Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable | Hacker News Reader

Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable

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I recently had my Framework Desktop delivered. I didn't plan on using it for gaming, but I figured I should at least try. My experience thus far:

    * I installed Fedora 43 and it (totally unsurprisingly) worked great.
    * I installed Steam from Fedora's software app, and that worked great as well.
    * I installed Cyberpunk 2077 from Steam, and it just... worked.

Big thanks to Valve for making this as smooth as it was. I was able to go from no operating system to Cyberpunk running with zero terminals open or configs tweaked.

I later got a hankering to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. This time, the game would not work and Steam wasn't really forthcoming with showing logs. I figured out how to see the logs, and then did what you do these days - I showed the logs to an AI. The problem, slightly ironically, with MD is that it has a Linux build and Steam was trying to run that thing by default. The Linux build (totally unsurprisingly) had all kinds of version issues with libraries. The resolution there was just to tell Steam to run the Windows build instead and that worked great.

> I later got a hankering to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. This time, the game would not work and Steam wasn't really forthcoming with showing logs. I figured out how to see the logs, and then did what you do these days - I showed the logs to an AI. The problem, slightly ironically, with MD is that it has a Linux build and Steam was trying to run that thing by default. The Linux build (totally unsurprisingly) had all kinds of version issues with libraries. The resolution there was just to tell Steam to run the Windows build instead and that worked great.

I've heard it said in jest, but the most stable API in Linux is Win32. Running something via Wine means Wine is doing the plumbing to take a Windows app and pass it through to the right libraries.

I also wonder if it's long-term sustainable. Microsoft can do hostile things or develop their API in ways Valve/Proton neither need nor want, forcing them to spend dev time keeping up.

MS _can_ do that, but only with new APIs (or break backwards compatibility). Wine only needs to keep up once folks actually _use_ the new stuff… which generally requires that it be useful.

Plus if it does happen, folks need to laern a bunch of new hostile stuff, given how linux is taking off, why not just move to treating linux as the first class platform.

> why not just move to treating linux as the first class platform

This is where the argument goes back to Win32 is the most stable API in Linux land. There isn't a thing such as the Linux API so that would have to be invented first. Try running an application that was built for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Good luck with that. Don't get me wrong, I primarily use and love Linux, but reality is quite complicated.

Sounds similar to macOS.

MacOS apps are primarily bound to versioned toolchains and SDK's and not to the OS version. If you are not using newer features, your app will run just fine. Any compatibility breaks are published.

> Try running an application that was built for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Good luck with that.

Yea, this is a really bad state of affairs for software distribution, and I feel like Linux has always been like this. The culture of always having source for everything perhaps contributes to the mess: "Oh the user can just recompile" attitude.

stability has critical mass. When something is relied on by a small group of agile nerds, we tend not to worry about how fast we move or what is broken in the process. Once we have large organisations relying on a thing, we get LTS versions of OS's etc.

The exact same is true here. If large enough volumes of folks start using these projects and contribute to them in a meaningful way, then we end up with less noisy updates as things continue to receive input from a large portion of the population and updates begin more closely resembling some sort of moving average rather than a high variance process around that moving average. If not less noisy updates, then at least some fork that may be many commits behind but at least when it does update things in a breaking way, it comes with a version change and plenty of warning.

Or MS does deals with developers causing them to use the new APIs. I still haven't forgotten when they killed off the Linux version of Unreal Tournament 3. Don't for a second forget they are assholes.

I'd love to see a world were game devs program to a subset of Win32 that's known to run great on Linux and Windows. Then MSFT can be as hostile as they like, but no one will use it if it means abandoning the (in my fantasy) 10% of Linux gamers.

I am seeing that number increasing soon with The SteamDeck and SteamMachine (and clones/home builds). Even the VR headset although niche, is linux.

The support in this space from Valve has been amazing, I can almost forgive them for not releasing Half Life 3. Almost.

There are strong indications that Half Life 3 (or at least a Half Life game) is coming soon. Of course, Valve might decide to pan the project, but I wouldn't be surprised seeing an announcement for 2026.

I believe it's already happening to a minor degree. There is value in getting that "steam deck certified" badge on your store, so devs will tweak their game to get it, if it isn't a big lift.

That's basically already happening with Unity and Unreal's domination of the game engines. They seem dominate 80% of new titles and 60% of sales on Steam [1], so WINE/Valve can just focus on them. Most incompatible titles I come across are rolling their own engine.

[1] PDF: https://app.sensortower.com/vgi/assets/reports/The_Big_Game_...

Same with Godot. I'm writing a desktop app, and I get cross-platform support out-of-the-box. I don't even have to recompile or write platform-specific code, and doesn't even need Win32 APIs.

One aspect I wonder about is the move of graphics API from DX11 (or OpenGL) to DX12/Vulkan, while there have been benefits and it's where the majority of effort is from vendors they are (were?) notoriously harder to use. What strikes me about gaming is how broad it is, and how many could make a competent engine at a lower tech level, but fits their needs well because their requirements are more modest.

I also wonder about the developer availability. If you're capable of handling the more advanced APIs and probably modern hardware and their features, it seems likely you're going to aim at a big studio producing something that big experience, or even an engineer at the big engine makers themselves. If you're using the less demanding tech it will be more approachable for a wider range of developers and manageable in-house.

>I've heard it said in jest, but the most stable API in Linux is Win32.

Sometimes the API stability front causes people to wonder if things would be better if FreeBSD had won the first free OS war in the 90s. But I think there's a compromise that is being overlooked: maybe Linux devs can implement a stable API layer as a compatibility layer for FreeBSD applications.

>I also wonder if it's long-term sustainable. Microsoft can do hostile things or develop their API in ways Valve/Proton neither need nor want, forcing them to spend dev time keeping up.

Not while they continue to have the Xbox division and aspire to be the world's biggest publisher.

Hear me out:

Containers. Or even just go full VM.

AFAIK we have all the pieces to make those approaches work _just fine_ - GPU virtualization, ways to dynamically share memory etc.

It's a bit nuts, sure, and a bit wasteful - but it'd let you have a predictable binary environment for basically forever, as well as a fairly well defined "interface" layer between the actual hardware and the machine context. You could even accommodate shenanigans such as Aurora 4X's demand to have a specific decimal separator.

We could even achieve a degree of middle-ground with the kernel anti-cheat secure boot crowd - running a minimal (and thus easy to independently audit) VM host at boot. I'd still kinda hate it, but less than having actual rootkits in the "main" kernel. It would still need some sort of "confirmation of non-tampering" from the compositor, but it _should_ be possible, especially if the companies wanting that sort of stuff were willing to foot the bill (haha). And, on top of that, a VM would make it less likely for vulnerabilities of the anti-cheat to spread into the OS I care about (a'la the Dark Souls exploit).

So kinda like Flatpak, I guess, but more.

Check out the Steam Linux Runtime. You can develop games to run natively on Linux in a container already.

Running the anti-cheat in a VM completely defeats the point. That's actually what cheaters would prefer because they can manipulate the VM from the host without the anti-cheat detecting it.

There is no "real" GPU virtualization available for regular consumer, as both AMD and NVIDIA are gatekeeping it for their server oriented gpus. This is the same story with Intel gatekeeping ECC ram for decades.

Even if you run games in container you still need to expose the DRM char/block device if you want vulkan,opengl to actually work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPU_virtualization#mediated

I try to get as many (mostly older, 2D) Windows games as possible to run in QEMU (VirtualBox in the past). Not many work, but those that do just keep working and I expect they will just always work ("always" relative to my lifetime).

WINE and Proton seems to always require hand holding and leaks dependencies on things installed on the host OS as well as dependencies on actual hardware. Used it for decades and it is great, but can never just relax and know that since a game runs now it will always run like is possible with a full VM (or with DOSBox, for older games).

GPU sharing for consumers is available only as full passtrough, no sharing. Have to detach from host.

12th gen and later intel iGPU can do sr-iov.

MS has supported doing gpu virtualization for years in hyper-v with their gpu-pv implementation. Normally it gets used automatically by windows to do gpu acceleration in windows sandbox and WSL2, however it can be used with VMs via powershell.

> Microsoft can do hostile things or develop their API in ways Valve/Proton neither need nor want, forcing them to spend dev time keeping up.

If they decide to do this in the gaming market, they don't need to mess up their API. They can just release a Windows native anti-cheat-anti-piracy feature.

> They can just release a Windows native anti-cheat-anti-piracy feature.

Unless it's a competitive game and it's a significant improvement on current anticheat systems I don't see why game developers would implement it. It's only going to reduce access to an already increasing non-windows player base, only to appease Microsoft?

Also in order to circumvent a Windows native version wouldn't that be extremely excessive and a security risk? To be mostly effective they would need to be right down the 0 ring level.. just to spite people playing games outside of Windows?

Existing anticheat software on Windows already runs in ring 0, and one of the reasons that competitive games often won't work on Linux is precisely that Wine can't emulate that. Some anticheat softwares offer a Linux version, but those generally run in userspace and therefore are easier for cheaters to circumvent, which is why game developers will often choose to not allow players that run the Linux version to connect to official matchmaking. In other words, for the target market of developers of competitive games, nothing would really get any worse if there was an official Microsoft solution.

On the other hand, using an official Microsoft anticheat that's bundled in Windows might not be seen as "installing a rootkit" by more privacy-conscious gamers, therefore improving PR for companies who choose to do it.

In other words, Microsoft would steamroll this market if they chose to enter it.

Also Microsoft closing the kernel to non-MS/non-driver Ring 0 software is inevitable after Crowdstrike, but they can't do that until they have a solution for how anti-cheat (and other system integrity checkers) is going to work. So something like this is inevitable, and I'm very sure there is a team at Microsoft working on it right now.

> just to spite people playing games outside of Windows?

These things are always sold as general security improvements even when they have an intentional anti-competitive angle. I don't know if MS sees that much value in the PC gaming market these days but if they see value in locking it all down and think they have a shot to pull it off, they'll at least try it.

In theory a built in anti-cheat could framework have a chance at being more effective and less intrusive than the countless crap each individual game might shove down your throat. Who knows how it would look in practice.

Steam has versioned Steam Linux Runtimes in an attenpt to address that. Curently it's only leveraged by proton but maybe it will help in the future.

It's like a flatpack, stabilized libraries based on Debian.

I run Fedora 43 and all games (single tickbox in settings) are running through "compatibility mode" (wine/proton). Works great!

Yeah that's been my experience with native Linux builds too. Most of them were created before Proton etc got good, and haven't necessarily been maintained, whereas running the Windows version through Proton generally just works.

Unfortunately it seems supporting Linux natively is pretty quickly moving target, especially when GPUs etc are changing all the time. A lot of compatibility-munging work goes on behind the scenes on the Windows side from MS and driver developers (plus MS prioritizing backwards compat for software pretty heavily), and the same sort of thing now has a single target for peoples efforts in Proton.

It's less elegant perhaps than actual native Linux builds, but probably much more likely to work consistently.

Sometimes you see developers posting on /r/linux_gaming and generally the consensus from the community is mostly "just make sure proton works" which is pretty telling.

It's sort of a philosophical bummer as an old head to see that native compatibility, or maybe more accurately, native mindshare, being discarded even by a relatively evangelical crowd but,

- as a Linux Gamer, I totally get it - proton versions just work, linux versions probably did work at some point, on some machines.

- as a Developer, I totally get it - target windows cause that's 97% of your installs, target proton cause that's the rest of your market and you can probably target proton "for free". Focus on making a great game not glibc issues.

I mostly worry about what happens when Gabe retires and Valve pivots to the long squeeze. Don't think proton fits in that world view, but I also don't know how much work Proton needs in the future vs the initial hill climb and proof-of-success. I guess we'll get DX13 at some point, but maybe I'll just retire from new games and just keep playing Factorio until I die (which, incidentally does have a fantastic native version, but Wube is an extreme outlier.)

1. I think targeting compatibility is 99% as good as targeting native.

2. You’re discarding the shifting software landscape. Steam OS and Linux are trending towards higher PC gaming market share. macOS has proven you don’t need much market share to force widespread (but not universal) compatibility.

3. I don’t see the value in a purist attitude around Linux gaming. The whole point of video games is entertainment. I’m much less concerned with if my video game is directly calling open source libraries then if my {serious software} is directly calling open source libraries.

On point 3, I guess my views are different because my {serious software} is usually work, and if it stops working that's kind of a B2B problem and part of doing enterprise. It's just business as they say.

Gaming is much more meaningful to me as a form of story and experience, and it is important to me that games keep working and stay as open and fair as possible. In the same way it is important I can continue to read books, listen to music or watch movies I care about.

I would hope Vulkan also does a lot of work here for linux native builds but I must admit I am only now starting my journey into that space.

A lot of those Linux native builds will have been using Vulkan.

Parity between DX12 and Vulkan is pretty high and all around I trust the vkd3d[0] layer to be more robust than almost anything else in this process since they're such similar APIs.

The truth is that it's just a whole lot harder to make a game for Linux APIs and (even) base libraries than it is to make it for Windows, because you can't count on anything being there, let alone being a stable version.

Personally I don't see a future where Linux continues being as it is (a culture of shared libraries even when it doesn't make sense, no standard way of doing the basics, etc.) and we don't use translation layers.

We'll either have to translate via abstraction layers (or still be allowed to translate Win32 calls) to all of the nasty combination of libraries that can exist or we'll have to fix Linux and its culture. The second version is the only one where we get new games for Linux that work as well as they should. The first one undeniably works and is sort of fine, but a bit sad.

0 - vkd3d is the layer that specifically translates D3D12 to Vulkan, as opposed to vkdx which is for lower D3D versions.

I have a slightly different view. The former scenario is essentially having our cake and eating it too. I'd rather not "fix" Linux culture.

Too late for an edit now, but `vkdx` in the note here is supposed to say `dxvk`.

It's not really harder to make a good native Linux port that will keep working, it's just not something most game developers have much experience with.

> Unfortunately it seems supporting Linux natively is pretty quickly moving target

With the container-based approach of the Steam Linux Runtime this should no longer be a problem. Games can just target a particular version and Steam will be able to run it forevermore.

When I run into issues with running games on Linux (Steam or otherwise), I found it useful to consult protondb.com to see what others have gotten to work. You can filter by OS or keyword etc.

https://www.protondb.com/app/337000 for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

A wise man once said "The most stable ABI on linux is win23". It sounds like a joke, but it is actually true.

It's the same with Dying Light. They have a neglected Linux version and I downloaded 16GiB before i realised to switch to the Windows version and start again.

I wiped windows 10 from desktop. Installed cachyos and steam Installed path of exile 2

and it worked surprisingly, also i see people joking about how win32 is the only stable api on linux xD. Also heard red dead redemption 2 also works well on linux that might be the next game i will check out.

