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Comment by thadt | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much the only reason I boot to Windows anymore is to play games with my kids and family. The direction of this thing is dangerously close to being all I'd care about from a desktop computer.

If Valve pivoted into making a well-supported laptop with good hardware that ran Linux and played games...

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Like other commenters, I also recently made the switch. Figured I would dual-boot windows but have never needed to boot it back up again.

ProtonDB is a goldmine when a game doesn't work. Oh, and switching from Nvidia GPU to AMD GPU seems to have worked great to get games to "just work".

one limitation for Bazzite for instance would be some titles that require anti-cheating won't work but just like OP, only use case I have for windows is gaming and running some banking app which won't work on non-Windows device

love to see more and more users realize they can game just fine on linux

It's time to stop buying such games and send game studios a signal that we won't tolerate rootkits and/or closed platforms. Anti-cheats should run server-side, or better yet, servers should be community-operated. I would probably bought BF6, but since I exclusively use Arch, EA lost a sale -- too bad for them there are thousands of other games that work flawlessly on Linux.

I want to echo a previous comment of mine on this topic:

With the rise of mainstream-compatible, as in a standard gamer can get them running and use them with a similar frustration level as Win11, Linux first systems like steam deck, steam machine and even steam frame, there is a real, even if currently low, pressure for big publisher to support Linux/SteamOS. I somewhat hope/fear there will be a blessed SteamOS version that supports anticheats enough for publishers like EA, Epic and Riot to accept the risk.

It has been time for long time and I support your stance but the big publishers only speak money. I gather they still have enough customers for their mainstream AAA titles.

But I would like to think that Valve it indirectly putting pressure on them. I too am not far from removing Windows and making the full jump to Linux for my gaming needs.

Rumour has it that after the Crowdstrike fiasco future versions of Windows won't allow kernel level modules. I can only hope this is true if it kills off the main reason titles don't work on Linux as a side effect. I'd have bought BF6, some version of EAFC, and more.

It's not going to happen. If anything they would just add functionality so things like Crowdstrike don't need to run in ring-0 but they won't remove the access.

Unfortunately the rumors were misinformed. Microsoft's official response states that while they will be moving towards allowing more security functions to be run outside of the kernel, "It remains imperative that kernel access remains an option for use by cybersecurity products to allow continued innovation and the ability to detect and block future cyberthreats" [1].

1: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/09/12/takin...

Or like the EU won't change their stance on the matter...

> Anti-cheats should run server-side [...].

This. It should actually be easier to catch offenders - you're leaning on hundreds of years of applied statistics, rather than racing versus sneakier exploits.

> [...] or better yet, servers should be community-operated.

I'm conflicted about this one. I've wanted to host a game server at home since 2003, but couldn't get a public, static IP. The landscape hasn't changed much, perhaps even for the worse: a Quake 3 dedicated server could be run from a mid-range laptop while playing the game; Minecraft and Factorio (both great games with fantastic communities), by that measure, have unreasonable hardware requirements.

So, you pay a host.

OTOH there's many ways for a studio to build and operate an ethical live service. Check out Warframe: it's 100% F2P, the main source of revenue is cosmetics, and it's easy for people to gift stuff (whales spill their pockets reinforcing community goodwill, rather than gambling).

It's best when a game offers both, e.g. Brood War. StarCraft II isn't "simply" dying; lack of LAN play actively hinders on-site, professional tournaments. And we can do nothing about it.

There's lots of neat tricks for DHT peer discovery and NAT hole punching these days. Wouldn't be hard to make a local game sever manager that lets you share join information to your friends and have it automatically resolve all the networking needed with no VPN, static IP, or DNS required.

I normally recommend Tailscale, and that's a great starting point, for games that do not support any of the neat tricks natively. The problem: it's more difficult to build a community around that. You're introducing a point of friction, and a lot of newcomers will bounce. It's difficult enough to guide a non-technical friend, and Tailscale is top among the absolute easiest solutions.

