind cover and measure player reactions - of which there should be none. Spawn bots (from the beginning of the game) that a compromised client (cheats) cannot discriminate from players and have them always remain in cover and gauge player behavior relative to them, despawn them if a [presumably real] player is about to detect them.

It all requires work and imagination which is in short supply in the industry. But given how cheaters kill certain types of games maybe someone will eventually do it.

> I suspect the answer to cheating will ultimately be big brother and hiding information from the client.

The speed of light makes this _marginally_ problematic to do. It is possible that a unit might move out of the fog of war, or out of cover, during the latency to the client (or between server ticks). You'd effectively have pop-in during some scenarios - but it would be minor and the net benefit would probably make it worth it.

I recall one of the MOBAs adding this during its lifecycle, HoN I think?

Riot has a pretty good article about why it is hard: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-... . Anything more than simple geometry makes server side calculations costly, especially when you're targeting 128 tick/s.

Their settled solution is still not perfect, hence still the need for client-side anti-cheat. The final video clip is definitely done to look effective than it actually is. Those positions are transmitted based on space, not time, and in a real game you'd be moving slower.

Mobas generally have a lower tickrate and simpler vision setups

Looks like they put in some effort. You will get better results by having this type of anticheat baked into the engine from the very beginning and requiring a GPU on the server.

What I had in mind is having a primitive physics simulation with point clouds (+ velocity smearing) for entities and geometries for surfaces. You will be able to to do many more checks this way.

Plenty of competitive multiplayer games run on Linux fwiw.

The only sure-fire way to defeat cheats is with something like Counter Strike's overwatch system: have humans vet replays. Cheats are a ludicrous business, there is simply far too much incentive to defeat software-based systems.

Well, the beauty of Linux is that anyone can go implement whatever features they want. But, I’m very happy that folks aren’t very interested in supporting this kernel level DRM stuff.

Totally agree, but it seems like competitive games have solved it. CS2 (VAC), The Finals (EAC), and Overwatch 2 (Warden) all run flawlessly on Linux.

Those all have poor reputations. There's a reason why ESEA/FACEIT has been around all this time.

Who exactly is "Linux"? What entity, specifically, would work on kernel anti-cheat? The only realistic company who would care about this is Valve. So really you should say Valve, not Linux.

That's the biggest problem with Linux on the desktop: outside of Red Hat and Canonical (neither of whose business has anything to do with gaming), there is basically no well-funded company that cares about it at all. Linux already works great for the use cases that matter to the people who develop Linux, who mostly are not trying to compete with Microsoft or Apple.

> I wish Linux would offer a solution to that. No idea what it would look like though.

It probably would have to be an isolated environment to run in. Something like the Secure VM efforts adopted for desktops, perhaps with a small trusted hypervisor instead of CPU vendor extensions. Anything else I can think of starts to restrain what software you can run on your machine, or becomes highly invasive in ways similar to Anti-Cheats on Windows, both of which would be rejected by the general Linux community. (Through, it's not like anyone was asking Microsoft either before implementing anti-cheat and trampling on system integrity, at least until Microsoft started requiring signed drivers)

However, given that a generic blackbox implementation enables DRM and binary encryption there will probably still be opposition. It gets particularly nasty if it's given access to something like a full TPM to unlock application data in the same way a TPM can unlock an encrypted drive for your OS. That would make it the penultimate closed source application, which is really anti-ethical to a number of communities. (open source, modding, game/app preservation...)

Made the switch to Mint recently. Steam says that of 750 games on my account, 748 can run on Linux, and I've had no problems with the dozen or so I've played lately.

> 748 can run on Steam Assuming you mean on Linux?

Probably meant "SteamOS" e.g. Linux.

Yes, my bad. Fixed.

I've been running Fedora at home for about a decade now, and I've been doing my gaming on it for the majority of that period.

I've been running Fedora at work for about 6-7 years now too, with few issues. Work binned Adobe XD and moved to Figma which has made it even more viable.

The one and only holdout I keep a Windows 11 install around for is VR. With Valve's new headset due to release any week now, we will hopefully have a bunch of Linux SteamVR patches on the way to sand the remaining sharp edges off.

I'm one of them! I dipped my toe in the water with a Steam Deck and had such a great experience that I recently purchased a Framework Desktop and installed Bazzite on it. It's been great. Everything I play just works and the performance is good enough to just forget about as a concern.

After many years playing on Linux, first struggling with Wine then with Proton when it came out, had to install Windows on my gaming pc. I mostly play Overwatch 2 with friends on my very short free time, thanks to a Steam bug (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1028...), on every single evening I had to wait forever (seriously, 15+ min) for shaders to compile or start the game immediately but suffer on every match beginning (different map) with stuttering.

That’s a deal breaker for me, I tried a fresh Bazzite install (from Arch) before giving up, exact same issue.

I wish Valve comes around one day and fixes that, I’ll kick Windows out of life in a heartbeat.

How old is your GPU/does it/the driver support async shader compilation? I've turned off shader pre-comp like two years ago because of this bug, never had any problems/lags with any games.

RTX 3060 mobile, nvidia blobs, default settings from the distro. Indeed, I disabled the shader cache at some point, for most single player games it was a good workaround, that was not the case for OW2 for some reason.

I play OW2 on Linux with Steam + Proton and I was having this issue a while back but somehow fixed it. I think it was by increasing the shader cache size! Happy to find the exact instructions that I did to fix it once I’m back on that PC.

I am a big fan of gaming on Linux, but I've been running into weird bugs with some of my favorite games.

For example, a couple months ago, my install of TW:WH3 started to crash after 20-30 seconds in the main game. I think it started happening after a minor patch. Another example is Battle Brothers. The game ran flawlessly. Then I installed and played a copy on a Windows laptop using the same Steam account. After that the game stopped booting properly on Linux. (Maybe a coincidence.)

As a result, I still boot into Windows now and again to play these games. I am dual-booting.

The frustrating thing is that it's very difficult to figure out why a game is crashing unless you run Steam from a terminal. The logs are hard to find otherwise - at least if you're using the Flatpak version of Steam.

That linear trend line does not seem to fit very well, I say we are looking at the beginning of a hockey stick :)

Stopped dual-booting for games and formatted the partition some time after Windows 7 EOL. Thank you Wine contributors, Valve and lord Gaben.

Nice!

Meanwhile Wine fixed 32-bit OpenGL path performance problem in new wow64 mode, so now you don't need 32-bit Linux dependencies to run 32-bit games in Wine anymore (that affects DX7 games for example that run through OpenGL via WineD3D).

Make that 3.0000001%

After trying Bazzite for a few weeks around 1.5 years ago, I was pleasantly surprised but the (back then) poor state of nVidia support was an issue. I went back to the Windows 10 partition with the intention of switching over for good once the support ran out. I went a few days past that date, but seeing this article yesterday evening made me pull the trigger. Made a CachyOS USB stick, swapped the NVME out for a fresh one (the 3080 was blocking it and the release springy thingy on the PCIe connector was almost inaccessible, grr) and it's been smooth sailing. I'm also trying not to install Chrome at all this time, let's see if I manage.