I can confirm I finished RDR2 in story mode in Bazzite, zero issues. Never played the multiplayer part, though.

Story mode is good enough for me

In my experience, Steam client and most games work great on Debian and Ubuntu, but you should know for GNU/Linux systems, it's only officially supported on Ubuntu (maybe SteamOS is implicit), I can't find the information on Steam's website or support pages, but this is a response I got from Steam Support when reporting a Steam client UI bug on Debian with GNOME, a while ago.

Which is funny because Ubuntu is also the only distro that wants you to install the Steam snap instead, which is then again unsupported.

>So if anything goes wrong in my install, it’ll be a lot of forum-hopping and Discord searching to figure it all out

This is not inaccurate, however every time I've had to interface with either Microsoft or Adobe issues, both the professional and community support have been abysmal. Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post.

Maybe the linux forums self select for independent problem solvers..

Community forums/support from big companies like Microsoft and Adobe tend to be completely useless. In most cases, all threads follow the same flow:

* Question with reasonable amount of detail.

* A reply from some "Community Helper" (Rank: Gold): "did you try reading the help files?"

* Another person with a "Staff" badge: "this isn't our department"

[Thread closed.]

At least it's not Qualcomm support forums.

"Talk to the sales about this functionality. [Thread closed]"

I have some respect for the Oracle's honesty in putting stuff like "this bug can't be solved in the cheapest version of the software, buy the upgrade package X if you need it fixed" right on the forum.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. Every enterprise OSS company operates like that. People paying for support and funding the project get to make requests. Anyone else can submit a PR or be happy with the free software. It’s a pretty good deal if you ask me.

Granted, Oracle charges a lot just to even use the software, but I still don’t think it’s unreasonable to limit certain types of requests for higher paying customers. Pay base price and you get to use the software, get updates and call tech support. Pay a premium and they prioritize bug fixes and features for you.

The "no guarantee of fitness for a purpose" people put on the terms of software they sell is bullshit. There is something wrong with selling software with some functionality and then requiring customers to buy other pieces of software to make that functionality work.

That said, yes, they still handle that bit better than most large companies.

You could ask the company to remove that clause for you, but it may come with two or three extra zeroes at the end of the price tag because of the legal and support ramifications that come with it.

You could make such a clause illegal, but then all software would have to come with those two or three extra zeroes.

* Helper: This is a great suggestion which I'll flag for the team to add support (5 years ago)

For what it’s worth the people who made that sort of post are probably vaguely annoyed at the lack of progress on this change, or on other ones on their own particular list of requests that have been moldering for half a decade while everyone spends three dev cycles adding half-assed AI bullshit features.

Or "Did you try rebooting?"

The Microsoft Way (tm)

Many OpenSource forums and software are like this. None of the help is there to help you use the system. It’s there for you to gain some deep knowledge that you don’t care about.

But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. some Linux distro needs to adopt some hardware line and partner with them to release a known good line of computers and polish the hell out of it. Like System 76 but nicer.

Almost all community help forums (for commercial and open source software) suffer from what I like to call "HaveYouTrieditis". You post a question, and without any root cause analysis or even a description of why it might work, people start posting "Have you tried X?" and "Have you tried Y?" and "You should try Z." These kinds of responses are almost always unhelpful.

I'm asking for help because I don't want to just try random things.

Lmao true.

Hah, this gave me a good laugh. There have been countless times where I have ran into this exact kind of situation, and it's not just limited to Microsoft and Adobe.

This is true, I chose to pick on MS and Adobe because the article closes with the admission that the author has backup Windows machines to run Adobe Creative Cloud in the 'inevitable' event that Linux has a problem.

For myself, those issues have been largely evitable; I think my longest current uptime on a running linux install is approaching 5 years..

Nailed it.

"Hello, thank you for posting. I understand you are having a problem with X. I assure you that you have my deepest sympathy in this time of trouble, and I will stop at nothing until this problem is fixed.

Have you tried running sfc /scannow?

...

Restart in Safe Mode?

...

Backup and Reinstall Windows. You can use OneDrive to backup if you have not already purchased a subscription."

> either Microsoft or Adobe issues

Please run sfc /scannow closes topic

Both MS and Adobe's forums are a complete joke, LLMs give better support than their respective "communities."

... and reinstall Windows is offered as the next step after sfc /scannow.

This is grossly unfair.

You've entirely omitted the `dism /cleanup-image /(scan|check|restore)-health` rain dance

Blast. Soz.

I've been using Windows since v1 or perhaps 2 - we had a "CAD" workstation at school back in the day. It was a RM Nimbus with a 80186 (yes!) in it. I own a Commodore 64 from 1984ish (still have it - it now has USB).

I also recall using telnet to access the internet (gopher, WAIS etc) and being asked by my boss in 1994ish to investigate this www thing that was making waves.

I found it after a lot of navigation through menu systems. This is a discussion about the real differences by Sir TBL: https://www.w3.org/History/1992/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html

My report was: it looked pretty much the same as the rest, which shows exactly how prescient I was! To be honest, back then it was hard to tell what on earth was going on in a telnet session. At the time I could get at a sort of hyperlinked system on my telly (CEEFAX) and there were other similar systems around the world.

In hindsight, I think graphics cemented the www's dominance. I remember discovering the Mosaic browser and leaving telnet at around the time when a MS President (yes the speccied one) decided the web was not going anywhere), and thinking "fuck: that's the future".

My biggest hope for LLM's was to finally be able to make sense of all the Microsoft documentation; the constant churn in product naming, different versions with varying levels of support and compatibility, the multitude of different API's to accomplish the same operation.. turns out the LLM's are just a confused as me :(

Every single auth related MS library/api I've tried to use has had three different doc pages saying a slightly different version of a slightly different part of what I actually need to know, and then the actual needed information being buried in a stack overflow post somewhere (and that information being slightly different again from the official MS docs).

Stack overflow was wrong then somehow ChatGPT knew what I was talking about when trying to set a dotnet environment variable in azure for an array in an app service. It has to be foo__0 not foo:0 so I broke production in a very nonobvious day for a day. At some point the foo__0 gets transliterated into foo:0 apparently?

The absolute worst location for this was, of course, the Azure or dotnet documentation sites. Cmon Microsoft you make both of these products surely this is a huge use case for your customers?

To be fair, that's an improvement over the status quo. Generally they are far more confused than me.

Asking Bing AI anything to do with MS Purview, (which is an M365 product for a range of data security applications), will result in several answers, all wrong and outdated, pointing to documentation that is also wrong and outdated, pointing to other documentation that doesn't exist.

For sure. Despite its reputation, troubleshooting is much easier on Linux than on commercial OSes. It's not even close.

Beyond the sensibility of Unix compared to Windows, it turns out having the source code for everything and a fleet of AI agents makes it really straightforward to diagnose problems.

Even just knowing that most of the time if I launch an application from the terminal it'll probably tell me what it's doing. For Windows, I'm looking for log files uhh... maybe %appdata% somewhere... maybe C:\Windows\Temp... maybe debugview... maybe a crash dump which is umm... somewhere...

The worst online fora for support are for 'for profit' companies.

I had one where I was trying to get mongosh (or similar, I think they have had multiple shells) to change some print behavior I had multiple users coming in and giving me incorrect answers to a different question that was easily found in the docs and then begging me to mark the question as solved with them as the respondent and they were always written as though I was some sort of child-king that needed to be kow-towed to.

This kind of gamification of support fora incentivises responding rather than responding with correct answers.

Conversely Linux fora always have people who are at best polite and largely know their shit. They will help you hunt down the problem until the point where you hit that it's actually a firmware bug and you gain skills along the way.

The use of the Latin plural fora really resonates. It's like they are their own class of organism evolving in a digital terrarium.

I've set Kagi to blacklist sites like answers.microsoft.com for a reason.

> Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post.

As a total sidenote, I do wonder when exactly stack exchange/overflow saw the writing on the wall with AI coding?

I don’t need to look for Denver 069 2004 post about MQTT request response options where someone pointed him to a now 404 link, I just talked to Claude about it and we came up with a solution directly to my problem, using my code as an example.

> and Discord searching

Yikes. This is the main issue of Discord, it's not publicly searchable.

This week we closed the doors on our Linux gaming podcast, which has run continuously for the past 13 years. No fuss, no drama. With the announcement of Steam Machine II (we also covered the original launch), it just seemed like the right time. Proton has evolved to the point where most things work out of the box. Few people are bothering with native support, and it’s become difficult to find new things to cover.

It really feels like everything is lined up for the year of Linux in the living room, and it’s great to see.

Wait, what was the reason for winding down the podcast?

> Few people are bothering with native support

Was the podcast an attempt to increase porting efforts to Linux? But Proton (and now Steam Machine II) took the wind out of your sails?

I never listened to the podcast, but I see where you're coming from and thanks for doing it anyway.

Twenty years ago I was in university and had a Debian install on a cheap-ass Acer laptop and I managed to get exactly two and a half games working under Wine: the first two Fallouts and about three hours of Civ IV before crash. Getting games to run at all was A THING so a podcast for that makes a lot of sense.

Today I have a full-time job and deleted the Windows partition from my expensive PC about three years ago... pretty much every game I've ever wanted to play since then has just WORKED. Better than on modern Windows, even. Not a lot to talk about there, I guess.

One thing I wish is that Valve could publish a 'Proton spec' that people could build against to ensure compatibility, but I imagine that that this would be an IP nightmare.

Can we have a link to the podcast?

I'm quite sure it's this one: https://linuxgamecast.com/podcasts/

Hmm, nothing about shutting down on that site?

Anticheat is a big issue that nobody seems to mention. I had to go back to windows for online games and it’s my understanding that there are deep technical reasons why anticheat on linux can’t be done the same way as on windows.

Because it's intractable on Linux and advocates don't want to admit that. The entire security model on Linux is resistant to deeper levels of access and control for applications, which is required for kernel level anti-cheat. While these forms of anti-cheats can't stop cheating, they are clearly more effective than user-space anti-cheats. For 99% of users, we gladly accept these more "invasive" anti-cheats because it means less cheating in the games we enjoy. Linux developers will never allow this kind of access because it is antithetical to their ideological beliefs around security. They gladly exclude any kernel level cheats to maintain the security model. It is a permanent impasse. One which I believe will never be solved with user-space or server-side detection. This is why the most common retort is: "just play different games."

To be frank, the argument that kernel level anti-cheats are invasive has never been all that accurate or compelling. Any user-space application already has numerous privileges which could ruin your day. You trust a developer and application every time you run it, irrespective of its access level. Valve has an opportunity now with SteamOS to impose technologies like SecureBoot and "safe" deeper layer anti-cheats which actually work. Yes, Linux enthusiasts would be up in arms, but it would mean that the most popular online FPS games would be supported on Linux, and I think that's far more important.

The other side is linux totally permits you to do whatever you like to your system, and then it's similar discussion to DRM (digital rights management, not direct rendering manager). When you're trying to the user from doing things they're not allowed to and the same user can fiddle with the system, there's no starting point for trust.

> For 99% of users, we gladly accept these more "invasive" anti-cheats because it means less cheating in the games we enjoy.

The modal user likely doesn’t even know anti-cheat exists, and if they did, wouldn’t care at all. They just want to play the game.

They want to play the game without cheaters. That's why studios use anti-cheats.

Well, it's not intractable if it's pushed to the underlying hardware and signed drivers.

Valve could build something into their chipset and start signing the Steam Deck drivers, create secure boot etc and essentially create an Apple SIP equivalent. Wouldn't work for the rest of the Linux ecosystem or other devices, and people would absolutely howl about it, but they could do it.

I run Steam in flatpak, so my games are sandboxed and do not have access to my home directory. I don’t have to trust anyone.

Same.

This is The Way.

Bonus: No game files junking up my home directory.

That's an added layer of protection but it's hardly foolproof. A malicious game/app can still:

* Exfiltrate personal data from allowed Flatpak directories

* Steal data you intentionally open via portals (e.g., documents, password files, wallet backups)

* Store malware or persistence files inside the Flatpak sandbox

* Use network access to phone home data or join botnets

* Abuse CPU/GPU for crypto mining

* Delete or modify files in your home directory if granted --filesystem=home

* Read browser cookies, auth tokens, SSH keys, cloud credentials if home is exposed

* Install persistence via ~/.config/systemd/user/ services

* Global keystroke logging on X11

* Screenshot entire desktop on X11

* Inject fake input events to the system (mouse/keyboard) on X11

* Record screen via portals if user once granted permission

* Gain full FS access if granted --filesystem=host

* Abuse DBus to change system settings or trigger polkit actions

* Install software outside the sandbox (e.g., ~/.local/bin or autostart scripts)

* Interact with hardware via /dev if granted --device=all

* Trigger kernel or driver privilege-escalation vulnerabilities

* Load or execute unsafe third-party mods, DLLs, or anti-cheat binaries

* Malicious patchers or mod loaders downloading external payloads

* Replace shell history or alter aliases to hide malicious activity

* Encrypt local or network-mounted files (ransomware)

* Spread laterally via stolen SSH keys to other machines

* Manipulate GPU/driver calls for rootkit-like persistence

* Abuse Wine/Proton compatibility layers to escape sandbox using native loaders

* Modify dotfiles (.bashrc, .profile) for stealth persistence

* Abuse LAN trust to attack other devices on the network

* Disrupt system performance via thermal abuse (extreme sustained loads)

* Exfiltrate browser sessions or wallet seeds stored in plaintext

* Execute background processes whenever game is launched without user awareness

Anticheat is a big non-issue that multiple people mention whenever Linux gaming is brought up. 5 popular anti-cheat games do not outweigh the whole ecosystem.

It is when those anticheats gatekeep the most popular PC games. For most gamers, they can't compromise on what they play and there is still a very large amount of potential games that would forbid a switch to another OS. See : https://areweanticheatyet.com/

> For most gamers, they can't compromise on what they play

I'm sorry, but 98% of video games are not competitive multiplayer IAP fests.

Most of those are addiction machines and f2p shitholes, that they isolate themselves from the system is a win in my book.

sour grapes

Well, sometimes the grapes actually are sour...

Not sure what you mean, in every thread there's someone that mentions anticheat as if to stress why Proton is never gonna be good enough.

You can be a true gamer™ even if you don't play the latest $90 AAA multiplayer FPS. To me not having a proprietary rootkit is a feature, and Windows is always there for those that are OK with being spied upon.

Anti-cheat is the only reason why I had to build a Win11 machine for games, and only games, some months ago.

Hadn't touched Windows in more than 10 years, and it's as bad as I remember it, everything is clunky, badly designed, no polish whatsoever.

The moment developers find a way to get their anti-cheat working in Linux I have absolutely no reason to ever boot a Windows machine again...