How would a server-side anti-cheat work? You wouldn't be able to detect ESP or other information leaks. Best you can do is see how good they are vs. everyone else but how do you know if someone is cheating or just really good? Most cheaters are not blatantly cheating so it is hard to know for sure. Even something like aimbotting is almost always adjustable in cheat software to have varying levels of accuracy.

SSAC is already widely deployed for many games. I'm not a professional backend gamedev (just an enthusiast), so I don't know all the approaches / tricks, but here's off the top of my head:

> [...] see how good they are vs. everyone else [...]

It's called Elo or MMR. You match players with a similar rating. An unfair advantage in one area (e.g. aimbot, map hack) turns into a significant disadvantage in all of the other areas (strategy, team play, mechanics, situational awareness, decision making). In SC2 you can regularly see mid-high masters or low GMs play against map hackers and just destroy them. Match making simply works as intended.

As a cheater - aside from being a different (not more difficult, but different) kind of a challenger, how do you gain material advantage from this? Streaming the game? If you attract a community that cherishes cheaters? Well.

This is of course on top of normal AC.

> [...] how do you know if someone is cheating or just really good?

In versus - it will surface, as noted above. You will plateau, just like any other player. If you're "really good", you will become an outlier and get attention.

In a game like Warframe (PvE, you can farm goods that you can sell for in-game currency), the main limiting factor is your time. A very good loadout will shorten an exterminate mission from 4 to 3 minutes, and you can build a decent loadout within ~2 months of starting to play the game. To further shorten it to 2min, you need good mechanics, or - as noted - to cheat. That's assuming you run solo - but since this is a co-op game, there's often someone on your team who will clear the mission for you in 2min anyway. Choosing to cheat is your own risk.

I'd consider AC a core part of game design.

> Most cheaters are not blatantly cheating so it is hard to know for sure. Even something like aimbotting is almost always adjustable in cheat software to have varying levels of accuracy.

It depends on how high you want to go - you don't know where the radar is, and it only needs to spot you once. The problem space isn't just aimbotting, it's highly multidimensional. An arms race like any other, except your "enemy" (the host) has significantly more information.

You must combine client-side with server-side AC either way. A CS exploit will circulate the same way a regular aimbot will.

> You must combine client-side with server-side AC either way.

I should have clarified - this is exactly what I meant. Client-side anti-cheat cannot be replaced by server-side anti-cheat. You need both.

I work on an FPS game that is heavily targeted by cheaters (Rust). We do both but we are probably limited with what we can do server-sided because it's a PvP sandbox game. There is no matchmaking and no defined winner or loser to simplify ranking players against each other. It's also high stakes because a cheater can ruin a legit player's hours of preparation in moments. Drawing a line in the data to detect cheaters will catch outliers but there's a world of "legit cheaters" out there who use cheats but limit it to not stand out and avoid being banned.

Oh that's interesting! I've never played Rust (or any PvP shooter outside of Quake 3...), so forgive me my ignorance. Questions, out of curiosity:

- Why no matchmaking, why no win/loss condition? What's the incentive structure / stakes for the participants? Is that a differentiator in the genre?

- Other than raw mechanics (aiming), what other kinds of skillsets affect gameplay / success?

- What are you allowed to share about the mitigations?

I don't wanna try any further backseating, just curious.

It's a sandbox game. You play on the same server over the course of a wipe (up to one month long) and then the server's map is cleared/changed. Hundreds of players gather resources, build bases, craft weapons, etc. to fight each other and defend themselves from others. Players often team up but you never know who you can really trust unless you're actually friends with them.

Other than aiming there's just game and map awareness, including understanding the current meta. Base design is a whole other area relevant to defending against raiding while you aren't online or away from your base.

We use EAC but also have our own layers of protection. We do some of our own anti-tampering in the client, a player reporting system with staff to investigate, server-side antihack to guard against all kinds of weird state modified clients send, and a lot of data collection+analysis. If you look up Rust or any other popular FPS game up you'll see it's still not enough.

The most effective anticheat tool really is game design. Games can be designed to limit or even eliminate the worst of cheating... but only by significantly changing the games. It'd be simple if everything was like the Civilization games because they're turn based and have well-defined actions. All input can be 100% verified without the need for tolerances and hidden state (fog of war) can be networked only when necessary.