I was keeping my games in a separate drive already, so when I mounted it and told Steam to look there, it just recognized everything and let me play right away!

It also exposed me to a new shell (fish) but that didn't go well. I ripped it out within seconds when the tab completion picked up files NOT matching what I had already typed, WT actual F? I'm sure it's configurable but screw that.

I also settled on CachyOS after distrohopping a few times in the past month. I had Brave at first but it doesn’t play well with shutting down on any Linux distro IME so I switched to LibreFox, but I might switch back and simply deal with the Brave issues instead because everything else feels better using Chromium-based.

I thought the auto-complete in that shell they use was neat, but I made a typo and it kept autocompleting that typo and I’m about to do the same as you lol.

I’m having wifi issues with my setup for some reason when it’s perfectly fine in Windows, so I need to diagnose that or switch back to windows until I build a new PC with a more Linux-friendly hardware.

It's crazy to me that Arch Linux is the second biggest Steam distro.

That's always been positioned to me as the one for hackers and experimentalists. You'd think the more 'user-friendly' distros would be higher.

> That's always been positioned to me as the one for hackers and experimentalists

I thought so too, that's why I mostly used Ubuntu up until 22.04 sometime, used Ubuntu since I moved before that. Then I moved to Arch, and everything just got so much easier. Upgrading Ubuntu versions was a bit hit-or-miss, especially if you'd changed configs for one reason or another. And after 22.04>22.10 failed for whatever reason, I restarted with Arch then never looked back.

Probably it helped that I already knew Arch by the time I started using it, compared to starting to use Ubuntu coming from Windows and not knowing squat.

But now with an installer, good defaults, and a helpful community (maybe slightly controversial) I think Arch can be a pretty good beginner OS, as long as you want to understand how your system is put together.

I was about to comment that SteamOS is based on Arch, but after looking at the actual graphs, they've got SteamOS as its own separate category.

I wonder how much of that is "hackers and experimentalists", versus random gamers* preferring Arch Linux's bleeding-edge latest-and-greatest packaging approach versus Ubuntu's seemingly-slower-paced development?

* though I suspect even the most casual 25% of PC gamers are probably significantly more tech-savvy than the average PC user of the population in general.

After arch got an installer much of the initial barrier went away

It might help that Arch has an absurdly good wiki.

Weirdly enough, if someone with the latest generation hardware wants a distro that mostly works out of the box, Arch will be the safest choice.

Install is (now?) relatively easy as well and there's enough of a community around it.

Steam Deck runs Arch.

Steam deck runs steamos which is its own category.

I would guess that having easy access to more recent kernels (including -zen) a and gpu firmware is a big draw for arch.

I think if it does come from SteamOS, but indirectly. When you have pieces in place selecting distro becomes simpler. Even if it not actual SteamOS.

The more I think about it, the harder it is to recommend anything else for the average Windows gamer/prosumer but first-time Linux user.

- Rolling release, so you don't have to do a major upgrade twice a year - which would otherwise be much more often than Windows.

- Latest kernel and graphics drivers, so it works with newly released hardware with the best performance.

- Steam, NVIDIA drivers, H.264/H.265 codecs, Gamescope, GameMode, MangoHud, etc. all in the default repos - a huge boon for new Linux users compared to having them in an external repo like RPM Fusion or having to install them manually, which can otherwise cause confusing dependency problems over the life of the installation.

- Nothing unusual about it that would be confusing or cause compatibility problems. It's just a normal mutable binary distro with a normal package manager, upstream packages, glibc and systemd.

The biggest issue is the lack of an official graphical installer, but while the install process is intimidating, it's not very difficult for people who are patient, can follow detailed instructions, and have a vague idea of what a partition and a bootloader is.

> The biggest issue is the lack of an official graphical installer, but while the install process is intimidating, it's not very difficult for people who are patient, can follow detailed instructions, and have a vague idea of what a partition and a bootloader is.

I think this is one of the main reasons CachyOS has been on such an upward trajectory. It's mostly Arch, but that installation was such a breeze. A couple of clicks and done.

I recently played Age of Empires 4 on Bazzite on a Framework and I was surprised at how well everything worked. I didn't have to wade through a forest of permission dialogs and popups. Compared to macOS, Steam even opened up faster.

The minor things were wonky default graphics and mouse acceleration settings, but these were easily fixed from the game menus.

For me I have been enjoying bazzite os

It’s fantastic! Truly enjoy using my machine now.

+1, now using Bazzite as my main OS in general and for gaming, and only use the dualbooted Windows on a separate SSD when I have to play a game which contains a rootkit. There've been two of those, and I can live without them. Rotate games quite frequently, mostly just works.

I think if you like checking it out and customizing the settings of your OS, then try it out! Or at least look up the games you care about on ProtonDB.

Even encrypted the Bazzite SSD just out of paranoia caused by Windows. Even partner-proof so far.

Only ever used Nvidia so far, probably going to switch to AMD in 1-2 years, as I hear that they're better on Linux.

I discovered that you can actually encrypt the home directory on SteamOS as well, its a kind of ultra beta feature but it actually seems to work fairly reliably aside from requiring you to set it up via SSH from another computer

https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/holo/dirlock/-/wikis/Enabling-d...

If I could install SteamOS on my PC I'd do it!

Bazzite basically is SteamOS for desktop. I’ve got a steam deck and PC with Bazzite and I probably couldn’t tell you which is which if you just showed me a TV with one of them running.

that's interesting to know, wasn't aware of this :) but then i'm even more confused what's wrong with my Bazzite, Steam Big Picture mode is unusable, runs at about 2 fps. i could debug it, but don't really use it anyways, just noticed when starting it.

> Steam Big Picture mode is unusable, runs at about 2 fps

can apparently be fixed pretty easily, https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/issues_and_resolutions/#stea...

Whoa, I thought Ubuntu was the most popular distribution. Arch and even Linux Mint are beating it?

The average Linux gamer is likely to have a very different setup to the average Linux user in general. It's a subset of a subset.

Steam Deck is Arch-based, that's most likely why.

SteamOS is counted separately.

Yes, but a lot of linux games use an Arch distribution such as CachyOS since SteamOS also is. They get updates faster because of the rolling releases.

I wonder how much Omarchy (based on Arch) made a dent... DHH said that it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

The hard part is never installing an Arch-like distro, it's making it past 5 sudo pacman -syu iterations without an AUR package going thermonuclear and requiring 45,000 pinned dependencies.

Just don’t use the AUR. Problem solved

This isn't really a thing that's happening though?

Coming from being a Windows power user for decades, Mint just felt like more of a natural shift for my daily driving than Ubuntu. I wonder if that's a common opinion or if there's another driver.

The survey only shows Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS and Ubuntu Core 22 for 8.25% vs Mint's 22.1 and 22.2 at 9.21%. There's a whole 18.04% hiding in the "Other" category that I suspect contains a lot of other Ubuntu interim and older LTS releases.