> The moment developers find a way to get their anti-cheat working in Linux I have absolutely no reason to ever boot a Windows machine again...

The trouble is that kernel-level anti-cheat sounds like something useful but it doesn't actually get you anything because the cheat developers are going to analyze and modify the anti-cheat code the same as they do the game code. And then having it running in kernel mode on the non-cheater's PC doesn't buy you anything when the anti-cheat code you wrote isn't actually running unmodified on the cheater's PC.

The cheat developers do have to put in the effort to analyze what it's doing in order for that to work, but the same is true of user-mode anti-cheat. Being in kernel mode doesn't solve or improve anything, it just creates a hazard because then bugs or malware in the anti-cheat code can compromise the entire system and are effectively granting themselves access to things you didn't approve, e.g. a game running as the kid's user account can't normally access the parent's tax returns, but in kernel mode it can. So what you want is for them to stop doing that.

Meanwhile the Windows kernel and the Linux kernel are completely different, so you're not going to be able to take Windows kernel anti-cheat code and run it in the Linux kernel even if you're not attempting to cheat. You'd have to have them to make a Linux-specific one, but you don't want them to, because they shouldn't be doing it at all.

This is entirely possible using TDX/SEV-SNP, running in a vm alongside a host OS. It's just a big engineering lift. They're almost certainly already working on it.

> where most things work out of the box

i really doubt this very much. i hope i am wrong.

I was still using Windows 8.1 at the start of 2024 and was trying to slowly shift away to Linux at the time, but circumstances beyond my control ended up throwing me into the deep end a lot quicker than I expected.

I'm really enjoying Linux. It's one of those things that makes me somewhat passionate about computing for the first time in a long time.

I'm one of those weird people that has been on Linux so long (wow, like over 2 decades now) I quite literally don't remember how to use Windows - even though I cut my teeth on it in the 90's. I dabble on the Mac to a moderate degree, but I'm just mostly comfortable on Linux, despite more BS than one would prefer. The benefits certainly outweigh the downsides (for most purposes), especially if you're technical enough to be self-sufficient.

When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?

If I wasn't super tech savvy, I can see why people would pay the absurd Mac tax - just throw money at the problem enough to make it go away.

> When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?

I think the sad reality is a lot of people simply don't care.

I specifically avoided Windows 10 because of the telemetry and the whole forced reboots for updates seem pretty annoying, and I didn't see it getting any better which is why I decided to try and move to Linux.

The only thing that held be back at the time was I was too ensconsed in my eight-year-old setup, so I needed to be able to do the same things on Linux; and I needed gaming to be viable. Which it thankfully is now to Proton.

And it's even more disgusting how Windows 11 has become considering it has the "we'll take screenshots of what you're doing every five seconds" stuff now. Sure, Microsoft claim they'll never see what people are doing, but what's stopping them from doing that in a future update?

At least people are slowly wising up to this; though a believe a good majority of new Linux users are because they don't want to create e-wase and replace a perfectly good computer just because Microsoft says "No."

Personally, I wish I'd swapped sooner.

There's at least a few factors:

- like boiling frogs, where things worsen gradually and you don't notice / hurt enough until it's too late

- accumulated bandaids over time to keep it bearable. e.g. knowing what settings to disable, perhaps having powershell scripts to debloat new machines, etc

- inertia. Hard to make big changes in general, even if they would help, because change is hard and usually costly

- forced to use Windows at work

I think MS Office is also singularly keeping people on Windows. That’s the only argument I don’t have a response to for getting my parents to switch.

I am confident that the lovely folks working on Wine are working as hard as possible to get maximal compatibility, and Wine (and Proton) is really a marvel of engineering at this point, but man I wish they would figure out how to get MS Office 2024 working.

To be clear, this is not a dig at the Wine people; I suspect MS Office is made purposefully difficult to get working on Wine, but man if they could get that working then there could be a huge exodus.

Genuinely interested - why particularly MS Office 2024, and not any older version?

It would have to just be a recent-ish version. I tried getting 2016 working as well and was unsuccessful.

Do people hate LibreOffice that much?

My dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel. LibreOffice does have an equivalent, but it's different enough to where he would be forced to port over large amounts of his code.

I think he could get over the different interface but I don't completely blame him for not wanting to redo all his work.

I use linux full time on my home PCs, and I want Libre Office to work for me.

I _can’t_ get equivalent functionality of Excel’s tables (named range, but it dynamically expands and applies formulas as you add more data). If you’ve got excel handy, open it up select a range and press control-L to see it.

There are endless forum threads of Libre Office boosters misunderstanding what the feature does and offering the halfway there equivalent.

I want this to work, but everyone uses excel’s feature set slightly differently and something will be missing for everyone. It’s incredibly annoying.

What do you end up using at home?

Most recent example, putting together a pretty basic car shopping spreadsheet I’ve just gotten pissed off and not done it.

Yes it’s petty, yes it means I just don’t do something easy. Yes in the end it’s only my problem.

I’ll probably just do it on excel for the web.

I don't use spreadsheets much anymore, and I end up just writing scripts for everything I would use Excel for. This isn't a brag, in fact it's sort of the opposite; I often miss the simplicity of Excel and I think for a lot of my scripts I would save time if I did them in in a spreadsheet.

One of these days, I should probably go through a tutorial series for LibreOffice and Star BASIC and properly learn it.

Anything ‘real’ I’ll do in R, but my wife is not super keen on that where we’re collaborating on something!

I'm not keen on R even at the best of times :)

If I need to do any kind of number crunchy stuff I usually use Julia right now. I really like Julia, it's a very cool language and platform, but for small things it's kind of overkill. I should really learn how to properly use LibreOffice.

We all have our vices! (It's what I learned first, and feel most confident in).

This has been a nice interaction which is increasingly rare online, thanks.

yes. It's terrible. I can't believe it's taken this long to still be awful. The mix of Java. The awful UI. If you're on Mac/Windows, you should buy Office. And if you're on Linux, you should use OnlyOffice, or Google Docs

This is an extremely niche problem that is probably not a factor for the vast majority of people: but my organization uses a shared dropbox account for file storage (yes, yes I know). The linux dropbox app does not have the smart download feature where you can see all files and folders but don't need to have them local unless you request them. The only options are to either download the entire dropbox folder, or to selectively sync certain files and folders, and then only be able to see those files and folders.

Given that the dropbox is some 4TB, but I often need to access things that I didn't previously need access to, this is a bit of a deal breaker.

You said it in your first sentence: you know that Dropbox is not designed to function the way you're using it. That's a kind of tech debt that may (will?) bite you in the ass eventually. Linux being incompatible with the way you use Dropbox is just a symptom of poor infrastructure and security practices, though I understand that it's probably out of your hands to fix.

Would some kind of rclone mount work with this?

The online MS Office is pretty good.

As far as I am aware, there is no support for the VBA on Office Online, which is a non-starter for my dad.

my solution was old laptop running Apollo and running moonlight on my Linux PC - use office that way. It's not ideal, but it works fine for me

> I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?

Some of us are in the weird spots where no OS "just works" and will require inordinate amount of setup and adjustments anyway.

I recently did an arch and Ubuntu install for two machines, and spend half a day each to get something mildly viable, and still tweak things from time to time two weeks after. Sheer hardware support was only a third of the pain.

Back in the days macos also took me about the same time to setup the local system , configure input and disable/workaround the silly stuff. Windows is on par IMHO (stuff are sillier, but disabling them takes about the same effort). For any of those I end with a fully working *nix system/subsystem, so the end setup makes very little difference to me.

The huge difference is windows having exotic[0] form factor support turned to 11, where linux will be rougher.

[0] I only care about tablets, I wonder if Bazzite could help, I'll be giving it a try in. few months I think.

Each time I've tried throwing Linux onto a new machine it's been a pain with drivers and compatibility. Things have slowly gotten better, but the last time I tried (using Mint) it still sucked big time.

I've used Linux for work (and school before that) for a long time, so I'm not intimidated by it, but it just feels like more effort than it's worth each time at home. I won't deny that Windows keeps getting more annoying though, so I'll probably give Linux an N-th try soon.

Edit: also, I'm a PC gamer, and I like having the option to play games like Fortnite or Valorant, even if I don't do so very often. But of course, I can solve that with dual booting if I really want to.

I'm also a long-time Linux user, but there are some things that still need Windows, so here are my cheat codes to make it usable:

O&O Shutup: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

All the missing privacy switches you'd want. Run it after any updates.

PowerToys: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

The real utilities you'll want to control your UI as a power user. Just autohide the taskbar and disable showing badges and flashing. It's a lost cause, and you can mostly just forget it exists. Use alt+space to launch things and keyboard or mouse shortcuts for window management. It's actually pretty good at mixing floating and tiling.

WSL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

I'm sure you know about it, but it works well even for most GUI apps these days, although it still doesn't support fractional scaling.

Windows 8.1 in 2024? Why? You have Win10 which is miles better if you needed Windows.

Very curious what kept you on 8.1.

"If it ain't fixed, don't broke it."

But it was broke, security support ended 3 years ago.

I wouldn't use a condom that broke 3 years ago.

Support ended in January 2023...

who cares? it impacts nothing. windows updates are counter productive for a decade. "but security and zero days!!"

ok surely that firewall and home lab and ability to not download and run garbage is enough for someone on the supposed "hacker news" to handle. but no, we got heaps of people using "out of support" as some sort of argument whatsoever to upgrade to absolutely dogshit versions of windows. make it make sense

People get their identities stolen every day, and it is a super, super, super shitty process to go through depending on how deep it goes. It can change your life forever.

Having oldass OS and application versions make that a thousand times easier when you have so, so, so many CVEs you can exploit. And LLMs have been show to make this very trivial now.

All you need to do is click on the wrong pop-up, or the wrong link in your email, or tap something on your phone screen, or have a poorly configured (often from the factory) router, and the initial intrusion takes place. After that, an outbound encrypted session quickly gets setup, and congrats, now your network is acting as a residential proxy that can be sold to criminals that want to download CSAM from your IP, AI companies that will use your connection for scraping, and other elements that will either mine the data on your systems (your PII, logins, etc) and scrape your screens.

But if you don't care about your life becoming a living hell, then I can't make you.

This happens all the time, every day.

If you have a car, you maintain it. If you have a bike, you maintain it. Power tools? You maintain them. Your electronic devices also need to be maintained. They have access to your most sensitive data, and potentially private conversations.

If you're behind a NAT and have an evergreen browser, say FF with UBO, avoid email attachments, etc... it's not very risky.

Did you know a website can scan your lan through a browser now?

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access

Did you know that a lot of current home router NAT implementations are currently broken, in particular for UDP traffic handling, and you can therefore spoof your way into the network?

https://www.armis.com/research/nat-slipstreaming-v2-0/

A lot of router vulnerabilities floating around out there.

Ever hear of UPnP/UPnP2? Did you know that applications can trigger your router to open inbound ports for you?

There have also been some 0 click exploits lately, those are fun. You don't have to do anything at all!

https://github.com/Defense-Intelligence-Agency/Zero-Click-Ex...

Yeah, you're still at risk, and moreso because you're not aware of how open you are.

You're talking to a Slashdot refugee. Haven't ever had UPnP available. I don't use Chrome and do use OpenWRT with AdGuard, you insensitive clod. ;-)

I had a 5 or 6 digit ID which was pretty good for a kid not from the Bay Area, but I never got into slashdot flame wars. I still reflexively check it many times a day.

I have a five but I didn’t make an account for a long time.

Do you think that the average HN commenter has the same phishing risk as your grandpa?

They're fine.

Everybody says that until it happens to them. Every time.

Considering I'm going 40 years strong of not once falling for a phishing scam, I feel pretty confident in my assessment that I won't do so in the future. It has to be an exceptionally good phish to get anyone moderately technical to even take a second look. And even then, generally one can tell upon a second look. It's not hard to not get phished.

It can be visually identical to the real domain.

https://www.kicksecure.com/wiki/Unicode

It's also happened with code pushes on GitHub, which didn't get caught in code review, and has compromised build processes by introducing a malicious domain that is visually identical.

Sounds like a HN-type problem.

https://www.knostic.ai/blog/zero-width-unicode-characters-ri...

I felt the same until my company's IT department got me with a (thankfully simulated) well-made phish on some bleary-eyed morning after a birthday party when I was only half awake.

Everybody feels confident until a slip happens. It's really just a function of probability and time acting against you as well as anybody, just like companies shouldn't ask themselves whether they'll be hacked, but when.

It also seems to me that phishing has become vastly more sophisticated in recent years, IMHO mainly due to 3 issues:

1. A growing number of huge data leaks that enable scammers to profile and target possible victims to an unprecedented degree and attack them using unexpected vectors. I remember my feelings sinking the day I received the first phish that contained basically all my personal data to address me. Once it's out there and traded, there ain't no getting back. As a consequence, spear phishing has become much more automated and widespread.

2. Proliferation of 2FA, often via email, as a supposed remedy-for-all which leads to a false sense of security.

3. The sheer ignorance of some actors that continue to undermine all the best awareness efforts and normalize insecure practices. For god's sake, I've received unsolicited emails from my bank as well as from globally acting online retailers telling me to click on a link and log in to solve some issue. To my great astonishment, both turned out to be legit. What the hell were they thinking?

Really, I wish all of us good luck. But I don't feel so confident anymore, rather like an unwilling participant in a lopsided arms race, where the adversaries have great resources at their disposal, and I have nothing more to rely on than my wits. ... Actually, put this way, it sounds like a classic cyberpunk tale. There's some appeal to it, I admit, but still.

In practice this doesn't affect the overwhelming majority of people as they're either not going to be compromised (the most likely case) or, in the tiny chance they're compromised, they're not going to notice (in which case from their perspective it still "isn't broken").

It isn't like this is the original WinXP during the era where computers connected directly to the open internet and caught viruses just by existing, making computers groan and being very visible that something was wrong. Pretty much everyone is connected via a firewall and on top of that Windows has improved its security considerably over the years. And there are still security updates for browsers (the main vector for malware by far) that support Win8.x (e.g. Firefox ESR will be supporting Win8.x until next year and people have made Win7 and Win8 compatible builds for modern Chromium).

So it isn't surprising that for all intents and purposes it isn't broken, especially when the alternative is having to change to something that feels like downgrade in terms of UX. From a user's perspective it is a choice between the unlikely potential of something invisible perhaps happening (getting compromised) versus the absolute certainty of something very visible happening (having to get used to a worse UX). Considering Windows still tie security updates with everything else, it isn't surprising that people judge based on what they perceive the most.