OK so it's like Minecraft, but with a lot more combat. I can see the appeal.

> The most effective anticheat tool really is game design.

Yep, that's always been my idea, and why I brought up Elo.

IMO second most effective is to play with people you already trust. Or like on many public Factorio servers: strangers get limited permissions until proven trustworthy. But none of this works in a game with just a couple hundred players.

Thanks for sharing.

(I had to make a HN account to reply to this, but…) If only Riot, Epic, BE, whoever else knew about this wondrous approach! That way they wouldn’t have to reverse half the Windows kernel to figure out ways to stop & detect hacks.

Valve (mostly) does serverside analytics for CS2 and the success of their approach can be measured by one of FaceIT’s benefits being “we have a working anticheat”.

On a sidenote, I highly recommend this presentation on anticheat stuff: https://game-research.github.io/presentations/2025-08-06-bhu...

Always fun to read the "why don't they just..." Comments like it's an easily solved problem.

I was in the same shoes, then one day I decided to give a shot to Bazzite. To my surprise the installation was extremely smooth, and everything worked right away. Now I’m playing almost everything on it (Arc Raiders, EU V, HLL and Horizon FW recently). If you want to _try_ all you need is 15 minutes, some HDD space and an empty USB. You don’t have to give up Windows at all, dual booting is also pretty smooth.

I have a bazzite box connected behind my TV. Even with a non optimal choice of graphic card (an old Nvidia) it works better than I was expecting.

I also bit the bullet and did a bazzite install and am blown away how seamless it has been for what I need. All the games I like run on Steam. Even Diablo 4 runs through the Blizzard launcher which does take some work to get installed, but nothing you can't find in a youtube video.

No issues using the system as my daily driver for personal things. I have dual monitors, one oriented vertically and one 144hz. All works great! I'd recommend it to anyone

The whole Universal Blue image ecosystem is so polished, consistent and coherent. Bazzite is their gaming image variant, I’ve also recently switched to Bluefin which is their Gnome variant on my workstation and everything works so nicely together, it’s the most joy I’ve had using a computer in a long time.

I've been very happy with Aurora-DX, which falls under the Universal Blue umbrella. I reboot it once a week to apply updates and I can roll back if I need to.

Loved the concept, tried it out, didn't work, at least not for RDR2 which I was trying to play. But how would it work, there is Linux, Bazzite, then there is Steam, RDR2 needs the Rockstar launcher, it's such an intricate web of dependencies, I'm not surprised something isn't working.

RDR2 has a gold rating: https://www.protondb.com/app/1174180

It should work with some tinkering.

I have finished RDR2 on Bazzite (story mode), zero issues.

When silly DRM or a game launcher is all that is keeping you from enjoying a game, that is when you get the pirated version without any of this bs and enjoy it without remorse.

RDR2 works great on my AMD Linux machine.

Worked fine for me on a Deck.

I apologize that nobody responding to you is understanding the point here that the last thing Linux gaming is, is consistent.

frankly at this point pirating the content seems a lot more convenient than some of these games, I wonder if those execs are trying to intentionally push us off

RDR2 works on my Steam Deck. I had to use desktop mode to sign in once, but after that it's just worked from gaming mode.

The screen is a little small, though, or my eyes are too old. Maybe both!

Gaming on Linux is hit and miss, depending on the distro you use and your desktop environment. Some games should be launched with gamescope if you are using Gnome/GDM

To have HellDivers run in borderless window on Debian 14. It required me to manually compile gamescope (wasn't that difficult but Valve's instructions are out of date), and use the backports on Trixie to upgrade the kernel to 6.16, and update wireplumber and pipewire (sound was flakey on some games). Kernel 6.16 performs much better than 6.12 just generally.

All the Arkham games work perfectly. Doom Eternal has some weird latency in the mouse and aiming doesn't feel right.

I could never get my Xbox One bluetooth controller behaving with Linux. I ended buying a 8bitdo Xbox style controller which works perfectly. It is much better made than the Xbox controller and roughly the same price.

So to be fair about Helldivers, it doesn't even reliably work on Windows.