Wouldn't there also be more mint versions in the other category?

Arch is rolling release and bleeding edge.

This helps a LOT with games, especially new ones needing the latest drivers or hardware support.

That would explain the recent move to rewrite things in Rust on Ubuntu, they need the marketing to grow their user base.

Again, I should mention that Linux users usually only see the survey once a year, if you want to get the survey once a month (like it does on windows), you have to close steam monthly and edit your config.vdf file to set the survey date to last year.

Are you saying that windows users are supposed get the steam hardware once a month?

I’ve had steam installed on (and more/less used daily on) probably 4-5 different windows installs since roughly 2016, and I’ve never seen it more than once a year.

Yeah it's definitely not monthly.

I’m using steam on Ubuntu 24.04 with 9y old hardware (which was mid-tier when new), playing mostly 2d platformer games and older resident evil titles. Never had any issues, this setup runs like a champ

Recently, I had to switch from Windows 11 to macOS at work. While the MacBook's hardware is truly impressive, the desktop experience is so poor that I wonder how you are supposed to use it.

At least it reminded me of why I like my KDE Plasma desktop so much. And then I wonder why people are talking about the year of the Linux desktop, because in my experience, Linux already offers the best desktop experience.

As a Steam game developer I don’t think I can ever forgive Linux for being 1% of our players but 50% of our support tickets. I probably shouldn’t hold a grudge, but I do!

I suppose it’s probably better in 2025 now that the best API for Linux gaming is Win32. Proton is genuinely spectacular.

I love my Steamdeck. SteamOS is great. Supporting one distro is easy. It’s supporting a million unique permutations that is pure nightmare fuel.

There is a somewhat famous post about this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_hav...

Essentially stating that Linux users disproportionately care to actually report bugs they encounter rather than ignoring them. I find that very plausible.

> Essentially stating that Linux users disproportionately care to actually report bugs they encounter rather than ignoring them. I find that very plausible.

In my lived experience, this 100% pure unadultered copium. It’s the wishful thinking lie that Linux people tell themselves to support their preferred choice of OS software which is, for some reason, part of their identity.

Supporting “Linux” isn’t too bad in 2025 if all you care about is SteamOS and Ubuntu. But distributing pre-compiled binaries and getting them to run on an unbounded range of system configurations is a nightmare.

Linux users do at least expect to run into problems. So they’re willing to fight through errors for several hours before asking for help. And the Linux gamer community is willing to help each other out to jump through all these hoops.

But none of that changes the fact that supporting Linux is an additional mountain of work. Although in 2025 you should definitely support SteamDeck via either Proton or native.

At this point I think it's reasonable for game devs to just target SteamOS. Other distros can adapt as needed.

I like the idea of Linux-native games but I've honestly never gotten it to work. Not on Ubuntu, not on Fedora, not on NixOS. The Steam Runtime is supposed to remove the distro from the equation - but, again, I've never seen it work. Proton is the sane target.

It is always with great fear and trepidation that I install the drivers for my discrete GPU on my Ubuntu system and configure the system to use it. The state of affairs might be better these days, but I remember it rarely working and having a high likelihood of horribly breaking the configuration, and trying to rectify it in the terminal while frantically searching forums on my phone.

I never update ANYTHING on my Linux system without a very good reason. The strike rate of updates causing damage to my system and costing me hours of debugging is not worth it.

I was tired of sound stuttering on windows in expedition 33, nothing helped. Installed bazzite, issue almost solved. Game works much better.

These things go slowly an then all at once. The catalyst will be one or a few of the AAA November titles shipping with Linux support. That will eliminate most of the gaming crowd's last reason to cling to Microsoft.

It may even kill console gaming because the Steam Deck is already a fantastic experience just waiting for more games. It's not a small demographic either, it's something like 40% of males age 18-35, plus all of the people in their circles who come to them for tech support. Once market share gets up to 30% or so it becomes a cool trend, that other gamers want to emulate, streamers and influencers get involved. Then around 50% market share the bullying starts. "Windows is for people too stupid to figure out Linux" says a Linux Mint enjoyer to a Windows 11 plebian.

Valve has done a great job getting things started, but it's the studios' turn to make a move now.

I finally got around to switching to Ubuntu, keeping my windows partition open just in case. Other than a few configs I needed to copy from windows, I haven't felt the need to go back to windows. I control my work computers from my gaming machine using Synergy and a customizable keyboard (Zsa moonlander), and though it took some time to get things to work properly, it works without a hitch. I play games on my Ubuntu machine and also do some imagen work with comfy ui and it works a treat. Other than the keyboard shortcuts for deleting a word Vs deleting a line differing (cmd delete deletes a line, whereas ctrl delete deletes a word, but in 99% of other case, ctrl/cmd are interchangeable in shortcuts), the experience is great.

About every 3 months or so, I install some gaming Linux distro (or, if I'm in the mood, install Linux Mint from scratch and try to configure it for gaming) and get solely disappointed and return to windows.

Most of the Linux hurdles in day to day work can be overcome (mostly is the lack of the apps I normally use that cause some attrition, but with some compromises and some work I can get around it). But for gaming (at least in NVIDIA GPUs) it keeps failing.

I have very limited time for gaming (around 2-4h per week), I don't want to keep having to eternally fiddle with game settings, fixing bugs, fixing launchers, try different Proton versions, etc, etc, etc, every time I sit down for a bit of gaming. And Linux, unfortunately, is just not really there.

Dare I suggest you use NixOS, or even better, https://github.com/Jovian-Experiments/Jovian-NixOS, so you

1) get a working setup in minutes by following just https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Jovian_NixOS;

2) if something does not work, you don't start from scratch next time you have an urge to try again;

3) have best-in-class community support;

4) overcome lack of apps by plugging into nixpkgs - the biggest repo of packages out there among all the distros.

Hope I did well on selling NixOS to you.

Link looks dead?

Remove trailing `;`

I just don't have time for that. I use Ubuntu (headless for work), I don't have the time to spend configuring yet another system.

I'm willing to try stuff like Bazzite since it - supposedly - comes all pre-configured. But I'm not going down yet another rabbit hole with a totally new OS just for gaming... I just don't have time for that. It's just much easier to install Windows 11.

What games do you play? I really wonder about experiences like these since they differ so much to my own. The only time I mess with linux-specific things like proton versions is if a newly purchased game doesn't launch with the default proton for some reason. It's annoying, sure, but pretty rare nowadays and I usually anticipate it by checking protondb before buying a game rather than after, and it's not like it's much effort to change the version to experimental or hotfix or add a launch option. Only a handful of games have required anything more complicated like using protontricks to get extra dlls (something I've had to do on Windows for various games anyway) or the GloriousEggroll proton fork, which are easy to install with my distro's package manager. But once it's setup and working, either out of the box or after some tweaks, I don't have to mess with it ever again. I still have one game using Proton 5.0-10 from 2020 that I still play occasionally. (Current stable version is 9.0-4 from last December.) No need to change it if it's not broken.