Of course the best solution would be to switch to an OS where such choices are not necessary in the first place. I've been using Window Maker since early 2000s and the UI has remained the same since 1997 when WM was first made, aside from the occasional theme change (which is done only whenever i personally feel like it, i.e. is not forced on me) while at the same time i'm using the latest Linux kernel, C library, drivers, etc with all security fixes. I do not have any choice between having security fixes or using a GUI that i am comfortable with - i get to have both.

It is VERY much a "compromised but don't know it, or it doesn't slow down things or break enough for them to notice" territory.

The state of security is /awful/ for general users.

But they also can't figure out how somebody keeps getting into their email account, why they get text messages that quickly disappear from history, or what these weird charges that keep showing up on their bank statement are...

Unfortunately, these days it's arguably safer to run an unsupported version of Windows. Microsoft is obsessed with putting adware and features that put your data at risk into the OS, so it's not clearly the best choice to stay current any more.

Software is not "broken" just because it doesn't get updated with new spyware and adware every week. This is a misconception spread by companies like Microsoft.

No.

Software is "broken" even before it gets updated.

If what you said were true, there would be no such thing as a zero-day.

Just use it for gaming.

> but circumstances beyond my control ended up throwing me into the deep end a lot quicker than I expected

As a Linux user since 2006/7, I totally understand. I had atleast 1 computer at home that would dual-boot to either Windows or Linux. Regardless, I had to have a Windows system.

My reasons may not be the same as yourself - but I do still get stuck and HAVE to use Windows from time-to-time. It's not just for playing games or work related. It's sometimes a simple file I have to download, fill in and email back. The file is likely a Microsoft Excel or Word file and while OpenOffice/LibreOffice is good most of the time, there is bound to be something off.

Sometimes my kids will have homework (going back a few years now) and it would only work on Internet Explorer despite the fact Chrome was dominant back then.

(I remember, back in 2008, I would ensure the websites I created had decent support for Firefox as well as Internet Explorer, despite my boss telling me "everyone uses Internet Explorer" - that soon changed by 2010 with Chrome)

Thing is these problems are not the fault of Linux, or the Office suite, or the web browsers. The problem was the people using files specific to a brand, or focusing on specific web browser, etc. However, many people wont view it like that. In these scenarios.. Linux was the problem.

I always remember writing my Resumes for recruitment agencies. I would hand over it is 3 formats. ODT, PDF, and DOCX. I did this because I was not sure how the DOCX version would look on Microsoft Word. Of course, it looked great in Open/Libre Office.

I always encouraged the PDF version.

> I'm really enjoying Linux. It's one of those things that makes me somewhat passionate about computing for the first time in a long time.

100%!

This is bad. New user going onto an arch distro with a ton of tweaks is worst case scenario for a smooth experience.

I'm sure cachyOS will work a treat out of the box, but i'm also sure that one day things will stop working and cascade into a distro hop or reinstall leaving a sour taste in the users mouth.

You do not need a "gaming" distro, all distros use the same software and you will be fine on ubuntu, fedora etc.

Agreed. I'm surprised by the amount of Linux newcomers being directed toward these weird, specialized derivatives that have existed >2 years.

It’s almost certainly driven by a desire for everything to work as expected out of the box.

Speciality derivatives come with attention to detail and purpose-fitting that often isn’t found in general purpose distros, like how Nobara has a system to auto-apply fixes for common problems or how Bazzite includes an overlay for game stats (framerate, etc). Rolling and bleeding edge distros have been popular because people want to use the latest hardware.

Can you get these things with a general purpose distro with older kernels? Sure, but the process varies depending on distro, hardware, use case, etc and isn’t necessarily accessible to many, even with the selection bias towards a technical mindset that comes with wanting to switch to Linux. It’s the same reason why Windows has been popular for so long and why Valve has seen outsized success with Linux: the fiddly bits have been minimized.

Major distros could pull in many of these users by sinking resources into that golden “out of the box” experience and aggressive hunting down and fixing of papercuts.

okay but this should just be upstreamed into a real distro, we don't need 1000 distros that are all reimplementing the same thing

There’s merit to that idea, but upstreaming is easier said than done. There’s a whole gauntlet of politics and bikeshedding to get past among other issues, which is why these things are separate distros in the first place.

Bazzite provides a Steam-OS gaming-centric interface out of the box. How are you going to upstream that? You think Debian stable is going to agree all of a sudden provide it's users a gaming console UI?

Isn't that just Steam's Big Picture mode?

It's an entire login session, steam game mode runs BPM via the game scope compositor, no desktop is loaded in the background, etc. The Steam client also enables hardware controls not available in traditional BPM.

You can look up gamescope-session for more info.

Its something that I generally wouldn't expect on traditional mainstream distros.

Debian -- probably not, but Ubuntu has numerous variants whose primary purpose is providing a different desktop experience, and a SteamOS-like variant would fit in perfectly with that.

That’d still come with the limits brought by the old kernels Ubuntu ships.

Which as an aside, I think distros should advertise better. It must be awful to be sold on a distro only to find that it doesn’t support your newish hardware. A simple list of supported hardware linked on the features and download pages would suffice but a little executable tool that will tell you if your box’s hardware is supported would be even better.

Ideally, this would be the best solution, but what happens when the upstream distro packagers disagree with the vision of one of these downstream distro maintainers?

Things that are basic table stakes for PC gamers are unnecessary edge cases or outright seen as negatives by the average Gnome or Wayland maintainer.

> Things that are basic table stakes for PC gamers are unnecessary edge cases or outright seen as negatives by the average Gnome or Wayland maintainer.

What do you mean "PC Gamers"?

It's not limited to PC Gamers. The CAD program I use for PCB layout won't run with full functionality under Wayland because "The Developers Know Best".

So, having to choose between Wayland or delivering PCBs, guess what my choice was.

Gnome and Wayland are really user-hostile - if their vision doesn't align with what the majority of users want, its the users that are wrong, not the developers.

Its JUST gnome thats blocking that protocol.

I remember what got me to reinstall Windows after running Ubuntu for a week or two several years ago was they switched from Xorg to Wayland and I literally couldn’t watch movies because they switched over without Wayland supporting this?

It was absolutely bonkers to me and soured me from Linux for years.

I’ve administered thousands of Linux boxes but it’s a totally different ball game.

They don't keep separate packages for fun. Many of the changes would not be accepted to an upstream.[1] That's usually why the derived distro exists in the first place. Imagine arguing that Ubuntu should just be upstreamed into Debian.

[1]: https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/

Why don’t you do it?

i don't have a problem recommending people use bazzite because of the nature of the whole system. It makes it harder for regular users to break it, while making it easy(er) to rollback.

To me, I find it a bit frustrating that Arch linux routinely has "manual intervention required" problems every single year where the intervention is just a single command that pacman could have just ran themselves if they so desired. Sometimes, they get a new developer and you have to manually install their keys first otherwise packages fail authentication. What can you do in the face of that except conclude they don't want things to "just work" and create a derivative in the hopes of making things just work.

Is it bad? SteamOS is an Arch based and extremely user friendly gaming-focused distro.

If all you want to do is play steam games then I'm sure steamOS is going to be the best experience possible. If you want to use it as a regular PC it probably works reasonably well but a user who doesn't want to use the terminal is more likely to run into a brick wall at some point (e.g. connecting to a printer or something). Something like Linux Mint is going to give an overall friendlier experience for someone new to Linux even if running steam games on it is slightly less friendly.

Ironically connecting a new Brother printer was the most painless thing I've ever done on Linux, because I didn't do anything at all. Linux saw it appear on the network and it just worked.

New printers implement the print server themselves, which I assume is why CUPS driver support is being deprecated. Basically, they're all HTTP* servers so no driver/etc support is needed.

It certainly can be for newer printers. I guess my point was that, at some point, you will run into a problem. It might not be connecting a printer but, with an Arch based distro, there is a high likelihood you will need to do some cmdline stuff at some point. In a Mint etc that likelihood is smaller.

I've stopped recommending ubuntu for beginners by default, as the now only-wayland mode is beyond the level I can support

If you want to game, then picking a "gaming distro" probably is the right choice.

Sure, you could use Fedora. But you need to know about enabling RPM Fusion, 32 bit repos for steam, etc. Now THAT is how you get someone to give up.

It's two checkboxes in the gui to enable RPM Fusion, and then you click “Steam”. It's not that hard.

Itemized bill:

Chalk mark $1

Knowing where to put it $999

So easy it requires a 140 lines of howto: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/rpmfusion-se...

It's easy for us. It's not clear how someone coming from windows would even know that they had to do this, much less do it.

This is part of the installer now. New users will select this when setting the distro up

That is amazing news! My biggest gripe with Fedora has always been that it is recommended to new users and then 80% of the time they have an Nvidia card and you end up with "Linux sucks if you use Nvidia" even though the official drivers work well if you install them correctly (i.e using your distro-provided method, not going to nvidia.com and downloading a file which is what most people coming from Windows will do).

I've used the official nVidia drivers, they definitely don't work well compared to AMD/Intel on Linux. They're usable and more or less stable, but on my computer I was seeing stuff like window contents freezing, graphics stuttering, screen tearing on video playback, the mouse cursor lagging when there was high CPU usage, etc. and it all went away when I switched to an AMD card. Everyone I've talked to has has the same experience: weird performance hiccups or glitches that go away as soon as you stop using nVidia.

I've used the official Nvidia drivers on Linux for 5 years now and had excellent performance and few or no graphical glitches, with most issues coming early on. None within the last 2 years. Never experienced high CPU or freezing.

My cards have been a 2080, 3070 Ti, 4070M, and 4090. I could barely get an AMD card (6600 or something?) to work.

Now you have talked to someone who has not had that experience. And everyone I have talked to says they have had an experience either like mine, or like mine minus issues with AMD.

Performance is good but there are a few caveats. Namely dx12 perf (identified and being worked on), vram limit stutter (doesn't page to system memory well), HDR enabling requiring basically a hack because Nvidia doesn't want to implement color managent wayland uses, and some other annoyances.

The new installer isn't as good as Ubuntu's IMHO, but holy moly it's so much better than the old one. I recently tried installing Fedora Silverblue (which still has the old installer), and besides being terribly confusing, it also errored out consistently This led me to install regular Fedora and then convert it to Silverblue, so I got to compare the two installers. It's not even funny how much better it is.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/gaming/proton/ would be the relevant set of instructions that a user would find upon typing "fedora steam". And it's maybe ten lines of instruction or a couple pages of GUI, because they're including such steps as “scroll down” and “close the window”.

Launch the terminal as first step. Yeah. That's why no good.

Or read the other instructions that don't involve a terminal at all.

Tell me you don’t understand how gaming devices work.

Repeatedly after me: you boot, you buy a game, you play. That’s it.

“Repeat after me”, and then describes the normal flow after steam is installed, in a thread about choosing an operating system to install on bare hardware…

Usually this is not the main problem that people run into. Most often we take basics of terminal usage and config management for granted, and these are the hardest parts for new comers to learn, because they often don't know the conventions and the unwritten laws of the typical config file format, and once they get a weird error due to for example a non-existent config file or insufficient permissions and they search the exact error message, they get lost in deep, unrelated technical discussions of more obscure problems that real sys-admins encounter. They don't know that they should search for the basics, and along with weird cryptic error messages they can easily get stuck on a trivial tasks for hours ...

The other day I handed my Arch laptop to a friend (a mechanical engineer) who liked tinkering with computers, had a few papers on $RECENT_AI_TOPICS, and was considering moving to arch to learn Linux. I advised him to start with Ubuntu and then move to arch, but he insisted so I gave him a quick test.

Since he was more or less comfortable with reading manuals and searching, I asked him to install nginx on my laptop and change the configs to listen on 8080. He eventually succeeded ... after 70 minutes or so. He installed nginx and started the service pretty easily in a couple of minutes, but then he got stuck on editing the config files. First, he wasn't familiar with the terminal file editors so he had to learn one (he chose vim and went through vimtutor) and then he opened the config file without sudo, so he couldn't save the file. Then he thought that maybe he needed to stop nginx first but that didn't work. And then he started reading nginx manuals and tutorials and SE threads for like 30 minutes. Finally he decided to search the vim error directly and then found the issue.

I have often heard similar stories, and I think the main hurdle for most people is not "the hard part" or RTFM, but it's "the unwritten part" and the conventions.

GP wasn't making a point about hand-editing configuration files, or rather, was obliquely making an obsolete point; he might as well have been complaining about modelines in xorg.conf.

NobaraOS is Fedora based and has solved a lot of these issues. They have a separate ISO to use if you have an Nvidia card that will handle all the akmods drivers for you for example.

It's also maintained by one guy. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the long term viability of the project.

Thats what Bazzite is for. (oci/bootc-based fedora for gaming)

My advice to anyone looking to make the switch is to just use Ubuntu until you're comfortable with the way a linux desktop works. The "gaming optimizations" for these enthusiast distros are marginal at best, usually just margin of error type stuff. Frankly, in my own tests gaming performance is just as good if not BETTER on Ubuntu in the general case than most other distros even the ones that market themselves as "optimized for gaming".

If you install something like Bazzite all of a sudden you're in the deep end of needing to learn how immutable distros work. It will turn people off that don't give a damn about this stuff.

Ubuntu is simple, easy to configure from the GUI, works with most things out of the box - including Steam - and is supported like a first-class citizen by the vast vast VAST majority of application developers.

I concur. I use Linux Mint and I have no problems with gaming.

I couldn't get Rocksmith 2014 running on Mint, which was a real PITA for me

I tried to install CachyOS with KDE on my wife's new laptop (Lenovo Yoga) about 3 weeks ago. The version available was 2025-08-28 (still is, just checked), and it was crashing KDE all the time. Quick research told me that version had lots of KDE bugs that have been since fixed, yet no new release.

Maybe it's different on Nvidia (wife's laptop had AMD graphics), but I expect a very bumpy road ahead of him.

Most of the updates to CachyOS are delivered via packages. You don't need an entirely new version of the distro image that often.

Right, I wanted to add that the journalist will be fine if they immediately update all packages but OTOH this is not what Windows users usually do.

I also recently got my FD, also switching to Linux, also chose CachyOS.

Worked great for a day or two but now updates aren't working because of some signing issue or something :|

Maybe I should switch to Fedora or Bazzite before getting too setup...

Have you tried updating everything using "sudo pacman -Syu" ?

I just had to update my CachyOS install last night, as some software I wanted to install was just getting 404 responses from the repos. Turns out they don't keep round old packages? I dunno, but the update command above fixed it.

No, I didn't, after the third freeze and reboot I just thought "why am I wasting my time on this crap?", wiped it and installed regular Arch Linux instead. That one was stable out of the box.

I absolute love KDE Plasma but I finally gave up for Mint Cinnamon LTS.

It has just been rock solid on any machine I have tried. KDE I was just always running into some kind of minor problem or something wouldn't work.