I have to install a two year old AMD driver to get Helldivers to recognize my GPU.

I've had zero issues on Windows. None at all. I have a AMD GPU.

Linux issues have been poor performance generally. Once I installed kernel 6.16 that was fixed.

That's why the correct choice is Bazzite

No the correct choice is what I want to use and it is Debian. Distro-hopping doesn't fix your problems and you will end up with either the same issues or more issues by distro-hopping.

I use my Linux machine for things other than games and I am not moving to "distro of the week" to run one game.

That's fair but Debian is shipping you multi year old packages when you want the latest drivers and mesa for games.

Bazzite has those, and you can just jump into a Debian Distrobox for development.

Debian 13 has mesa 25 which seems to be the latest or very close to the latest and installing an updated kernel was trivial via backports.

People exaggerate the problems of using a stable distro.

>People exaggerate the problems of using a stable distro.

Stability isn't a problem, it's a feature. Companies trust Debian, Ubuntu LTS, etc. for their servers EXACTLY because the packages are old.

This isn't the case with desktop computers, where the latest optimizations are delivered weekly if not monthly, and may improve performance across the board.

Sorry, but Debian 13 was recently released. Just three months ago, you would have been stuck on Mesa 22.

Usually Debian testing will get you where you need to go with Steam and gaming. The stable branch won't git r dun for you usually.

I find you can get a fair way with using backports. I am running the latest kernel and pipewire gubbings.

I've been playing games on Debian Stable for many years now, and although there were some issues back when the Linux Steam client first came out, in past five or so years, I noticed that I tend to forget to even check whether a game works with Proton before buying, and I haven't had any issues playing all sorts of games.

Of course, I don't play AAA slop that's essentially rootkits with a game attached on the side, but even more reasonable AAA titles tend to work just fine.

What I'm trying to say is that this "debian stable is from previous century" confusion needs to die. They had one or two slightly longer periods between two stable releases, many years in the past, but that seems to be all people remember.

The correct choice if you don't want to spend all that time fucking around with your configs to play a game is Bazzite. If you value something more than the time you save then sure, use Debian for that ineffable reason: but don't bitch and moan about Linux being hard to play games on just because you're using a distro that isn't designed for it.

Bazzite makes gaming easy and is the Linux distro for gaming.

A few games I've tried required a little fiddling to work correctly. Some of these, like Dark Souls, required me to get a Windows patcher to run in linux to patch a windows binary, which required me to launch the patcher from Proton in Steam, and know where Steam installed the game. Not straightforward at all, but it can be done. I would not call it an experience for the average Windows gamer.

Some of the latest shooters, will get you banned because anti-cheat.

That said, there's nothing in my library (180 games!) that doesn't run in Linux, and I have a number of games that you can't even get to run in Windows at all anymore.

I think the gaming community should all send Gabe Newell a Valentines Day card, or maybe a Christmas gift, or something. Seriously, the man has done so much for gaming, think of where we'd be without him. Windows App Store, Sony Game Store, walled gardens...

How's the Nvidia driver support in Bazzite?

> If Valve pivoted into making a well-supported laptop with good hardware that ran Linux and played games...

SteamDeck is out since February 2022 and does all that. You can use a BT mouse&keyboard, plug a USB-C screen or dongle for HDMI. I did live presentations with that quite a few time. It's just a computer with another form factor.

It's not "dangerously close", it's been there for years now.

Basically only competitive gaming with kernel level anti-cheat are problematic.

seconding this. I bought a SteamDeck OLED -- and it blows my mind more people havent heard about these. it's essentially a bad ass handheld laptop. yes it plays games great, but the OS side when you boot into desktop mode is quite capable - I spend more time on it than my home pc these days

The thing that makes that different though is the packing/unpacking experience. With a laptop it's just... opening and closing the lid. With a steam deck (or really any mini PC with a screen and battery), if you go wireless as you suggest, there's now at least 3 devices (deck, KB, mouse) that need to be handled and charged separately. Given my previous negative experiences with BT I'd go wired but that makes every move take even more effort.