I game a lot so there's other stuff I'll do like tweak the actual game settings to get visual/performance/control qualities I want, or use steamtinkerlaunch as a way to more easily install mods, or let my distro update my nvidia drivers (which I've found more stable than AMD's in the past on linux, but I use the proprietary ones) but that's all normal gamer stuff regardless of OS.

Right now, Clair Obscur and Crusader Kings mostly.

I also try other games when I install the system to check the current status of things.

For instance, the Monster Hunter World Demo (I don't like that game, I only use it for testing) is terrible. Very high lag, takes about 15min every time it starts because it needs to redo the graphics shaders, it's much slower than on windows.

Clair Obscur doesn't start. I get into the main menu, and then I can't start it.

Crusader Kings works fine IIRC.

Also, Steam game mode still doesn't work correctly with NVIDIA cards in Wayland... after all these years.

And yes, I did try Bazzite (that's what I mean when I say sometimes I just install a gaming distro instead of bothering to config).

And like I said in another comment, this is not some super specific setup I have here. Now I have a 5060 Ti, before I had a 1080 Ti. This is the basic setup many people have. So, sorry, but I just don't believe when people say "It works perfectly fine for me". It's like when I hear "Firefox doesn't have any different energy consumption on my MacBook"... although people have been reporting the very same issues for more than a decade now and I, personally, experienced it in 3 different Apple laptops.

Thanks for the details, I don't play those games. (Clair Obscur is on the list but I was planning on just bumming off a friend's xbox version.)

Your nvidia complaints suddenly make a lot more sense after mentioning Wayland. I've always used X11 and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, with Mate as my desktop environment. It was stable in 2009 when I built my first gaming desktop and it's stable in 2025 with my newer one. My main desktop distro has been Gentoo, with my current CPU a Ryzen 9 5900X and a 4090 GPU. (Upgraded from a 1080 Ti. Prior to that on my old machine I had a 1050 Ti and prior to that an AMD Radeon 7950 that worked great up until AMD started messing with their drivers and trying to be more "open" (I hope they eventually got manual fan control back in).)

Besides my Steam Deck I also sometimes have played some games on an older travel laptop (ThinkPad T470p with an older i7 and an nvidia 940MX) running Mint, also with X11 and Mate. Again though I didn't have any real issues apart from having a weak CPU/GPU. (Tekken 7 on fairly low settings and resolution is about the best it can do, I've had better experiences remoting to my home PC with steam remote play or sunshine/moonlight.)

The shader recompilations after a driver update or what have you suck, but I don't think I've had them take nearly 15 minutes before. I've been tempted to turn it off / skip it since in theory it doesn't matter so much anymore for reducing stutters, and Windows is essentially that already (though I still hear complaints all the time from Windows gamers about shader compilation stutters) but I haven't really experimented. This is something that somewhat rewards continuous usage at least, because even if there are games I play that would take that long and I just haven't noticed, it's easy to not notice because the system's on most of the time and Steam can do that in the background as needed before I decide I want to play the game.

I've yet to try one of the "gaming distros" like Bazzite but their marketing often rubs me the wrong way. e.g. they brag about HDR support but I'm very skeptical of that working well or at all for those with nvidia GPUs. I do technically have an OLED 1000 nit HDR monitor but I don't make use of HDR in Linux, that is I guess a downside but when I tried experimenting on Windows when I got it I could barely tell the difference so whatever. In theory gamescope can kinda get HDR working now (as of this year) even with nvidia, at least for playing video files, but I never got it working for games. I have been experimenting with gamescope more but without HDR just to have a more isolated display compositor. Some older games especially don't tolerate alt-tabbing out of full screen and tabbing back in, but with gamescope that problem goes away.

Thanks for your details.

Yes, I must mention that I briefly had a Steam Deck, and it all worked very well. But the issue is with NVIDIA. And my system is not mainly for gaming, so I’m stuck with NVIDIA and I’m Linux is lagging - a lot - when compared to windows.

nvidia 4080 here. I dont have any issues on Pop OS!. Drivers install and update just fine. Games just work. Bazzite is another popular gaming OS.

My steam library is like 120 games with several pretty popular ones. Again, no issues outside of anti-cheat but I'll uninstall those games so i dont care.

nvidia's drivers have gotten a lot better and their support docs are pretty decent. i had a mild issue a few months ago getting ollama running properly. All i had to do was update the nvidia toolkit, worked fine after that.

Well, before the 5060 Ti I have now, about 6 months ago I had an 1080 Ti and games absolutely didn't just work. In fact, the all thing was a very big mess because there isn't/wasn't proper support for 1000 series NVIDIA GPUs with Wayland and there was a big list of issues: VSync being an obvious one (but many others).

I had to configure (the few distros that still support it) to use X11 and live with another set of issues.

I'm no stranger to Linux and its setup. homeservers, pi's and any old laptop I come across.

But for my main Desktop(gaming,dev,fun,...) I've reluctantly bought a W11 key (cheap one thank god).

I don't mind working through driver issues and needing time to figure stuff out but the thing that bothers me is 'Compatibility between online games and Linux is hindered by anti-cheat software, which often lacks Linux support, especially kernel-level anti-cheat systems' (thx google).

I could go on a very technical rant, or start about setting up w10/w11 vm's with 5% loss in performance etc...

But honestly, I wanna play my online gaems =(

It hasn't been totally flawless but I am able to play expedition 33 and poe1 using mint on my Thinkpad (it's not a toaster it has a 3080ti, biggest issue is cooling).

I started using Proton recently and it is quite impressive. Some games have native support, some use Vulkan, others want to run on SteamDeck. I haven't booted Win 11 in more than a month. Not having to dual boot any time I want to switch work/fun is great - even if reboot doesn't take that long these days. I tend to play older, single player games, not everything is perfect, but I like it much more than being frustrated by Windows - using Fedora btw.

My son (8yo) and I have been running bazzite on mid tier AMD hardware for almost a year. It was so solid and such a good experience that I just upgraded us to a desktop with an nvidia 5080. Bazzite deck mode (beta) has been glitchy, but desktop mode has been rock solid. This is a total game changer. I gave up my Xbox subscription and am so happy to be back on Steam without having to tolerate windows.

Steam Deck on the go, Bazzite for desktop. Match made in heaven.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop is actually coming...

Windows will maintain its user base until schools adopt a different OS. Until that happens, Linux will keep growing into the single digits.

Considering how Microsoft is handling the Windows 10 to 11 upgrade it wouldn't be surprising to see many developers jump ship over to Linux. Some European countries/companies are already trying to get away from Microsoft due to security and monetary concerns, so why wouldn't developers and consumers do something similar?

Does this over count because I think good chunk of Linux people (including me) have dedicated windows or maybe old windows machine where they play some of the games that are unplayable on linux. Also double boot is something that would be common in situations like that. In such case, I think this should be higher a little bit. Or Am I missing something?