I have dolphin and konsole installed and open right now so once you get use to Cinnamon, it isn't really that much different but so rock solid with Mint.

It’s immutable, so if something goes bad it will just rollback. SteamOS, Bazzite, and others also work in a similar manner. I run several Bazzite boxes for gaming and they are nigh impossible to brick.

CachyOS is not an immutable distro.

Partially agree. If you're only using your PC to play Steam games and absolutely nothing else, especially if you want it to auto boot into Steams big picture ui and behave like a dedicated gaming console something like Bazzite is ideal.

But if you're using your PC like a PC and also doing other stuff imo it's better to install a 'regular' distro like Fedora or Ubuntu. I haven't had any difficulty installing steam and playing games on either of those.

I think something like Bazzite would be great for those wanting to game. The fact that it's going to be hard to break the system and just letting updates be applied automatically will make it more like a console than a PC in that regard. I also assume that switching to the desktop mode is not difficult. I just started using Fedora Bluefin last year, and I've been really happy with it and it's architecture is the same as Bazzite, but for devlopers.

I found it incredibly stupidly easy to break bazzite trying to change something relatively simple that isn’t even a required step most of the time (automatically mount my second internal ssd).

Copy and pasted some change in some file, save, restart, fully totally bricked.

Switching from and to desktop mode works exactly the same as on SteamOS, but if you are not setting up a handheld or HTPC, Bazzite also has regular KDE/GNOME desktop images, and even -dx images like Bluefin. I've been pretty happy with my various Bazzite installations.

actually I am running the most fk'ed up system you can find (two gpus from different vendors, dedicated usb pcie card, highly customized kde slapped on top of catchyos) and I haven't had any issues, way less issues than kde neon.

New user choosing operating system has most likely just bought a new laptop or PC. Especially for laptops, Arch (or anything rolling with latest kernel) _is_ the best choice, because of drivers.

> You do not need a "gaming" distro, all distros use the same software and you will be fine on ubuntu, fedora etc.

That's not necessarily true. I mean, you will be fine, but gaming is one of the areas where you can benefit from having everything on bleeding edge. And Cachy is surprisingly stable (and the "one day things will stop working" can realistically be said about any Linux distro, really).

Honestly I've been pleasantly surprised with CachyOS, admittedly I've been using Linux for over a decade but it was my first foray into Arch-land and I'm genuinely impressed with it. The stability is very good, and I'm yet to break anything seriously on it.

The idea isn't that it's a 'gaming distro' specifically, and more that it's suited to performance in general which can be a useful thing. If someone's new to Linux and doesn't understand why they might want to run something like CachyOS I agree they should just pick Ubuntu or similar and be done with it, but personally I rate CachyOS as a daily driver.

I use bazzite linux for gaming full time and can't say enough good things about it. You don't need to do anything at all to maintain it. Every Windows game I've ever tried just works perfectly out of the box. Sometimes I will see a warning telling me that a certain game is not certified for a good experience by Steam, and it all just works perfect anyway.

When I was running Windows on the same machine I was constantly trying to diagnose why things stopped working, and downloading drivers.

Perhaps my experience with Windows was worse than average, I don't know. But from my perspective there is zero reason not to run Linux full time for gaming.

There is one reason, anticheat, that at least was why i had to abandon bazzite for now. Otherwise i loved how easy it was to set up like a console for my kids to use without my help.

I still keep my dual boot Windows for this reason. EA decided to put anti-cheat on EA WRC, so now you cannot play it on Linux.

I play most of my games on Bazzite and anything requiring anti-cheat or use of my Logitech wheel on Windows

Also daily driving Bazzite on my gaming laptop, everything is supported out of the box (iGPU / dGPU switcher, fan control, LED keyboard, low/high screen refresh), there's barely any maintenance needed and it runs really smooth. The other day I connected my G27 (wheel, pedals and gear shifter) to play BeamNG, it just worked, no drivers, crapware or configuration needed.

I also use the same machine for dev work and everything works amazingly well.

In the 2000's I used to fear that not having windows at home would lead me to a lack of troubleshooting prowess when it comes to problems with windows at work.

Now I'm just glad I only have to suffer windows at work.

After some uni class at a conference room, back in 2006, there was a Linux hackathon/demo-y thingy outside where there were people showing off Compiz, the cube and that kind of stuff. Of course my noob ass was impressed with that - you can switch windows a 3d cube? That's amazing! That's the future! I want to try that!

So they were kind enough to give each one of us a Ubuntu 5.10 CD, one of those from back then when Canonical shipped free Ubuntu CDs to people around the world completely for free.

I can recall poking around that brown-y Gnome 2.x and feeling cozyness, like feeling at home. Everything felt transparent and humble and honest, from the desktop wallpaper, the icons and the typography to the tone the help pages were written. You could feel the ubuntu on it. It really felt like it was made for human beings.

The computer no longer felt like a dark box that only let you do things your license let you to do and if you dared to look at other direction, ever so slightly, things could go insanely wrong.

Granted, I didn't had internet at home back then (and wouldn't have it until late 2008 via a crappy 3G modem) so after nuking the Windows XP install and tried install it, also nuked the partition where I had all my uni docs and stuff and, defeated, had to go back to Windows via a pirate copy - until I had enough spare time to go learn what I did wrong and try again. Never went back ever since.

Things have changed a bit - Ubuntu is not what it what it used to be, I am not who I used to be (ended being a graphic designer) and not even the internet itself is not what it what it used to be - but I'm glad human creations like Linux still exist.

Man, Compiz! Ubuntu on CDs! :') Thank you for activating some core memories.

I really miss the old cozy days of Ubuntu as well. Ordered a set of CDs to pass out to friends in University sometime around 5.04 or 5.10 as well. I used to wish I could afford the ubuntu backpacks they sold at the time.

Like many others, I recently dove head-first into trying Linux as Windows 10 is no longer officially supported, and I really don't like a lot of design changes in Windows 11.

So I went and installed Fedora, and for the most part, everything's working great.

I use my machine for both work and gaming, and there are really two deal breakers right now on the work side:

1. Most of my work is web-based, and it's really surprising that this is an issue, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to get Chrome to use autoscroll on mouse middle click. In Firefox it's just there as an option, and worked great. The LLMs suggested adding a flag to the launch options (which was an additional layer of complexity because of flatpacks) but that doesn't actually work if you're using Wayland.

2. Google Drive. No native app. Was able to mount my drive with RClone, which works, but at the core of my workflow on Windows is using the Everything app (on hotkey) to quickly search my Drive files immediately as I type. I can't seem to get KRunner to index my Drive files. I add the folder path to the indexer, but it's not surfacing any results in there.

Gaming works great though.

> how to get Chrome to use autoscroll on mouse middle click

I'm using an extension for that: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/middle-button-scrol...

There used to be a more popular one, but it got dumped by Chrome recently, guess it wasn't up-to-date.

This one isn't perfect (eg sometimes it pastes clipboard on middle-click), but still it mostly works.

Thanks! This works pretty well.

Arg, but then middle clicking links to open in new tabs wont work any more.

Think Gemini 3 can one-shot a Chrome extension?

https://archive.ph/DNFkL

> So really, why wouldn’t I blow that up and start over?

I really wish more people would mention the option of dual booting. Use another separate SSD to install your linux OS and that way you always have the option of going back to your Windows install. You can even reserve some programs for Windows and do everything else with linux.

There's really no need to approach it with a "screw it" attitude. You'll probably get yourself in too deep with that approach.

This is the way. I've been dual booting with Ubuntu for almost 20 years now and my main finding these days is just how easy it has become and how rarely I need to switch to Windows. Sure, it happens and the option is always there, but Ubuntu as a daily driver is solid.

Why stop with only 2 OS’s? I triple boot with Haiku.

Windows has a rather famous bad habit of nuking any other OSes installed on the same drive, so you really do need an extra separate drive, which is inconvenient if you don't already have a separate drive.

Yeah this happened to me at least once, and I had to spend several hours with low-level recovery software to get my files back. This was the catalyst that finally got me to ditch windows for good 7 years ago.

And changing your bootloader (every update) and timezone (every boot)

This used to happen to me. But there was a time I just had two different drives. With different OS in it and used the bios selector to boot what I wanted

Yeah, it's also why you should install Windows first and then Linux not the other way round.

I tried to do this, but booting into a different OS depending on the task just turned into a chore. I tried going full Linux but despite the claims, many games don't "just work" out of the box. Many require tweaking, at minimum. Of the top 100 games in Proton, only 9% are "Tier 1," and reading reviews, even that doesn't guarantee a flawless experience. (https://www.protondb.com/dashboard) On top of this, kernel level anti-cheat games are not supported at all, and trying to run them in VMs result in permanent bans. Worse still, many peripherals have zero driver support. I have Fanatec wheels and pedals and could not get them to run in Linux.

I could live with using Linux for web browsing, but because it doesn't do the other stuff I like, I ended up just staying in Windows and eventually uninstalled Linux.

Mirrors my experience very closely. I really /want/ to use Linux since I really do like GNOME over the Windows Desktop, but if half my peripherals don't work (in this case an Elgato mic where my friends would say I'm either exploding their eardrums or too quiet, and my CREATIVE USB DAC) I'm just very demoralized when trying to use Linux to play games. I've tried the dual boot route, but a spontaneous Discord message of "hop in loser, we're going gaming!" turns into "let me reboot my machine and then Windows update and now my game has to update and it's now 10pm I have to go to bed" just makes me stick with Windows full time.

I'm still really rooting for the Year of the Linux Desktop, and it does continue to get better and better, but I'll keep rooting from the sidelines.

I very much agree. The driver support won't happen until Linux reaches a much larger install base, but that has some hurdles. First, unless Valve creates some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat for SteamOS, we'll never see some of the most popular online FPSs. Frequent cheating is a red line for most players.

Second, Linux needs a standardised *and enforced* application installation method like .exe. One should never, ever, for any reason, ever, need to use the CLI to install an application. Yet there are so many applications out there which require the use of guides/manuals and the CLI to install, configure, or use. This is partly a dev preference, partly to save time, and partly because it's difficult to build and maintain distinct UI for different distros which each have their own quirks. People often ask, "why don't they release this on Linux?" But that's not actually what they're asking. They're really asking, "why don't they release this software on 20 distinct operating systems?" Each distro might have 0.1% of their total addressable market. Unfortunately, even if SteamOS enforces some kind of package manager like flatpak, that's not going to force devs to use it. It would need to be Linux-wide, and that will never happen. So we're left with fragmented install methods across multiple package managers, and a huge headache for people who just want their OS to get out of the way.

If you trust Windows 11 to never rewrite partitions it doesn't recognize, sure...

I had to briefly go back to Windows and I just couldn't understand how anyone serious can run an OS that just decides to reboot itself in the middle of the night.

This 100%. The main purpose of an operating system is to run programs and keep them running. Windows fails at that.

The (only) people who pay for Windows are corporate managers. Therefore, the main purpose of Windows is to make corporate managers happy. Corporate managers want updates to install promptly, so they can tick their ISO compliance box saying "no insecure software running here". They couldn't care less about an annoying experience or slightly reduced productivity for their underlings. Therefore, Windows succeeds at its main purpose.

Just install Reboot-Blocker. Or equivalently, define a Scheduled Task that rotates your “working hours” every hour, so that it always matches the current time. Yes it’s annoying to have to do that and that there isn’t a simple switch anymore like there used to be, but at least it’s defeatable.

Any corp laptop will do this too, regardless of OS. It's annoying but not a dealbreaker for most people. They aren't running servers.

Apple has decided to take this paternal route as well, and it's quite frustrating. The good news is if you use the Pro version of Windows, you can disable that. Still crazy you can't fully disable it using standard setting on the consumer version, of course.

For most users, they don't even notice that it rebooted, because their apps were relaunched and put back in place. It's (ironically) the people who run Linux who notice, because they probably have their Windows machine full of FOSS ports from Linux that don't restore on relaunch.

Well, it just so happened that I did notice the reboot last night, when it just cut off my moving of 500GB of files to one backup HDD and the defrag that was running on another. Neither of those just relaunched themselves.

Did you notice any warnings that there would be a reboot while you were setting up the file copy or defrag? How many hours, cumulative, had you spent in Windows in the week leading up to this reboot? I think the answers will reveal that my point is being illuminated nicely, and I thank you in advance for the assistance in this matter.

I heard Jonathan Blow say that the problem of Linux, or native gaming on Linux, is the gazillion of libraries of unimaginable number of versions. I find it funny that investing a ton of time(by now decades) and money into making a API layer for Windows API made more sense than to clean up or somehow standardise Linux itself.

What a mess this thing is. Though, I am definitely not moving to W11, so Linux will be in my future one way or another.

Steam works around this using a chroot (container-like) into an environment with controlled libs. That being said, I have never seen it work: I always end up enabling Proton.

There is the school of thought that Wine is merely the Linux gaming ABI, and I largely agree. Native Linux binaries "feels" better but doesn't bring much from a practical standpoint.

I thought Steam uses Proton. How many of these gaming layers are there? Also, it looks like yet another unnecessary fragmentation.

For Linux-native games (there aren't many) it uses what I described, making the system look a lot like Ubuntu to the game. Proton is for Windows (PE/exe) binaries, not Linux (ELF).

Jonathan Blow is sharpshooting and being intentionally difficult in order to sound smart (he really needs to engage in that behavior less, he's smart enough as-is). Virtually nobody bothers with Linux-native binaries for games. Compile your game for Windows, test it on Linux+Proton, find that it probably works fine, it's not hard.

> Virtually nobody bothers with Linux-native binaries for games.

Well, that was exactly his point.

I just tried installing Heroic Games on Arch, and the install process has left me less than impressed. It will be one vague error with a bunch of forums saying, "try this" and no "this is what that error means". I try to install that one and it has its own error, with the same forum experience. I'm not trying to install something which will allow me to install vulkan which will allow me to install heroic games...maybe.

I don't think an Epic games launcher is exactly obscure. Mind you, I'm completely commmitted to Linux and having the launcher is just in the "nice to have" category, but it hasn't gone well so far.

The experience using Heroic Games Launcher is a good bit less polished than Steam IME. I only really use it to play games that are occasionally given away on the Epic Games Store for free so I mostly treat it as a nice bonus if they actually work on Linux.

I use it almost exclusively for Satisfactory, which I could buy again on Steam, but I don't want to.

Steam is working flawlessly. Other than anti-cheat, I haven't run across anything that doesn't play exactly like its windows counterpart.

My experience installing the Heroic Games Launcher on Arch was just:

- git clone the heroic-games-launcher AUR repo,

- makepkg -sc,

- pacman -U.

And it just worked. This was something like a month ago, though so maybe my experience is more recent?