I could see a setup with a case for the deck gives it a laptop form factor, but that doesn't seem like what you're suggesting. I might also ask how often you move your setup? My schedule requires I do so at least 8 times/week.

A Uperfect lapdock with a USB-C PD injector from one of the AR glasses sets (can be bought separately) is even more convenient for Deck as a laptop replacement.

I used to also have a dedicated Windows machine just for gaming, but two years ago I formatted the Windows drive and put SteamOS (via ChimeraOS) instead. I can legitimately say that it has been more stable than running the same games on Windows. Just flawless.

now with gabecube, maybe steamos would be directly available for desktop too

Just wondering, what games are you playing that dont run on Linux yet? I can't think of games I'd play much with family that dont work well

I do not believe that _you_ are trolling with this question, but answering this is just asking to be trolled.

That said. Fortnite. Yes, I still play it with friends and cannot play it on Mac or Linux. :(

I'm sure others have similar examples. Also there are just simple things like playing with friends and streaming on Discord. Anybody streaming from Windows always comes across smooth and HD to the other participants while anybody on Linux seems to consistently be received (I don't know where exactly in the chain the problem exists, so just "received", as it may not be a broadcasting or encoding problem, I'm not an expert in this) with a lot of artifacts and lower framerates.

A friend of mine, a Linux user, says he installed Windows for gaming. Apparently the main issue isn't actual compatibility for games, but that a lot of games require some kind of kernel level anticheat (rootkit?).

Yes. Valorant and Battlefield 6, for example.

Yes, this is broadly true. Just about everything that does not have Linux-disabling anticheat runs wonderfully on Linux these days. You can check https://protondb.com/ to see how any given game runs.

Yes and they could just make it(the rootkits) work on linux. It's more about the publishers/devs actively opposing linux.

Alternatively it's still a pretty small slice of the market that's not willing to dual boot for the major games that do require windows only anticheats so it's just not worth their dev and support time to try to serve that small slice. Valve's work on Steam Machines/Decks is the thing needed to actually push developers to supporting it by providing a relatively consistent target OS and a large enough install base to justify spending the money to support.

The major anti-cheats do support Linux, but it's opt-in on the dev side because they're significantly easier to bypass than the Windows versions. It's not even close, getting around the Linux ACs is child's play. It sucks but nobody really has a good solution yet.

Yep anticheats are one of the big hurdles to 'porting' a lot of online focused shooters to linux. It's an unfortunate situation but I get it from the company's perspective, not having any anticheat leads to shitty situations for way more players than not having a linux version of their anticheat and a vast majority of players have Windows devices or are willing to dual boot.

This is true. Battlefield 6 is in this boat

It’s a few games, but a few very important ones.

GTAVs online ecosystem with custom servers. Rust hasn’t enabled Linux Battleye support. Valorant

Some releases that are temporarily popular like BF6, playtest of Battleye games where Linux support isn’t enabled (Fellowship, Exoborne). All games in this paragraph also by Swedish developers. Kom igen, linuxstöd

Escape from Tarkov is the only reason I have a Windows Hard drive still. It doesn't have anything else on it.

FWIW, PvE and modded Tarkov does actually run fine on Linux (Streets map doesn't, nor does Arena).

It's definitely not the same, but between Arc Raiders and PvE I get my extraction shooter fix. Online Tarkov is mostly populated by Gaming Wizards™ anyways.

Yes I am playing Arc Raiders now instead of Tarkov because switching is not worth it. Until it will be!

EFT has a pretty ridiculous history with attempts at anticheat. Several years ago they set up their servers to kick anyone with virtualization enabled because cheaters had been using VMs to intercept network traffic (the network traffic wasn't encrypted for tarkov then). The response from cheaters was to use a seperate bare metal build to intercept the traffic. The devs "fixed" it right before windows 11 came out with virtualization on by default.

Some intrusive ones (EA's anti cheat for recent Battlefields, Activision's anti cheat for Call of Duty, anything from Riot to name a few) do not work.

However, EAC - who is a major player in this field producing generic solutions - does support Linux. The involved publisher, however, needs to approve this and the developer need to turn on a feature flag. That's it.