I don't think this should over count because the steam hardware survey is done once per account each time.

It just depends if you're booted into windows or into linux when you have the survey popup.

It is an indicator but far from real imo. Percentage of users that participate in the survey could be different across different OS too.

I recommend everyone to switch not only to linux but TWM (thin X11 desktop) and ARM (3588 to be specific).

That way you are saving 10x electricity AND moving away from M$ in one blow.

Then stop using closed source software, and start releasing your software as open or source-available.

And I promise the world will become a more peaceful place, slowly then all at once.

This weekend I finally freed my pc from Windows10 and installed cachyOS. It all worked better and easier than expected.

I contributed 2 devices of Linux Steam devices, I can now play windows only game, such as black myth: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2358720/Black_Myth_Wukong...

There have been a few mentions in this thread of portable gaming PCs like the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally. Has anyone here tried using them as a primary machine? I've been thinking that since I travel with a portable keyboard and mouse anyway, maybe one of those machines might not be too bad for actual work?

I installed steam os this week on some old hardware I had lying around (all AMD) everything runs perfectly, zero fiddling around. All my games run fine - admittedly I'm not playing any of the latest and greatest aaa titles but baldurs gate 3 and the latest katamari game run great.

Going on 2 years of linux only, between Debian and Endevour, other than linux nvidia drivers crapping themselves basically every update its been awesome. I do miss Fusion360 and League with friends, but its been overall very good and I recommend it to anyone on the fence. Break free.

Gaming on Linux is great. I do it on PC and my Steam Deck handheld, on my laptop, with Steam, Heroic Launcher, and sometimes plain Wine. For anti-cheat multiplayer stuff, I reboot to my Win 10 LTSC, and that's about it for my Windows usage for the last 10 years.

That's awesome! I've come to take "the year of the Linux desktop" as a prophecy of sorts. It might take another 20 years, or desktops might vanish, but it is going to happen. Slow and steady wins the race. Best regards from a decade-plus Linux full-timer!

I am considering making the switch to Linux for my software + data science (primary) and gaming (secondary) setup.

I use a LG OLED TV as screen, so no displayport inputs. Only HDMI 2.1.

How is the support for Linux + HDR + HDMI 2.1 + 120 Hz + VRR + Nvidia (5000 series)?

Thats my exact setup and Ive had no issues so far. Running Arc Raiders on PopOS, Nvidia 5070ti highest settings on 120hz monitor with 120-200 fps.

Can always dual boot, so its worth a shot. I have windows just for a few games like BF6 which wont work on linux cause of its anticheat

It is shocking how well Arc Raiders handles ray tracing on Linux. I have a locked 60fps at 1440p on my 3070Ti, and tons of GPU headroom to spare.

These Embark people... they scare me.

I think the issue is more about how other games handle ray tracing. For games that just treat ray tracing as an "ultra quality" setting, there's no point of making a low quality ray tracing option, because then you'd just turn it off when non-RT options look just as good.

But Arc Raiders (and their previous game, The Finals) does use RTGI for good effects. And that low quality RT setting is still going to be better than no RT because of its realtime nature. https://youtu.be/MxkRJ_7sg8Y shows that off to good effect.

You can see this kinda performance on Indiana Jones and Doom Dark Ages, which have switched to workflows that require RT. Low quality RT in these games is performant enough to run on Linux AMD drivers which run RT in software on cards that do not have hardware for it: https://youtu.be/44XaGU01J84

Interesting, I'm running Pop_OS! as well with a 4070 RTX MSI laptop. Can't get Arc Raiders to load, just freezes 15-30 seconds into the launch process no matter what Proton compatibility I choose.

Last I checked HDR was utterly broken on Linux. X had no plans to support it at all (!).

Wayland supports it if you have the right version of gpu, gpu drivers, composer, kernel, state of the moon and hdr.

After 20+ years with Apple, I'm 90% on Linux at this point.

Two desktops, two AI workstations, two laptops, and a handheld. Even my wife is running Linux.

My personal phone and work laptop are the last holdouts.

With the Steam Deck included, I had no idea we are so few.

macOS even fewer, which I can understand. That Apple had to introduce a literal Game Mode in their OS, to make games viable at all, speaks volumes.

I doubt I was included in this survey but I finally wiped my Windows partition and went all in on CachyOS on my gaming PC this week. Gaming Copilot spying on me in Windows 11 was the last straw.

I didn't expect Linux to be above macOS despite Wine's awesomeness.

- Windows 94.84%

- Linux 3.05%

- macOS 2.11%

There is wide spread disrespect against people who play games on mac. It is a running meme.

So few games support macOS that it is a real pain to find games to play on it.

If you have a MacOS ARM system, than emulating old slow games can work:

https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

For some, it is the only real legal option given windows 11 licensing.

Apple M3/M4 are a great chip, but they EOL the hardware ecosystem every 12 years on average. Few companies can tolerate that level of development liability, and Apple users benefit from the FOSS ecosystems cross-platform efforts. =3

Wonder what will happen with that percentage once they sunset Rosetta. I think steam has a native client, but the Mac support for most/all games is x86 based AFAIK.

Rosetta is supposed to stock around for game compatibility only.

macOS is by far the worst gaming platform. I think most macOS users are fully aware of that.

I mean by this point it should be expected. Apple hasn't really backed gaming in meaningful way since the original Mac in 1984.

Releasing Game Porting Toolkit aimed at developers wanting to make a quick and dirty shim and not users getting their own windows games working is such typical Apple hubris.

The Game Porting Toolkit is weird because despite first appearances it doesn't actually help developers make quick ports. Apple built a pretty robust DirectX-to-Metal shim, but they only licensed it for "evaluation purposes", so its only value to developers is in seeing whether their Windows game runs well enough on Macs to be worth porting. If they do decide to port they still have to do it the hard way, they're not allowed to ship Apples shim to users.

It's kind of baffling because it does almost nothing to help the game developers that it's ostensibly aimed at, while it does help end-users play unmodified Windows games on their Mac, which Apple doesn't endorse.

Baldur's Gate 3 looks absolutely fantastic on it due to the HDR rendering and high screen quality on Apple hardware though.

It's sad for me as a long-time Mac fan and gaming fan that Apple has always had hardware and OS that was technically superior when it comes to gaming, but neither Jobs nor Cook ever cared about gaming except as a checkbox, so it all went to waste.

The amusing thing to me is that so many productive things have come OUT of pursuing gaming, such as graphics cards being useful for mining and then AI.

The question is, how long it will be working for?

My Steam account has numerous games in it that supposedly work on macOS, but not really because they shipped 10+ years ago and weren't updated since. Some don't launch at all. Some do, but with various more-or-less-breaking bugs. Of the remaining ones, many don't advertise hi-DPI support so macOS renders them at 1080p instead of 4K.

It desperately needs a stable API for games. Which Proton could provide, except there's also that whole Apple Silicon thing meaning that x64 Windows binaries aren't easily runnable.