I recently tried to run Apex Legends on my Manjaro (i played this a lot few years ago on my Windows dualboot), but it is impossible to play it on Linux, as EA/Respawn is preventing the game from running on Linux due to Anti cheat systems having troubles with protecting the game.

I'm really curious what would be the appropriate solution for an anti cheat that runs on Linux in a way that a) does not compromise my OS/privacy/security b) protects the game from cheaters at the same time.

Secure boot and let the game attest the boot state.

It would restrict you to a series of whitelisted kernels, probably from major distributions, but it's better than the current situation.

that sounds like a reasonable compromise, it may even provide more control and protection over what they are able to achieve on Windows?

i remember their anti cheat was utter crap tbh, not like something that Riot implemented for Valorant (a kernel-level system that runs from boot-up with deep system access)

I don't think there is a good solution. The best for privacy and security would be server-side anti-cheat but imagine the tantrum EA would have when they'd have to spend some dollars themselves instead of installing a spyware into their clients' pc for free.

what tapoxi suggested above sounds like a reasonable compromise tbh, but i doubt it will ever happen, as the userbase is too small :-(

I think software transparency could help with this. Or at least remote attestation - you could run the game inside an encrypted VM (AMD SEV) and attest that it is run this way. This way, you're not running a kernel module on your host, and you can't cheat the game even if you just physically write or read to the memory.

sounds kinda complicated, what would it bring over secure boot and whitelisted kernels that tapoxi suggested?

Works with any kernel.

My final Windows partition ever, exists solely for Roblox now. I was forced to "upgrade" my $200 Windows 10 Pro to 11 when Minecraft would no longer update. After installing 11, I find now Minecraft won't run unless you sign into the Microsoft Store app, not even the Java Edition. In Linux I can at least run Java Edition of MC, and all the other games I care about work perfectly, heck, sometimes better, through Steam. I love Valve.

I knew for a fact that a Linux desktop was a viable option when you have a separate macOS/Windows laptop (which is my main computer). Recently (frustrated with macOS updates), I decided to be Linux-only for a week[0], replacing my MBP with an MBA that runs Asahi Linux.

Unfortunately it turns out that I depend on too many desktop apps that runs on the major desktop OSes but not on Linux (or on Wine, for that matter).

* KakaoTalk, the major South Korean IM app ran on Wine for a week, but the updater doesn't work and freshly reinstalling the app broke Wine for some reason. (I tried removing the whole ~/.wine prefix, but it doesn't work.) Now I'm stuck without KakaoTalk.

* Discord is only provided as a x86_64 Deb file and a .tar.gz file. I tried using it from Firefox, and it works fine but audio sharing during screen sharing doesn't work.

* Disconnecting from my Bluetooth AirPods somehow does not stop my music. I'm not sure if this is an AirPods limitation or a Linux limitation (since I've never used AirPods with Windows), but it annoyed me endlessly.

* USB-C DP mode and the fingerprint sensor doesn't work. This is an Asahi Linux limitation, but I've seen various parts of the hardware not working when using other Linux distributions on laptops as well. I feel this is a common occurrence.

Not to mention that the lack of text editing shortcuts that macOS has, which is a big deal to me (but I tried as that is a macOS-ism).

I carried my MBA for 4 days before I gave up today. I brought my MBP today with me.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45940274

> * Disconnecting from my Bluetooth AirPods somehow does not stop my music. I'm not sure if this is an AirPods limitation or a Linux limitation (since I've never used AirPods with Windows), but it annoyed me endlessly.

I think this is by design, not limitation. On android, changing sound device stops music playback. On windows and linux, changing sound device doesn't stop sound. I tried it with wired headphones, maybe expectations for BT are different, but I think that comes from smartphones.

For discord I just use Discord Canary. its a wrapper and works perfectly. But I'm also on Fedora.

I would suggest trying something other then Asahi linux! I know that their support with Mac systems is near unbeatable. But it does still tend to have some hiccups. Especially with M3+ systems.

I know that "try a different distro" is a often (user biased) and imo bad answer. But in the case of Asahi as awesome as their work is they are climbing a different mountain compared to the rest of linux development.

>Discord is only provided as a x86_64 Deb file and a .tar.gz file. I tried using it from Firefox, and it works fine but audio sharing during screen sharing doesn't work. I got it working with the unofficial client Vesktop. Functioning screensharing on wayland is actually advertised as one of their main features.

>* USB-C DP mode and the fingerprint sensor doesn't work. This is an Asahi Linux limitation, but I've seen various parts of the hardware not working when using other Linux distributions on laptops as well. I feel this is a common occurrence.

This really is a special case, they've had to write new drivers for everything in the Apple Silicon Macs and they haven't gotten that working yet. I have in fact been waiting on this feature for a few years now as I want to use a MBP with the lid closed and two monitors plugged in, but currently only the HDMI works and not most USB-C functionality. This is not at all the norm in x86_64 land where more normal hardware is used. I'm still using a ThinkPad T440p and thinking about getting a T14 gen 5 due to the MBP I got a few years ago not being satisfying/fun to use, comparatively.

As for Discord and AirPods and such, the more proprietary stuff you need, the worse time you'll have. Though I just saw something in the news that might help with the AirPods. Check out LibrePods.

https://github.com/kavishdevar/librepods

So why not use the .tar.gz for Discord?

I just rebuilt my PC and setup Steam on Linux. It was fairly smooth.

I've dual-booted Arch and Windows for about 16 years. I always kept Windows around for gaming, and the occasional "doesn't support Linux" workflow.

For a few years where I didn't game I found myself almost exclusively in Linux. But then I spent the last 5-6 years stuck between the two as my PC use for daily tasks dwindled, I stopped working on side projects, and I started gaming a bit more.

I hated trying to split my time between them. Most of what I used a PC for was the browser, so I could just stay in Windows most of the time. I wanted to use Linux, but rebooting to use a web browser just didn't make sense. As a result I would accidentally go 2-3 months without ever booting Arch. As a result, I had a couple of major updates that didn't go smoothly.

I wanted to use Linux, though. I like having a customized WM, I like having so many useful tools at my disposal, etc. I just like using Linux, in spite of the occasional technical complexity.

In the last couple months I rebuilt my PC and a major requirement was that I get set up to game in Linux as much as possible. I even bought an AMD card to ensure smooth driver support.

I'm so incredibly thankful that Steam has made gaming not just possible, but relatively simple. Installation was simple. My single-player games seem well supported so far. And most importantly, Steam has made it obvious they're committed to this line of support, so this isn't some hero effort that will bit rot in a couple years.

I still have to reboot to play competitive games, due to their anti-cheat requirements, but that's less of a problem, I'll take what I can get.

My buddy gave me a computer because it wouldn’t run 11. I put Zorin Linux on it. I’m quite pleased.

Not once in initial setup or first week of use did it use dark patterns to try to trick or force me into something I don’t want to do.

Anyone have experience with CachyOS or Bazzite here? I'm using Fedora KDE standard, never toyed with Arch distros, and don't know much about Bazzite/Kinoite. Regular Fedora seems pretty usable to me.

In any case, it's really great to see Linux overcoming its final major hurdle for a lot of technical people to dump Windows: Gaming compatibility.

I use cachyos. It's good as long as you're fine with some knob turning. I haven't had an issue granted I haven't played many things. Cities skylines 2 works for me so I can't complain about it

I've only played with CachyOS in a VM but I plan on installing it on my next computer build.

Both are great options, but if you're happy with Fedora, there's probably not a big reason to switch. Arch is a full rolling release, which requires you to be aware and ready to deal with any breaking changes each time you update your packages. On Fedora, you'll mostly only have to be ready for this on a new version release. If you want to always have the newest packages for everything and don't want to wait, then CachyOS is great. If you want to turn on auto updates and only think about changes when a major release drops, Fedora is a better pick.

Bazzite, being an atomic distro, is kind of hard to compare to. For basic use-cases like running just software available in Flathub, it is incredibly solid and easy to use. If I were choosing a Linux distro for a non-technical family member, I would go with an atomic Fedora distro and be completely confident they could get things done without breaking anything. However, if your needs are more advanced, you're going to need to be ready to relearn a lot (e.g. using containers for development), since atomic distros are a big paradigm shift from standard ones. This isn't a bad thing, just something to be ready for.

if you want a gaming-fedora experience I use Nobaro and its pretty great!

I prefer CachyOS. It's basically an easy-to-use Arch distro. They package more than the default Arch repos contain which helps a bit in avoiding building stuff yourself out of AUR.

I tried Bazzite, but I'm just not a fan of how everything is installed as a flatpak. It might be more secure and allow for easy rollbacks and stuff, but it limits what apps are allowed to do by default. The main issue that caused for me is that the 1Password Firefox extension was not able to communicate with the main 1Password process. Maybe I could have tinkered with it using Flatseal, but that feels like such a hack.

I really like windows 11, works great. I have it way more customized to my liking than most "normal" users would, but there's really no negative impact on me. I also have a Mac and use Linux (bounced between arch, ubuntu, and now just use PopOS). Overall I generally prefer windows, it generally runs everything. Things like windows powertoys make the user experience pretty nice, doing similar on linux requires a lot more work. Wezterm standardizes the terminal across all platforms. But the OS really doesn't matter too much, it only accounts for maybe <10% of my experience. But everything just seems a bit easier on windows but I could live just fine in any of the OS's if I had to.

I generally like Windows too, which is a lot of why I'm so incredibly frustrated by the direction Microsoft is taking.

There are still glaring bugs, omissions, and regressions in Windows 11 that just are not getting attention because Microsoft is 100% focused on AI instead of improving their product.

I have a MacBook Pro now. I get by. Window management drives me absolutely insane, but this is the best laptop hardware, performance, and battery life I've ever had. Windows is now shoved into a VM that I pop open only when I explicitly need it for a few work things (primarily Excel and PowerBI Desktop).

I'd go back to Windows again the moment Microsoft starts respecting their users again, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

I had to help someone elderly set up Windows 11 recently and it was monstrous. The error messages were useless and when we finally got it going, the UI was horribly sluggish. There was a time Windows was a solid default choice for the average consumer, but Windows 7 was 15 years ago.

If you are looking solely for a Linux gaming distro, Bazzite is it. I switched from Windows earlier this year and I haven't looked back. Everything works out of the box.

https://bazzite.gg/

I've been linux gaming for decades so I'm not a good metric here. But I recently installed Bazzite on my gaming PC, and with Steam Big Picture mode, and Steam Controller mode, it's just like a Steam Machine now. Except it has more VRAM, larger, more modular.

I just felt like I wasn't using the PC for anything but gaming so why run Fedora with FDE and everything, just go full gaming mode on it, keep it simple, and the experience has been great so far.

Never before has a successful software company worked so hard to reject the wants of their user base. Ai continues to be a solution seeking a problem.

C'mon. Microsoft is one of the top 3 companies in the world.

All three of the top three could vanish overnight, and a think a lot of us could just go on living without much issue from the "loss".

but the windows brand is taking a serious beating

win10 was a great restart somehow but 11 transition was (and is) alienating many people

That couldn't have anything to do with being a near monopoly.. no sir.

Two names for the same thing.

There is exactly one game keeping me from running Linux as my main OS… and that’s iRacing.

Sadly, they won’t (not can’t…) ship the flag in EOS (née EAC) that enables anti-cheat support on Linux. It would work, but they just don’t have the resources to support a whole other family of OSes.

So, between that and the abject murder of WMR for my Reverb G2, I’m stuck on Win10 for the foreseeable.

Open source sickos: Yes... hahaha... YES!

Honestly, I'm just surprised it took this long, and this much end-user abuse, to get things to where even casual enthusiasts are realizing that Microsoft (any proprietary vendor really) is NOT their friend, and looking long and hard at giving Linux a go. But I'm glad y'all are here.

I switched over last year, no problems. Everything runs fine, and often better than on my wife's Windows machine. We're going to switch her over soon, because Windows 11 is such a shitshow.

Really interested to see where Valve goes with the new hardware. I love my Steam Deck, so I have faith they'll do a good job.

Gaming on Linux, with games complied on Windows, using Windows APIs, targeting Windows users.

This will be like the netbook wave, or OS/2 Windows compatibility layer, a celebration until Microsoft decides the show has had its time.

Valve really should push for native Steam OS builds.

Depending on the landscape, it will not be up to Microsoft, though. If enough SteamOS machines are on the market, it will be a viable target platform on its own, and then, even if MS had a special part of the API, the developers won't use it, lest they lose the SteamOS market.

Microsoft has many ways to tackle the problem, starting by the amount of studios they could take out of Steam moving exclusives to their store, console style, as one of the biggest publishers.

Then there are enough shennigangs they might think of regarding APIs, legal actions against Proton, or whatever their creating minds can conjure.

I'm sure there's a lot they could do, but I think even is the worst scenarios, SteamOS would still be a vibrant indie platform, with many major releases from studios who dgaf about Microsoft specifically.

We'll see for sure, especially if the Gabecube sells well. Right now, SteamOS is still not among the largest players, when looking at units sold. I'm sure Microsoft will ramp something up when it gets more popular.

There are low hanging, unpicked fruit for Microsoft to make more money from selling desktop licences. It's still trivial to buy one for a third party for pennies on the dollar. It's still not possible to install officially without TPM 2.0.

In contrast, Microsoft have pushed the pricing of Game Pass up significantly and are in the process of unifying the next Xbox platform with PC.

Given that, I don't think it's consistent with Microsoft's current strategy to make selling games to gamers harder for the benefit of the OS division.

Now, that conclusion does depend on Microsoft acting rationally, which isn't a given, so I'll also add that I don't think it's actually an option for them: win32 already exists, the cat is out of the bag. And the cat can't get back in the bag to be extended/extinguished unless Microsoft convinces everyone to move to Windows 11.

I'm not worried. Strong API backwards compatibility is one of (if not the greatest) Windows moat. Microsoft risks their market dominance if they begin fucking with that. Especially with regards to business use cases.

I assume you never had to deal with the WinRT mess, Windows time on that front has been better.

WinRT? You're the only one who even remembers it.

Not really, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't keep pushing WinAppSDK and WinUI, however I do agree it doesn't get much love, after all the mess, including not taking backwards compatibility into account every single time they rebooted the developer experience since Windows 8.

In case you missed the memo, WinRT last reboot was to make it work on Win32 side, and more recent COM APIs are mostly WinRT variants.

Sadly pipewire still has issues properly delivering audio on my system with all core load of ~50%. It makes media consumption on a linux pc simply impossible for me, even a 13 year old thinkpad running windows is better in that regard.

Best thing we did two years ago was to set up Bazzite on a mini-PC. It’s been flawless.

My gaming PC sits next to the TV in my living room and I use it like a console, I have one of those cheap blutooth wireless keyboards with trackpad for the really basic iteractions and then I just use a game controller for playing games.