However, some publishers simply deny this for... totally mental reasons ...and this means that the game is marked as borked in protondb even though the game could as easily be played on Linux thanks to EAC's Linux support.

"EAC supports Linux, but devs just won't turn it on" is the clickbait answer, but the details are more nuanced. EAC has multiple security levels that a title can set based on the threat model of the game, and most games with heavy MTX that use EAC shy away from it, largely because Fortnite doesn't do it. EAC is owned by Epic, and if Tim Sweeney says that you can't do MTX on Linux safely, then any AAA live services game with in-game MTX is going to shy away from it, regardless of how true the statement actually is.

"MTX" as in, microtransactions?

What do microtransactions have to do with anticheat?

granting clientside without paying, things like that

You don't want someone having a skin that you are charging money for among other things.

The Finals has mtx, is protected by EAC, and is playable on Steam Deck.

Throne and Liberty, which is also protected by EAC and has mtx, is also playable on Steam Deck.

So this is bullshit and it clearly shows it's the publisher's choice. What Sweeney thinks has nothing to do with it.

no it shows those guys are willing to take the risk and learn the water is fine.

most aren't

> What Sweeney thinks has nothing to do with it.

I don't know if this is a fever dream or if it actually happened, but I seem to recall reading something about Tim Sweeney using Linux for a week to see how it compared. If he liked it, Epic Megagames would publish titles w/Linux support. He ended up complaining about some irrelevant things in KDevelop and it was pretty clear what his intentions were before even trying things.

I can't find any reference to this online, but I'm pretty sure that it happened. This would have been ~1998.

edit: It may have been Mark Rein?

You are only safe if you run Tim's rootkit :)

This. While EAC does support Linux it is nowhere near the level of protection of EAC on Windows.

I dont think I'm getting trolled, I know that loads of games still dont work. I just wanted to get an idea of which games are the current biggest ones holding people back.

Fortnite & Call of Duty

If I could travel back in time and prevent my kids and nephews from ever learning about Fortnite, I might do it. Instead I'm out here trying to keep from getting sniped by a Simpson character.

Fortunately, it seems like the rest of the family is getting tired of COD's ceaseless churn, and might be willing to pick up something else.

Fortnite is a fun game though, it's the only game holding me back from fully switching to Linux. Cloud streaming just doesn't cut it, latency is way too high (+ more money for a single game)

Ah I had kinda forgotten Fortnite exists haha. I think I assumed your kids were younger.

Does Roblox run on Linux?

BF6 and any multiplayer EA games with anticheat

Apex is an EA game and actually ran great on Linux until they removed support. Unfortunate, but they said it was necessary to combat cheaters though that claim is somewhat dubious since cheaters is perfectly viable on Windows still.

FIFA is another one that comes to mind, or however they call it these days.

Also from EA

Its much easier to cheat on Linux though.

Battlefield 6, GTA V online, Escape From Tarkov, likely GTA VI

Imagine not supporting the latest releases that all your friends are playing.

Zero of my friends are playing any of these games. GTA VI will probably do the console first release thing anyways.

Edit: Fair enough to the other ones though. This comment wasnt meant to be inflammatory or argumentative, but clearly someone else believed it was.

What's the point of arguing like this? You're asking for experiences from people, then when people give you proper answers it glides off with "well no one I know plays those anyways". Isn't the discussion larger than your personal and private experiences, if you're discussing in public like this?

You seemed to have some initial claim that "all games actually work perfectly fine, prove me wrong" but then you don't seem to actually want to engage faithfully anyways.

They think HN is Reddit, notorious with its flaming war

HN wasn't letting me comment, then I forgot about this. I wasnt trying to be hostile, I didnt think about the comment coming off that when when I wrote it. I feel you were far to quick to assume bad faith, but either way I apologize that my comment came off as argumentative.

I certainly never said nobody plays those games. I was just responding to their statement about not playing the games your friends are playing.

Steam Box 2 will be out before GTA VI

Depends on your friend group; statistically speaking they're more like to play ARC raiders than EFT which does run on Linux

Trying to get RDR2 to work on Linux, so far no luck.