Yeah, Apple has been its own worst enemy here. Neither Jobs nor Cook are interested in gaming, so backwards compatibility for games was never a priority.

Linux has always cared about both software preservation and gaming, so it deserves to be the long-term "home" of gaming IMHO, as hacky as it is.

I just wish there was something, anything that could compete with Apple Silicon though :/

I think part of this is just laptop vs desktop. Everyone I know has a macbook, not a soul I know has a mac desktop. Everyone has either a console or a separate "gaming" desktop.

Apple really shot themselves in the foot with their insistence on dropping OpenGL and not having an in house Vulkan implementation. Games that want to support macs need to add Metal renderers.

Seems this kind of comments will keep coming no matter what. Nevertheless, here's some points on the matter:

Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X. In Apple platforms world there's only one graphics API that is guaranteed to work across their hardware, so it was a big deal. However, they could not keep up with OpenGL updates, as they overlapped poorly with their products map, i.e. switching new OS X to newer OpenGL revision would require to drop support for older Macs.

Out of that need (and also to address multiple shortcomings of OpenGL) Metal was born. OpenGL support layer was implemented on Metal.

Metal was released before Vulkan API was finalised. There was never need for Apple to support Vulkan. Vulkan, as the OpenGL before it, has the same downsides for Apple, but bringing nothing to the table compared to Metal.

Very few games have custom written Vulkan rendering pipeline. Majority rely on game engines, and if the engine supports Vulkan rendering, it is almost certain to also supports Metal.

So, instead of relying on supporting 3rd party rendering APIs Apple spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.

> So, instead of relying on supporting 3rd party rendering APIs Apple spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.

I have been using a MacBook Pro for decades (Linux/Windows PC for gaming). I haven't seen this happening.

Apple have, in recent years, sponsored a few triple A titles to add MacOS ports but the vast majority of games don't run or run so poorly it doesn't matter.

With CrossOver there are a handful of games that work well, most don't. I tried to play Fallout New Vegas and it wouldn't start. Tried to play Raft with some friends and it didn't start. Borderlands 2/3 didn't start. Democracy 4 started but ran at 2 fps.

Some games like EU4 and Dark Souls 1 remastered work pretty well. I ended up buying an ROG Aly because I travel a lot and want a portable gaming experience. I use game streaming to my MacBook to play games - I wouldn't have bought the Ally if my MacBook could just game.

IMO - if the Asahi team were able to implement Vulkan with no documentation or references - Apple could do so in a weekend if they so desired. I'd like to see Apple write Windows or Linux drivers for their hardware so we can use official Bootcamp and run games on platforms that care about it.

It seems like these sorts of defenses will be written even when Nvidia is worth $2 trillion more than Apple. Here's a reminder why people are mad:

Apple can support both. There's no reason they shouldn't, as a competitor on the open market; AMD, Nvidia and even Qualcomm are supporting both DirectX and Vulkan in software. It would not require Apple to retool their hardware (as Asahi has shown) and would not require them to depreciate Metal (as their OpenGL support shows). The only significant sacrifice Apple has to make is their unforgiving monopoly on modern GPU APIs that they have meted out against everyone's will but their own.

macOS will be depreciated on Apple's roadmap by the time developers take it seriously as a gaming platform. It's outrageous that people like me have to abandon the Mac because Apple expects me to satisfy myself with iPad games instead of the full range of experiences available on the software market. They have a monopoly, Apple is throwing a temper tantrum because they know Steam has the better experience and they can't compete any better than Microsoft does. Their best strategy is to kill the Mac and pretend the iPad is a console with computer-like features, which should outright terrify you if you own a Mac.

> Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X

Certainly they were a company that boosted OpenGL, but the company? During the early years OSX had less market share than Linux does today, and OpenGL was already well established by gaming and professional software before OSX ever came out. Quake supported it (not on release), Quake II and Half Life supported it on release, Quake III required it. Heck, Quake III released on Linux shortly before MacOS (classic), making it arguably as influential then, and of course the OSX port of that only came a few years later. But point is, that Id dared to release their new flagship with only OpenGL support shows that OpenGL was already firmly established and supported before OSX existed.

Yeah, I would say id (in the quake era) did far more to keep opengl alive than Apple.

Without quake and a few other popular games, it is likely direct3d would've been the only thing supported by non professional graphics cards.

> However, they could not keep up with OpenGL updates, as they overlapped poorly with their products map, i.e. switching new OS X to newer OpenGL revision would require to drop support for older Macs.

How does mesa manage then if apple cannot?

Games on Mac are a multifaceted problem, but IMO the main issue stems from Apple treating games like they do apps. They expect developers to continue to support them, to update them as APIs get depreciated.

Apple can spend all the resources they want, but they'll never be able to convince enough developers to foster a gaming ecosystem that could ever be taken seriously when there's other platforms that have 20+ years of back catalogue titles available. This has largely been enabled on Linux through wrapping D3D to Vulkan and if Apple put in the work to support Vulkan all that work could be used for free. Or if they more permissively licensed GPTK's D3D>Metal wrapper, but as it stands it's still not as good as DXVK/VKD3D. Practically speaking Steam on Mac would be considerably more useful if there was native Vulkan support.

Of course, Apple wouldn't want that given their desire for vertical control of software distribution, though notably they don't do the same for video or audio. I mean they support MP3s right? That's what games should be treated as, a piece of media. MP3 might not be the best quality, most would prefer AAC or FLAC, but sometimes an MP3 is all a user might have, so they should let users play it. But they can't seem to break free from this delusion that game software should be treated the same as Uber Eats.

Two more points to that:

First, due to substantial differences in graphics hardware, that is tiled-based deferred rendering for Apple Silicon and immediate mode rendering for NVIDIA and AMD the software simulation or translation layer will never be as good as DXVK/VKD3D, which essentially do rendering on exactly same GPUs. In case of using TBDR the pipeline must be rewritten to get the benefits. Simply put, for Apple hardware every Windows game wrapped in a translation layer will be significantly worse off than a native port. That’s why it’s important for Apple to push for that.

Second, Apple is the owner of the biggest game storefront in terms of revenue. They don’t have to ask for game developers to come, they are already here. The market we are talking about is AAA games market. And this market is characterised by dedicated hardware: consoles and gaming PC. So I think this is where lies the actual problem: Apple doesn’t make dedicated hardware for games.

> First, due to substantial differences in graphics hardware, that is tiled-based deferred rendering for Apple Silicon and immediate mode rendering for NVIDIA and AMD the software simulation or translation layer will never be as good as DXVK/VKD3D, which essentially do rendering on exactly same GPUs. In case of using TBDR the pipeline must be rewritten to get the benefits. Simply put, for Apple hardware every Windows game wrapped in a translation layer will be significantly worse off than a native port. That’s why it’s important for Apple to push for that.

Doesn't matter for the back catalogue, which is the thing that is missing that makes the platform a running joke re: gaming. It's also an issue that affects Adreno on Snapdragon, but it isn't stopping Valve from planning to ship a version of Proton for that platform. Having personally talked to a DXVK developer about this specifically, the overhead, while existent, I understand isn't necessarily as severe as you make it out to be either.