Windows 11 has been fine for me, I don't interact with it much other than seeing it for a bit when launching games.

I honestly wouldn't mind giving Linux a go, the only downside is I made the mistake of buying an nvidia graphics card, I'm not sure how much of a pain it is these days but last time I tried it was a bit of a nightmare - the general wisdom at the time was to go with an AMD card.

Nvidia's Linux software is first rate -- actually a large amount of the software that would merit buying an Nvidia graphics card is Linux-only anyway. I actually briefly had an AMD card but ended up giving it away since it didn't support ~any of the projects I needed to work on. But YMMV, my anecdata is from a ML engineering perspective.

I can confirm your anecdote, based on messing with ML on a linux system in my personal time over the last few years. I don't do any work in ML, but I have never heard of anyone doing anything with ML on Windows other than maybe running some models locally.

Though I will say I have encountered issues in the past with a Linux gaming computer which experienced issues with the Nvidia drivers anytime I decided to update the distro (I was using Kubuntu at the time).

I do ML in a Debian WSL install because I’m a crazy person. But I hate dual booting and it works perfectly.

Not only has Nvidia Linux support been first rate for decades now, but their FreeBSD support is also great. The secret has been that they run the same driver on all platforms with just a shim to interface with the different kernels.

About two months ago, I switched from Windows to Chrome OS, and I haven't missed Windows at all. The only thing that needed some adjustment was my audio setup. I have virtual channels for the system, music, chat, and games. These are then mapped to my Rodecaster Pro II. With Pipewire, this setup was not too difficult and works reliably. Gaming works perfectly fine. The only application I miss is ShareX for taking screenshots. I still use my old Windows PC for gaming with anti-cheat software via Moonlight and Sunshine, and it works perfectly.

imo everyone needs to try ChromeOS for the OOBE and living with sleep & instant reboot updates. Windows is a nightmare.

it's made me want to get into core boot and find Linux laptop hardware that hums along.

This week we shut the doors on our Linux gaming podcast that has been running continuously for the past 13 years. No fuss, no drama, but with the announcement of Steam Machine II (we also covered the origianl launch) it just seemed time. Proton has evolved to the point most things work out of the box. Nobody is bothering with native and it's gotten difficuls to find things to cover.

It really feels like evertying is ligned up for the year of Linux in the Living room and yeah, it's really good to see.

I've been gaming on Linux exclusively for the last few years. Problems with games are few and far between these days.

I've only had to fully reinstall once every ~2 years or so, and it's usually due to some problem with my DE/system not booting that I can't be fucked to troubleshoot. That's mostly my fault for running GNOME on a rolling distro. I just back up my home dir to the storage drive and I'm back up and running in less than an hour. Other than that, it just continues to work and I can be reasonably assured that if I don't touch it, it'll be fine.

Changed from Windows 10 to an Ubuntu with beefy specs. When I saw firsthand the improvement of the user experience, I felt the year of the Linux desktop is nigh.

>I’m going to install CachyOS, an Arch-based distro optimized for gaming on modern hardware, with support for cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs and an allegedly easy setup.

oh no

I don’t understand this reaction. It’s an immutable distro and is very similar to SteamOS. It’s very hard to break and dead simple to maintain. You will likely install apps via Flatpak and never have to touch the Arch repos.

I think you're thinking of Bazzite. Which indeed would probably have been an excellent fit for a gaming-focused beginner for the reasons you mentioned.

Any technical minds care to explain how the "agentic Windows" actually functions?

Based on the marketing it seems to run a sandboxed copilot instance that can impersonate the user to take actions, with their permission?

Something like "hey copilot install Putty"? and it does it?

I can relate to the reluctance to adopt AI features into the OS -- but I would also like to understand how they work and any utility they might provide.

That's what I understand. It basically spins up a windows VM, you grant it access to specific files or folders, and it runs the actions in the VM.

From the MS support doc:

> "An agent workspace is a separate, contained space in Windows where you can grant agents access to your apps and files so they can complete tasks for you in the background while you continue to use your device. Each agent operates using its own account, distinct from your personal user account. This dedicated agent account establishes clear boundaries between agent activity and your own, enabling scoped authorization and runtime isolation. As a result, you can delegate tasks to agents while retaining full control, visibility into agent actions, and the ability to manage access at any time."

MS showed a little bit of something like it at Ignite yesterday, but for enterprise automations, the AI spun up a Windows 365 instance, did some stuff on the web, then disposed of it when it was done.

thanks for explaining that. I could see some value and also tremendous risk.

My concern is that the Windows Credential itself doesn’t have a ton of value (opening windows apps) but the browser cookie jar (e..g Edge or Chrome) , which the Credential unlocks, has tremendous value — and threats.

The core problem is lack of granularity in permissions. If you allow the agent to do browser activities as your user, you can’t control which cookie / scope it will take action on.

You might say “buy me chips” and it instead logs into your Fidelity account and buys $100k worth of stock.

Let’s see how they figure out the authorization model.

"How it actually functions" is too much of a moving target. The book of "best practices for building AI agent functionality into your OS" is still being written. But "sandboxed envs for AI to do things in" is one approach MS is currently trying for.

I agree that a "good" implementation of agentic AI can have a lot of benefits, to casual users and power users both. But do I have any trust in Microsoft being the company to ship a "good" implementation? Hell no.

Windows has been getting more and more user hostile for years now, to casual users and power users both. If there's anyone at Microsoft who still cares about good UX, they sure don't have any decision-making power. And getting AI integration right is as much a UX issue as it is a foundation model issue or an integration hook issue.

Installing a working Nvidia driver was a nightmare for me. And this was on a very recent version of Ubuntu.

I don't know if I would use the word approachable

Fedora makes it pretty approachable, and some distros (e.g. Nobara, Bazzite) just straight-up ship the driver.

IMHO, stuff is moving fast enough in the Linux gaming world that any distro built around taking its time to update things (i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) is liable to be a bad time. Anecdotally, I've found that redirecting new users interested in gaming away from those distros has dramatically improved their satisfaction.

Graphics drivers are near the top of my list of issues I've had with Ubuntu. I've been using Linux for well over 20 years and Ubuntu (and to a large degree, other Debian derivatives) is just such a pain in the ass to install and configure. It is superficially a good UX in the sense that if you can somehow manage to stay on the happy path, it's smooth, but go an inch off of that and you're in for a world of pain.

Please don't install some weird trendy distro. I'm starting to think that Microsoft is sponsoring them just to make sure that people come running back to Windows, complaining, saying "not ready for prime time." Just install Debian. Stable. Or Mint or even Ubuntu. Move over to something bizarre when you know why you want it.

Occam's distro-hopper? Don't attribute to malice, what's easily explained by people chasing after trendy new things.

People want to game. Telling them to install Debian stable is not going to end well. There's a reason why these "weird" gaming distros are popular, and it's not because they are making people run back to Windows - quite the opposite.

The secret for a reasonable linux distro for most people is LTS Kernel + Latest packages. Most people want the latest versions of whatever software they use that will often include new features and lots bugfixes. The only time you really need a new kernel is for to support cutting edge hardware.

Many of the Arch or Fedora derivatives fit this paradigm well.

And DEs. MS taking no prisoners, meanwhile Linux community squabbling over which button layout is best.

Install Ubuntu.

Enable the proprietary drivers if you have Nvidia graphics during the install.

Install system updates when the pop up appears on first boot.

Install Steam from the Ubuntu App Center.

Open Steam, install a game and play it. Most of them will work without issue unless it has invasive kernel anti-cheat.

The install-to-game time on Linux is actually substantially lower than it is on Windows now.

I don't want to believe it until it happens.

NVIDIA and AMD can decide to undermine it if Linux doesn't yield enough profits for them.

Even if only one of them undermines linux, linux gaming might have trouble progressing and game developers might just ignore Linux gaming.

Microsoft could also undermine it if they really wanted.

> NVIDIA and AMD can decide to undermine it if Linux doesn't yield enough profits for them.

Can you elaborate what you mean, here? AMD has Mesa drivers for Vulkan 1.2+ compliance; their GPUs will support DXVK and Proton until the hardware breaks, even if they quit today. Nvidia's situation is slightly precarious, but the community has Nouveau and NOVA as hedged bets against them going rogue.

And I can't see why they would ever go rogue - supporting Proton is so easy that many manufacturers do it by accident. Remember, even Apple Silicon supports DXVK on Asahi, despite Apple neither documenting their GPU, writing Vulkan drivers for it or designing their raster hardware around open standards. I'd be shocked if AMD or Nvidia managed to make a card that runs DirectX but refuses OpenGL and Vulkan bytecode in any form.

This is exactly why Valve's work is important with SteamOS. The more SteamOS devices people use, the more of a viable market they are, and so, a direct incentive is born, against locking games out of Linux.

Personally, I don't think it will get worse than it is now. Some games are locked to some platforms, be that Windows, PS5 or Switch, and many great games can be enjoyed in Linux.

Google made gaming on Linux both approachable and profitable with their work on the Android platform.

Funny timing. I just said screw it the other day and wiped an old laptop to install Linux. I'm using budgie at the moment, but it's been pretty smooth sailing.

I suspect the combination of modern Linux + + Steam + LLM to troubleshoot and learn may see more conversions like myself

I couldn't afford new computers in the past, would get some POS but putting Linux on it and a tiling manager gave me more bang for my buck

Started with Linux Mint then Debian/Ubuntu, tried some others too but ultimately just stuck with Ubuntu

It should be NixOS of course.

I started using NixOS a month ago.

Knowing nothing about how to configure it, I installed it with the graphical installer, booted into a tty, installed claude-code, checked the config files into git, and proceeded to vibe-code a basic sway (now niri) environment to see what it would feel like.

A month later, my NixOS environment is so much better than my heavily optimized macOS environment that I sheepishly use it inside a VM on macOS (UTM) or VNC to my desktop machine so I can use it from my bed.

LLMs really open the doors of desktop Linux since you can git clone all of your deps locally (your window manager, keepassxc, waybar, your apps, nixpkgs, home-manager, even the linux kernel, etc., etc.) and the LLM can dig into source code and web search to do things for you or debug issues. And NixOS adds a level of observability into what's going on since any changes show up in git-diffed config files.

If anyone is like me and used macOS because you used to use Linux but couldn't be bothered anymore when you'd run into a rough edge, you might find it fun to use NixOS + claude-code (or equivalent) running in ~/nix-config.

Yeah the NixOS recommendation here is clearly a joke and I wouldn't recommend it to almost anyone, but I too switched about a month ago, and it's basically made for LLMs. Let them read the Git repo and they'll actually have a chance at figuring out the issues you have.

But: you will have issues.

It's not a joke. Despite of all the shortcomings it's the only way to have reproducible environments and stay sane. LLMs do help with learning curve, yes.

This is the way. I'm running NixOS on my NAS and my Desktop and I use Nix and home manager on my MBP. Thinking about trying Jovian on my Steam deck. I can have a single flake that describes my home environment and device specific configs for each separate deployment. Claude Code to setup and integrate everything has been a lot of fun and has been productive. I have run NixOS quite a bit on my own prior to this, so it's been helpful to know where and when to push back on CC.

I finished my desktop setup last night. The only thing I did was enable SSH on a clean NixOS install and setup sudo settings for CC. After that I used my NAS CC instance to SSH to the desktop and bootstrap an "idiomatic NixOS install of Claude Code". From there, every change on my NixOS desktop has been via LLM.

Exactly.

I keep lazygit open at my nix config root and periodically press "e" to open modified files with neovim to scope them out.

But other than that I barely open the nix config files since, unless I happen to remember a string to grep for in vim to get me where I would want to be, it's faster to type a prompt to claude and then go back to whatever I'd prefer to be doing.

It's also sobering to have claude build a whole TUI or GTK4 GUI, things I used to look forward to doing myself from scratch up until this year. I have some polished TUIs/GUIs for random things like managing sway/niri monitors or managing blocky logs, and it almost feels pointless to share them online like I used to because you can just vibe-code them yourself. And any of the iterative polish I've had to do now is just going to be next year's vibe-coded one-shot.

But I try not to think about that last paragraph too much...

The last paragraph for me is critical. I've got pretty severe ADHD. I know the things I want to do and the steps to make them, but the executive function to do them just doesn't seem to exist anymore for personal projects. CC has made that sort of work possible for me again. One of my immediate needs was to be able to share screenshots with CC securely. I one-shotted a paste service similar to imgur, but far more simple in design just for this use case. I can share documents and images/text/documents with CC just by pasting into a browser and CC can share files with me by uploading to the underlying services /uploads directory and sending me the link. The whole service took us 5-10 minutes to build and deploy in a split horizon DNS configuration that pretty much just worked as expected on the first try.

Now don't get me wrong. It's a stupid simple app and would have been quick to build personally as well. It just takes a post with clipboard contents and guesses the file type based on data provided. Saves the content into the service /uploads directory with a randomized 6 character name and provides a link. When accessing a link, the service finds all pastes older than pasteTimeoutSetting and deletes them before trying to serve the content. But all I had to do was describe the use case and make a couple small suggestions before the entire thing Just Worked.

As much as I like NixOS (I use it btw) I would absolutely not recommend it to a new user. I'd probably recommend trying Debian Testing.

I have been waiting for this time to come. Microsoft clearly doesn't care about Windows very much, and Linux has never been more ready to break out in market share. Quite exciting to see!

Gaming on Linux always sucked because of many factors:

1. Linux decades ago was not "new user friendly"

2. Wine and PLayOnLinux was all we had with endless problem, and heavy dependency on Windows files like DirectX and libraries

3. Windows dominated the gaming market

4. 3D GPU driver was non-existent

The single reason why gaming on Linux now is better than Windows, has one name: Valve

SteamDeck/SteamOS changed everything, the whole Wine process is managed by the OS and no longer by the user. You may need to change the Proton version, that is all. That also pushed GPU drivers to be better supported on Linux.

Valve single handled what gaming on Linux has become. I run Mint Cinnamon Linux, and even tho it is not "SteamOS", I can play Steam games just fine.

Microsoft terrible takes and AI, is also pushing gamers over to Linux, better FPS on Linux than Windows. The only restriction is kernel anti-cheat software that only runs on Windows, but many games do not use that and the ones that do use it like COD(dead game), BF, etc, isn't everybody cup of tea.

If it wasn't for Valve, Linux gaming would still be as dead as it has always been.

To make it more perfect, users that use their computer for browsing, writing docs (LibreOffice), etc, can be done on Linux for free.

You as a computer user in 2025, you have little to no excuse to try Linux, but try something good like Mint Cinnamon Linux that is extremely new user friendly, good for browsing, good for development work, solid for gaming, video editing is chef kiss, etc, etc. Avoid Ubuntu (they are going proprietary).