I play it on Linux, try Proton hotfix.

I've played it on the Steamdeck without issue.

For me it's only games the specifically don't support Linux, which are mostly competitive multiplayer games with anti-cheat software. Apex Legends used to work great on Linux, but they removed support as an attempt to combat cheaters (there are still tons of cheaters).

In addition to what others have said, a group of friends still plays enough League of Legends that I don't both dual booting. Also if you play RuneScape (RS3, not OSRS) the best 3rd party add-on, Alt1 Toolkit, only works on Windows.

For me the thing that pushed me to reinstall windows after I got a cheap $10 copy was Kerbal Space Program. Though, in my specific case I strongly suspect it was older hardware & driver issues than anything else, since I've not had any major problems on steam deck.

I do have more random crashes on certain games even on steam deck, but not as bad as Kerbal Space Program on my old (12 yr) desktop.

Factorio seems to work better on Linux. Which is both good and bad (since it's so addictive).

Factorio can save without stopping the game on Linux, which it can't do on Windows, since they just fork the process and do it in the fork IIRC, which makes the saving something you basically don't think about on Linux, but bugs you when ever auto save runs on Windows last I checked

Doesn't this make the game use double the memory for a while?

Battlefield, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, Fortnite

Basically all the games I play regularly with my friends.

Microsoft Flight Simulator

From what I can see, that runs fine through Protob

Same, if they also released something like a Steam Machine Pro with more ram+vram and bit higher specs I would instantly purchase it. Nvidia and AMD have been rightly criticized for releasing 8GB video cards in the past year and valve shouldn't be immune to that criticism.

Would be great of Valve to just drop a Steam Machine Max++ with an AMD Ryzen AI 395 and 128GB unified memory. I know this is not going to happen, but SteamOS should boot fine on that SoC, so you can DIY a Steam Machine that also runs LLMs (albeit a bit slow) :).

It sounds like you want to install Bazzite on a Framework Desktop.

Last year I read a lot of reviews making a fuss about the RTX 4070 (mobile) having "only" 8GB VRAM but it's what I ended up buying and it just hasn't been an issue where I'm like, shoot my games aren't fast enough or pretty enough to have fun. Sometimes I think number-based reviews miss the point, and I miss HardOCP!

>with my kids and family.

if you have an AMD GPU, Linux Mint does everything 'gaming' - on top of installation, bluetooth and printing(!) better than Windows

This promises 4k 60fps gaming and Valve is good with hardware, so this is an immediate buy from me if it's under 1000€

No need to mess around building a gaming PC anymore.

> This promises 4k 60fps gaming and Valve is good with hardware, so this is an immediate buy from me if it's under 1000€

Does it promise that? It seems like the hardware might do it, didn't see that anywhere

Valve says it runs 4k 60fps with FSR and I trust them.

NOTE: it's not "4k60 at ultra detail", which seems to be implied in the minds of some PC gamers =)

Hmm, you're right, weird that I didn't that initially, I wonder if it was just because all the background videos showed errors at the time and might have messed with the page layout

It’s <= a Radeon 7600 GPU (28 CUs RDNA3 vs 32), so I’m not sure I’d have advertised it as a 4k60 machine. Then again I’m not a marketer so what do I know. 4k60 is a flexible target with FSR I suppose.

>with my kids and family.

if you have an AMD GPU, Linux Mint does everything - including installation, bluetooth and printing(!) better than Windows

AMD GPU here, but I had issues connecting my Xbox controller to it and using it with Steam. On Bazzite this all works out of the box. Would love to know what the issue was but could've been my bluetooth chipset or something of the sort -- Don't know what Bazzite does differently from Linux Mint sadly.

Overall barely ever in Windows anymore and a happy Linux gamer.

I recently got a tiny and mighty GPD win mini. I booted windows once to shrink the data partition and installed Bazzite Linux. Painless install, never even considered booting in win again, and so far all games I tried worked flawlessly. I know there are issues with anti-cheat, but I usually don't even like those games..