> Second, Apple is the owner of the biggest game storefront in terms of revenue. They don’t have to ask for game developers to come, they are already here. The market we are talking about is AAA games market. And this market is characterised by dedicated hardware: consoles and gaming PC. So I think this is where lies the actual problem: Apple doesn’t make dedicated hardware for games.

Not just AAA, but most everything outside of the F2P/casual sphere. Speaking as someone who actually likes games as a form of art, the App Store's library is the video games equivalent of reality TV and home shopping. It's mostly exploitative trash. Maybe Apple is happy with cornering the market on exploitative trash though, good for them.

I don't think there's any issue to run any older game using Crossover or similar on a Mac. Grab that on Steam or GoG and go. Not sure why Apple should become involved in those simulation efforts.

You shouldn't need to own Crossover. The code for running these games is Open Source, Apple is the only one that can fix their runtime to support it.

> the software simulation or translation layer will never be as good as DXVK/VKD3D

> every Windows game wrapped in a translation layer will be significantly worse

That's not wholly accurate, though. Apple Silicon has reverse-engineered drivers that do perfectly well keeping up with immediate-mode multiple-pass graphics pipelines, MoltenVK is not SOTA anymore: https://youtu.be/BbJMPfXTbbE?t=447

You're correct that tile-based deferred rendering is more efficient. That's not the issue, though. Apple can (and already does) support traditional raster APIs on the desktop, because they have to for compatibility's sake. Thousands of Mac apps will never use TBDR or Metal and will never be updated to use it. And there's no good reason to stop supporting those applications, because OpenGL runs perfectly well on Apple Silicon. The same goes for DirectX, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not.

There are hundreds of thousands of games that do not support TBDR and will never be ported to Mac in their lifetime; and Mac owners could be playing them regardless. The only one holding them back is Apple, because they'd rather Mac owners play Genshin Impact and earn Tim a few RSUs with a gachapon pull.

I think what you are describing is Apple Silicon GPUs delivering good results with sheer power. However, when the same titles are adopting TBDR you'll get faster rendering time or higher resolution. Cyberpunk is a good example of porting properly done.

Skipping unnecessary operation during frame rendering is always better for games.

I don't think I am. Even before Apple released Game Porting Toolkit, Crossover could play the game at nearly the same framerate as native: https://youtu.be/mEZJFjhLAbc?t=46

Looking at this kind of footage really does not convince me that "porting properly done" is worth enduring a library with no games. Nevermind the fact that the game runs fine through translation on the $400 Steam Deck hardware. You really are overstating the difference it makes.

It’s not needed for old games, but as I said: Cyberpunk is an example of port properly done. It’s not something achievable via simulator.

Did anything I say is actually untrue?

Maybe there's subtleties on why the situation is like it is, but the matter of the fact is that most developers need to go out of their way to support Apple (maybe even to a larger extent even than to support linux).

> spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.

This is news to me, is there some writing about it somewhere?

>Games that want to support macs need to add Metal renderers.

...and ARM support. That's the bigger footgun, imo.

I believe Proton does not/will not be integrated into Steam on Mac because it would compete with CrossOver, the paid product from CodeWeavers that essentially funds Wine development.

I don't really believe this to be an issue - Valve directly contracts CodeWeavers, they developed Proton together, and they've been pretty clear from recent hiring bursts that it was specifically to work on Proton. I have to imagine the income from Valve is exponentially higher than the relative niche of CrossOver. They're basically a subdivision of Valve now.

I'm interested in alternate explanations if you have them, to be clear this is only my theory.

While Valve might make up a big part of CodeWeavers book of business now, that was not true when the original contract was signed.

The alternate explanation is that it's rather pointless to integrate it because all new Macs are ARM, and there are basically zero Windows games compiled for ARM.

Not likely considering Valve are working on an ARM version of proton in the open, have published test results for x86-64 windows games playing on proton-arm64ec-4, and there are credible leaks that the Steam Frame uses an ARM cpu.

If anything Valve is moving towards ARM and taking the library along with it.

Then it will probably happen after they get it polished on Windows.

Crossover isn't aimed at the gaming crowd, but productivity software. Their builds favor stability over new and shiny compatibility/feature support. I just had a license because I like supporting CodeWeavers.

They also make a Linux build of CrossOver.

They advertise gaming as a use case for CrossOver (there used to be a separate CrossOver Games product, even, which I was a customer of), and it would not surprise me if the linux build of CrossOver sells so little they wouldn't care.

I believe the statistics doesn't count Windows version of Steam games running on Mac via Crossover. And of course Steam is not the only store to purchase games on Mac (in last couple of years bought 2 games via App Store and none via Steam)

This isn’t surprising at all. In this context, “Linux” means “Steam Deck,” which is basically a plug and play console being sold at cost for $300-500.

Macs actually run a lot less of the Steam library without doing pretty involved workarounds like hsing CrossOver. Since Valve sells the Steam Deck they put a lot of work into getting Windows games to run on Linux automatically. They didn’t put that effort into the Mac platform.

This is actually wrong. According to statistics, Steam deck is less than 30% of all Linux distros. It's all pretty fragmented, with Arch holding the lead at around 10% (after SteamOS of course).

Edit: fixed % cos I was way off writing from memory.

I'm using Steam on Arch and am very happy with it.

The recurring compilation of Vulcan shaders after every update bothers a bit, but it works very well.

I only wish Fortnite were possible. that’s the only thing I keep windows around for.

Sweeney said Linux is cancer when they stopped Linux support for Rocket league, so probably unlikely.

He said that the market share wasn't worth it. Yet they support MacOS (which has had a lower market share compared to Linux in this segment for a while).

running supertuxkart windows build with proton.

I suspect that if this number gets much higher and I also suspect it will, MS is going to deploy nuclear options to break Proton and, with it, Valve's Linux ambitions.

Good. Hopefully it will tip to 95% in a few years. I'm so sick and tired of the Windows dependency. Microsoft doesn't give 2 fucks about games unless they can make money off it. I have a few Steam games I can only play on Linux now, ironically.

2026 WILL BE THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

My son and I made the cut over to Fedora about a year an a half ago.

Neither of us miss windows at all. There are some games we cant play but at the end of the day... I dont really want what they offer (in the kernel level shenanigans.), so I cant say I miss them much.

I honestly can’t believe it’s not much higher. It’s so easy these days with SteamOS and Bazzite.

Look at the most played games, half of them won't work under Linux because of the online components / anti cheat system. BF6, PUBG, Rust, GTAV Online etc.

https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=playerCount

only 6 out of the 50 most played right now aren't working

10 millions players ingame, 90% of players are not playing these titles

6 out of 50 is a huge number in terms of annoyance.

It's the same reason alternative web browser engines like Ladybird are probably never going to take off. It might support 99.99% of web features - which sounds amazing! - but that probably means it's going to fail in some way on like 0.1% of sites which in practice is extremely frustrating.