I don't really play multiplayer games other than a self-hosted Minecraft server, so for me the SteamOS experience (using Jovian on NixOS) is strictly better than what I had on Windows. A lot of games from the late 90's/early 2000's have trouble running on modern Windows but work fine with Wine or Proton.

I've been utterly astounded by Proton in the last year. Nearly every game I have run has run just about perfectly, often better than on Windows, and I'm able to play them with an Xbox One pad no less.

Valve absolutely deserves a lot of credit, but I do think that the constant effort from the Wine people should get a lot of credit as well. Wine has had constant progress for three decades, with every release getting a little better. I haven't worked on it, but I suspect 90+% of the work with Wine is figuring out all the weird edge cases that have popped up on Windows throughout the years, which is often slow, tedious, thankless work. Valve did a lot of work but there's a reason they opted to improve Wine instead of writing Proton from scratch.

The problem with Wine is that you most know what libraries to add, etc. PlayOnLinux automates that process somewhat but still very manual.

Steam Proton makes the whole process painless, you only select which Proton version to run, and that info can be obtained from ProtonDB if you encountered any issue, it is beautiful.

As for Linux, even emulators works like never before. I could never get PS4 emulator to work on Windows, I got PS4, X360, GameCube, and a bunch of other emulators running on Linux like I couldn't believe it.

You can do the same from within SteamOS itself, you just install an app, select the emulator and you ready which is far easier than me doing this from from Linux.

Oh no argument on any of that. Valve has done a superb job at making Linux 100x more approachable and easy to use.

I just want to give credit where credit is due, because a lot of this wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of the Wine people. “Shoulders of giants” and whatnot.

True, Wine and even PlayOnLinux were making miracles. Folks could even run Adobe Photoshop lmao before Adobe went downhill. Wine and PlayOnLinux still the way to go to if you need to run a Windows software for whatever reason on Linux.

> COD(dead game)

Doesn't COD have like over 100 million monthly active users?

Gaming on Linux is approachable because decades were spent working around the obstacles created by Microsoft and the work that Microsoft did to steer people away from open standards.

I have been using Bazzite[1] since I discovered it here. It works great for games.

[1] https://bazzite.gg/

What are the benefits of Bazzite over Proton? I'm not sure where I would use this.

Bazzite isn't an alternative to proton. Bazzite is a distro and still uses Proton. Bazzite is an alternative to SteamOS.

Ahh, I see, thanks! Is it like Jovian then? I've been wanting to install an OS for games onto my NUC.

It's like Jovian in the sense that it takes the "immutable" (for some reason I have heard it being called "atomic" too) approach to installing things.

Honestly I don't have to think too much about it, and that's the way I like it, for a gaming system. It works, it gets updates, it lets me install games, they run ok.

Yeah, same, I'll install Bazzite ASAP, thanks!

Steam Survey October:

Windows 94.84% -0.56%

Windows 11 64 bit 63.57% +0.53%

Windows 10 64 bit 31.14% -1.04%

OSX 2.11% +0.20%

Linux 3.05% +0.37%

In other words, for Steam users who waited to switch to Windows 11, half left Windows and most people who left went to Linux.

Linux grew its share by 14% in one month? Amazing.

Dunno, just upgraded Fedora to Fedora 43 and all of the games I had set up (wine) stopped working. Will try gaming on Linux again next decade.

You should rebuild the Wine environments. Or just use Steam.

Is this common with wine; that you need to rebuild your environments when upgrading??

My current stack: LG Gram, Manjaro, Steam.

I'm mostly playing MtG: Arena and it works like a charm.

I could even install Steam via the package manager.

Once they get music production onto Linux, it's fucking game over for Microsoft, at least for me.

A good deal of VSTs run in Wine already, Ableton works, Bitwig works...

Shout-out to ProtonDB for the fix when things don't work out of the box

Welcome to the world of computing freedom.

Call of duty 6 and now 7 will never work. They’re checking for TPMs and yelling about secure boot. Insanity.

Yea and guess who owns Activision?

I wonder when games will require HVCI and friends

That sounds less than impressive.

I have been a GNU/Linux user since 2006. While I still had a Windows PC (likely dual-boot on one machine) for games and my full-time job, Linux provided ALL I needed 90% of the time.

I tried various Linux flavours. Starting with Ubuntu. From memory, I tried Mint, Fedora, Slackware, Manjaro, etc. I cannot remember when I last tried a Distro. It likely ended by 2010. Since I have just stuck with Debain.. for both client and server installs.

I said goodbye to Windows a few weeks ago.. fully. While Windows has served my purpose in certain ways, I have always been critical of Microsoft and their practices. I would agree that Windows 11 is a solid OS.. its the "features" added on top that slows it down.

This time, I have the latest version of Debian. No dual-boots.. nothing else! Despite being aware of Steam's Linux support for some time, now.. I actually gave it a shot and suprised how easy it was. I then tried Heoric (Epic) Launcher and just as easy!

It probably helped that my laptop is an AMD. I normally hear effort and difficulty with nVidia but I did not have much trouble 10 odd years ago. Not sure what its like to properly work today.

So far I have tried 4 games. 2 modern games, and two 90's games. All of the worked! Whiles the 90's games had their issues at times.. this mostly refers to using a gamepad.

The 2 new games (sure this is not a good experiment for all games) have worked flawlessly!

Honestly.. in my opinion.. installing Debian appears exactly the same as it was back in 2010.. maybe more. I rarely had issues. It's just this time I am able to play Steam and Epic games and installing dotnet is easy on Linux.

Let's not forget the work Steam are doing. We have a new Steam Machine. While being marketed as a new games console it's still a PC... and new users will try it out. For the younger generation, it might increase the Linux skills and spread wider adoption.

The only thing Linux has against it is time. Time is something humans lack... we lack patience! I knew that one day Linux would get better games support. It was possible even back in 2008. I managed to get GTA3:ViceCity working through Wine.

Mark my words. Linux will gain marketshare. The only part I am concerned about is infiltration of corporations jumping all in. It's not the kernel I am concerned about as it's protected by the GPL.. it's the larger corporations selling their products which the average user adopts and eventually becomes "required" software in most distributions.

The best way to understand this is, in an alternate universe, Microsoft drops Windows and encourages everyone to use Linux. How do you think they would get involved. Just think about that.

It's bad enough with what Red Hat push

Over here we've been saying for years that gaming on Linux is a far better experience, with better framerates and better stability.

Just you're kind of SOL if you want to play anything that isn't based on some flavour of Quake or Unreal engine.

Well, that's different now. See? Told you. Faster, smoother, less crashy.

Oh, you want Microsoft Office? Yeah well you're probably using Office 365 these days anyway. Everything's in a browser. No, it looks just the same. Edge? It's less crashy in Linux, weirdly.

AutoCAD? Nah. Still SOL.

having used desktop linux before i even started gaming on a pc, things are easier but still not there yet for the general masses. personally, it is still not there either.

take one of the most popular ea sports title. it does not run:

- on linux via proton, because of anti-cheat

- inside a windows vm (in linux), because of anti-cheat

- via cloud streaming (technically perhaps because of the previous reason)

still got people exploiting and just a horrible experience in competitive mode. so much so that devs refuse to allow a universal marketplace. the console folks disable crossplay to avoid any trouble in competitive modes.

the same publisher went out of their way to support nintendo switch with crossplay, but steam deck does not seem to be big enough to go through with the actual work in making things work right. these titles print money and have the most means to make this possible from their end.

so if you want to play mainstream online experiences, or with simulator accessories, you are mostly on your own or dedicated community efforts. maybe a few more years in the oven?

I wish my parents would switch. Look at my comment history if you want more details, but TL;DR the auto update to windows 11 bricked my mom’s laptop and I had to do some weirdness with Linux to save her files and then wipe the computer.

Since I am a software person I have become the person that my parents call for IT help, and increasingly I have grown pretty frustrated with Windows. I have been trying to convince them to move to Zorin or Mint or something or to buy a Mac, and they will not yield.

In a bit of fairness to them, the biggest issue is MS Office; they did recently try LibreOffice and the MS Office online, and they had shortcomings with both. Since I have been wholly unsuccessful at getting any modern Office to work on Linux (without virtualization), so now I don’t have a case for them to move.

Which is annoying, because I really hate having to deal with it.

What were their shortcomings with LibreOffice?

My dad complained about StarBasic being different enough from VBA to where he'd be forced to port over large amounts of his spreadsheets over. He also uses the paid version of Mathtype to do his equation editing, which I'm not sure would work in Linux even if Word did run on Wine, at least not the direct integration.

I am drawing a blank over what my mom was complaining about but I do recall that it was valid. Something to do with Word.

It's tough for me to give full rebuttals to any of this, because I don't really use any WYSIWYG stuff for documents anymore and just use Typst or LaTeX/Pandoc for everything now. That works fine on Linux but of course that's understandably a non-starter for most people.

At this point I think the only thing I could realistically do to get them to switch, and I doubt it would be successful, would be to convince them that Winboat would be fine.

That makes sense. I think for most people the main, or even only issue, with LibreOffice is the switching cost of compatibility with their existing documents and then the ongoing annoyance of dealing with MS files people send them.

Unfortunately I don't think there will ever really be a way around that.

Try giving LTSC versions a go. Parents get a Windows, and you get much less headaches. Those get long security updates (Win 10 still being updated until 2032 for example), and they get no feature updates. The bloat is also cut down, no Store, no Cortana, etc. So overall, it's much easier to deal with. And it's a fully valid Windows, I do my gaming on it, and I have it installed for parents as well. Activation can be done by massgrave or by spinning up your own activation emulation server (under 10 minutes), and pointing the Windows to it (3 commands).

I moved to Linux after Win10 stopped receiving updates. It's WAY better than I expected it would be. Highly recommend people making a cut over. (I used Bazzite, but there's other options out there.)

>I don't want to talk to my computer

I recently vibe coded a voice typing software (using Parakeet — your best bet is probably Handy though).

It works in my terminal. (I just changed my paste shortcut to Ctrl+V

I can now literally speak software into existence!

I made a thin wrapper around my llm() function I can pipe text into from Bash.

This allows me to make many other thin LLM wrappers, such as one that summarizes then contents of entire directories.

I have a thing called Jarvis inspired by a Twitter post, where I ask it to do anything in bash, and it just does that.

I wouldn't exactly say it's useful (I am unemployed) but I am kind of having my mind blown a little bit.

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

Please, really, I am sure we all get it. Who is even the audience for this kind of comment at this point? Can't we have one comment section that's about how Linux is cool and good and Windows sucks? Like when we were all still real nerds instead of product hypers?

The point of my comment is that if you use AI in the CLI it can be very helpful, because they're really good with text and pretty bad with everything else.

The general rule here is that you use it for what it's good for it's actually really good.

The "typing into my terminal" is mostly for interacting with Claude Code. I wish that part worked on my phone.

Although I do use the voice typing tons for text chat, ironically.

Ok! Great! Thanks.

What lunatic thinks that voice is the best way to interface with a computer?

disabled people? also no one needs 105% efficiency all the time when using a computer

Did pewdiepie not write a voice to text for his LLM setup?

Thing is, we can talk faster then most of us can type.

Voice + Programming is slow because of all the special symbols. But voice + vibe coding? The ability to tell your LLM to do tasks, while you focus on other parts of the code, without the need to switch tabs/windows.

What about "change the color green on this element (html page), where my mouse is pointing"... Annoying with keyboard if you need to switch windows, very possible with voice.

And LLMs are very forgiving for mistakes, unlike if you want to voice program where every symbol needs to be accurate.

People do not realize that programming as we know it, is going to change.

Wispr flow ftw

>People do not realize that programming as we know it, is going to change.

I saw yesterday that I had been approaching software incorrectly. It feels futuristic because it's so fast, but it's still linear. One guy making one thing at a time (with some help from the computer).

But software can now be made so rapidly, that the bottleneck is actually curation. You can now generate a hundred ideas for software and a prototype for each one in the time it takes to make some coffee.

Going through all of it is the part that doesn't scale, it's bottlenecked by the individual. That's the reward function, right? Taste, discernment.

At this point software can grow itself, it can mutate, and it can combine with other software. I think building is entirely the wrong metaphor now.

I think a better metaphor would be a genetic algorithm. You try a bunch of stuff and see what works. Then you combine the best parts.

> You can now generate a hundred ideas for software and a prototype for each one in the time it takes to make some coffee.

Yep ... thinking the old way to make software is going to end.

In the past, we made a framework, then sold that framework for clients. But we always had the issue where client X wanted Y features, client Z want X features ... And over time the framework bloats, you get issues with features that may conflict between clients. Then you start to split the framework maybe for client Z because its too much different. Now your have issues when features or bug need to be fixed...

In todays LLM world, i see it more like custom software per client, with "instruction files"...

You make a custom framework for a client, with the AI writing it based upon a instruction file, that is supplemented by custom requirements for the client. Its written for that client and only that client.

The next client, same ... the next same. If a client sees a feature that they want, you instruct the LLM to update the framework for that client using again, a addendum instruction file.

If you instruction file was written correctly, bugs are going to be on the low end, and most clients do not need constant updates to their software.

A client wants to go to a different company and can not get the source files? That company needs the database files + the original design / analysts and the new company rebuild it again into a new version.

So ironically, we are going to, to a world where custom software is very normal, and cheap.

> I think a better metaphor would be a genetic algorithm. You try a bunch of stuff and see what works. Then you combine the best parts.

Yep, put that in practice last week.

I wrote a database in barely a week and half time, and was "slow" because i made like 5 different versions playing around with clustering, different parsers, more advanced each time (regex, token, lexer-ast) and tons of other features.

When i did not like a version, o LLM, rebuild it using my new updated instructions. O, i do not like the parser as it had issues, lets make a more advance one.

We are not talking toy DB ... full insert/update/delete, joins, CTE, Window function, SubQueries, Index's, alias, ... you name it, all working correctly. If i used my instruction file today, i can make you a custom DB in a day. Two if you need something custom. If somebody told me this 6 months ago, i call you crazy lol

Normally, when you build something, you spend days, weeks into it, especially if its advanced. Your reluctant to just tear it down and restart from zero. Or pull a important component out to rebuild from zero. Because sunk cost ... Now its just a half a day work, a day at worst, and you redid what will have taken you weeks or months. It really allows for a lot more experimenting, finding what fits better as time becomes different vs you on your little keyboard typing for ages, rebuilding, making tests, again and again. When a LLM does it 10, to 100 times faster.

For somebody who is a senior programmers, your actually the most easy to adapt and get the most out of LLMs (and ironically often the most resistant to change to using LLMs). Programmers that do not adapt to the new, are going to be left behind.

All of us that don't want to write books in a tiny chat window.

AI chat windows is the COBOL joke on mankind.

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