Only reason I even had a windows machine too. I got rid of it because I realized after a long tiring day sitting upright, I really did not find sitting even more upright and playing games relaxing. I wanted to plop down on the couch and do it. And it was a gigantic tower that was taking up too much space in my office

If I could have a machine like this instead, I'd happily buy it instead. Windows has zero use for me other than playing games

Playing PC games with a controller, lounging back in a good recliner, is much more relaxing. Many games work great like that, and Steam tells you how well any particular game works with a controller.

I made the switch to Linux for gaming maybe six months ago. I play A LOT of games and have only encountered a single game that didn't just work.

> If Valve pivoted into making a well-supported laptop with good hardware that ran Linux and played games...

The Steam Deck is kind of close to this although the screen isn't the best. I think the closest you can get to this right now is adding a graphics card module on a Framework laptop.

Laptops are difficult to cool down, they're bad for gaming.

Unless they remove fans, or have limited hardware, but that's already a steam deck: just add a keyboard and a larger screen.

I believe you're looking for https://system76.com/

I have a System76 laptop, and I bought it because they supported Linux and because I could buy replacement parts if I needed them.

The battery swelled, so I contacted them and they don't sell the battery anymore. I tried ordering one from, literally, half a dozen places online and was refunded each time because it simply does not exist.

They already proved with the Deck that you don't need Windows for a great gaming experience anymore

Extremely hard pass on a laptop. They already have the steam deck, and now they have this. Whether you want it portable or not, there are options. Laptops always end up being just... so disappointing.

the limit last time was anything competitive or multiplayer that required a weird launcher or some low-level permissions or something. I just want to play CS2 and hunt showdown.

I've been using Pop_OS, buggy as hell but steam games work great!

Everything is kinda a dumpster fire, but they nailed steam games.

Pop_OS is pretty rough. Theyre running on a super outdated base while working on COSMIC

The pop shop app being single threaded is just embarrassing. Do a search, the entire UI freezes up until the search is complete.

Also updates regularly break my KDE session and I have to restart my display server.

Sometimes I have to switch to a tty and back to my graphical console to get my display back.

It is a mess all around.

I haven't managed to get my GPU working in Docker, ugh.

That said, it does work. Mostly.

Agreed about POP Shop being slow. I recently learned that they were working on its replacement: "COSMIC store" (written in Rust + Iced), and it's super-fast. You can try it with `sudo apt install cosmic-store`.

The 24.04 beta is really stable and the new cosmic DE is great! I've got it on my desktop and laptop, no problems.

System76.com/pop/pop-beta

I actually really like my current customized KDE desktop. I have it all setup with transparency everywhere and a fully animated shader desktop wallpaper. Basically the opposite of everything Gnome stands for. :D

For me it's been super stable. I've hardly seen any bugs. And in those remote cases, it would be more correct to call them quirks than bugs, which have later been fixed anyway. I've been using for intensive gaming, AI projects, and audio production. And when I say audio production I don't say Audacity. I say recent versions of Ableton Live running on ASIO drivers with windows VSTs and Max 4 Live instruments at 5 ms latency, all of this running through Wine with an amazing Wine managing software called Bottle (hehe). As for gaming,, it's not hard to see people claming they get even more fps than they get with windows. It's not a PopOS thing, it's the Linux ecosystem that is finally getting mature enough to pull this out (this time for real). On top of this, System74, the company behind PopOS who is selling laptops with that OS, are also optimizing the kernel to make sure everything runs super smoothly... I really don't see where your "buggy as hell" is coming from.

Half the time updates require me to restart X (or Wayland, whichever I am using at the moment).

Coming out of sleep is hit or miss. It works more often than I expected but sure as heck isn't 100%.

Graphical corruption slowly sets in with QT based apps over several days and then I have to restart my display server again.

(This actually seems to have gone away with the an update a month ago!)

Not knowing if I'll be able to sit down at my machine and have it boot up I consider buggy as hell.

Oh and certain items in pop shop, just clicking on them crashes the entire app. Every time, 100% reproducible.

Some apps have 2 listings, one of which crashes pop shop to look at, the other of which typically works.

Some apps just cannot be installed through pop shop, just nope, not going to happen.

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