Chrome no longer has the ability to run a number of extensions I like, and Firefox has abysmal performance at some bulk indexeddb operations. Safari isn't available outside Apple, and Opera and Microsoft are stuck following Google (along with all the other engines built on Chrome). There's no options left.

I hope ladybird makes it far enough that smart people start optimizing small features that rarely get used. Do that and I think it'll be successful enough to be used as a daily browser.

As much as the browser wars sucked, I can't wait for them to happen again. I'm already using 5 different browsers on mobile, since nobody wants to support containers, profiles, or organizing tabs with multiple windows.

Some of those ratings are generous to say the least. Apex Legends is probably the worst example, it's still clinging to its Silver rating despite being completely unplayable on Linux since last November.

Similar with GTA V. Still very popular, but the multiplayer doesn't work anymore. Singleplayer works though and that's enough for some people to rate it good.

Rust is also similar: multiplayer community servers with anticheat do not work. When the majority of players are on those servers, switching to Linux is not an option. But people on Linux looking for servers think it's good enough that you can play on servers with anticheat disabled.

I have no idea where that list is coming from but many top games are missing. Fortnite, League of Legends, Valorant, Roblox, FC26, and Battlefield 6 all do not run at all on Linux due to anti-cheat.

It's based on Steams numbers, so yeah games like Fortnite, LoL, Valorant and Roblox won't show up at all since they aren't distributed through Steam. Battlefield 6 should be on there though, maybe ProtonDB just hasn't refreshed the stats in the few weeks since that came out.

That doesn't cover games not on Steam, is incorrect in at least one case about playability, and an analysis of currently active players does not account for people who play multiple games.

Then it is our responsibility not to buy these games and send game studios a clear message. I would have almost certainly bought BF6 if it ran well on Proton, but EA decided to punish Linux users and also killed games that previously ran without issues when they "upgraded" their anticheat.

Because people use their PCs as general computing devices. Immutable distros are irritating for people that are used to Windows or macOS.

Linux is miles better than Windows as a general computing device, it's not even close.

Ignorance is bliss. We are not talking about general Linux in this chain.

I wouldn't say it's perfect quite yet. I just installed Debian on my Framework, and my microphone isn't working. Debugging it for the last 30 minutes has gotten me nowhere, and half the answers on the internet don't apply to my distro. Until basic issues like this go away or have easy solutions, it's hard to recommend it to anyone.

I'm going to be shown the door for this suggestion, but go consult with ChatGPT about your mic. ChatGPT had been very good for debugging Linux usability issues and papercuts in my experience.

Is it a normal mic, or bluetooth? I think, Trixie have some regressions in bluetooth stack of Cinnamon - it worked nicely in Bookworm, but I had weird issues on Trixie that just disappeared once I switched to KDE (didn't try Gnome).

Audio has always been overengineered and brittle. Vanilla alsa was the sweetspot, but things like pulseaudio and all the projects that followed it to "fix" it have too many things that can go wrong.

I don't seem to have any issues with audio anymore since Pipewire became default on Ubuntu, as a non-professional but fairly demanding user with a bunch of wired headphones plus bluetooth. I definitely used to have plenty of annoyances!

Interesting, why is that, considering macOS is itself immutable?

It's not on the application boundary...

You over estimate the will/knowledge of everyday people to do anything else than buy a branded PC, install Steam and be done with it.

When I decided to get back into PC gaming during covid, I built a PC put Windows on it and installed GOG, Steam and Epic to turn it into a glorified console. It has been like that ever since. For anything other than gaming I use a Macbook.

If you got the means and space, I think it's the easiest solution. I do play some games on the Mac, but the experience has been rather poor outside of indie games which usually work very well.

That said, the controller support on windows constantly sucks. On macOS though, it's really easy to set up. Go figure.

> I built a PC put Windows on it and installed GOG, Steam and Epic to turn it into a glorified console.

It's fine, if you are willing to put up with the forced logins, spyware, ads, unwanted cloud/AI integrations, requests to update/reboot when you don't want to, and dozens of other anti-features that suck up resources and actively work against the user.

I mean that is how it should be. Im a huge nerd and even for me Im real tired having to go troubleshoot bunch of shit to get something working

The lack of accessible devices with first party support make mainstream Linux gaming rather annoying.

For many games, people prefer Nvidias's graphical tricks over AMD's, making AMD cards a worse deal, while at the same time Nvidia's Linux support remains abysmal for most cards. It's not impossible to use their hardware anymore, but you need to know of their bullshit beforehand and even then you run the risk of messing up.

I hope Valve can get something similar to a Steam Machine programme off the ground now that games actually run on Linux. Unfortunately, I kind of doubt any vendors will bother to go through the effort of supporting their hardware on a firmware level for anything but Windows (and even at that level Windows is full of ACPI patches and driver workarounds to clean up their trash).

> Nvidia's Linux support remains abysmal for most cards.

I can't relate. My 3090 works flawlessly on Arch, and I can play any game that does not intentionally ban Linux users through anticheat.

If you can figure out how to install Arch, you're not exactly a mainstream gamer.

My 1080 also runs ~fine in Ubuntu (driver updates require a full reboot or GPU accelerated applications fail to launch). Guessing the right kernel parameters to make sleep work was a fun game that lasted a while, though. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting is that long for a reason.

Laptop GPUs are hit the worst, of course. No distro I've found can figure out how to keep the iGPU and Nvidia dGPU 1) running at the same time (so screens and HDMI work) and 2) run at more than 40fps. Nvidia forum posts go unanswered, laptop vendor forum posts are basically useless, and reported bugs/issues go stale and eventually get autoclosed.

Nvidia hardware either works fine out of the box, or you're going to lose many hours beating it into functioning form.

I’m so sick of Windows. Steam and VSTs (music production) are the core hold outs im grappling with to make the permanent linux switch.

Another Linux W, I love to see it. Thats 4 million gamer which is a sizable chunk of people to target

It's one of those scenarios where I've felt for years that the steam survey doesn't break things down enough to be useful for anything besides the broadest generalizations. The PC gaming market is huge, but there's going to be a lot of variety and sub-groups within it and I expect few developers are trying to target 'everyone' (the opposite of targeting).

Guys, we can do it!

LET'S GO FOR BROKE!!!

LET'S BREAK THE 3.5% BARRIER BEFORE GNU HURD WINS NEXT YEAR!!!!

Haters cheat sheet yo help you out, in case you’ve forgot your “arguments”:

* SteamOS is not real Linux, because normies only interact with Steam launcher

* “Only 3%?”

* Windows is still the biggest platform

I have a coworker who usually say that billions of flies can't be wrong. Maybe we should just start eating what they eat.

I've been saying it for years. Windows are for bugs.

> * SteamOS is not real Linux, because normies only interact with Steam launcher

Not quite sure what your point is.

Not sure you are either.

> * Windows is still the biggest platform

100% of Windows users are using Linux every single day.

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