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Comment by abirch | Hacker News Reader

I refuse to use windows at home. I'll use it at work, but it's either Xubuntu or MacOS at home. I couldn't be happier.

I have no choice but to use Windows at home due to 200+ Steam games I own. Many work only on Windows only. Emulation don't work for most on Linux.

I got a separate PC just for linux btw, so no biggie

I shelled out for a Steam Machine (SteamOS ≈ Arch Linux.) I do gamedev, and I figured having a test machine was a decent enough excuse for a purchase. It's working suprisingly well for the games I'm actually playing. They're playing better than on my last Windows desktop tower, even, presumably due to a better GPU.

Granted, catalogs vary - anti-cheat and DRM may not play nice, and EvE Online wasn't stable until I switched the renderer from D3D12 to D3D11 (and I haven't tried playing with multiple accounts) - but you might revisit Linux gaming if it's been awhile since you last have.

The enshittification of Windows has finally driven me to the point where Linux compatability is going to start affecting my Steam purchases.

Out of interest, are you doing any dev on the SM? If so, how is it for that?

Only a token test amount so far. The root filesystem is read-only by default, but without the whole Nix ecosystem, which is a little awkward (can't install packages even as root without changing that.) On the other hand, it comes with `distrobox` preinstalled, so it's easy enough to spin up a container and use that (including package installation.)

My raw notes are here: https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/notes/blob/master/programmi...

Whenever I used windows for games I just installed it on a partition and solely used it for steam. Nothing else installed but steam and games. Usually with the free unregistered version of windows because I could not care less about setting a desktop background. Too insufferable for any other use.

Meanwhile my steam library of 900+ works pretty much flawlessly on linux. Yes the odd esoteric game needs a workaround or two, but honestly if you browse the pcgamingwiki then you'd notice you also need to tweak them on windows too, such is the problem with older games.

Ditto. Nothing I want to play doesn’t work on Linux / bazzite.

Echoing this. I would have to go out of my way to find one that does not work simply by double-clicking the steam entry. This is on Arch

It does happen, but it's pretty rare. Specifically, the MechWarrior 5 games don't work with my VKB joystick out of the box (had to do some config shenanigans to get that to work), Rome II Total War crashes pretty regularly, and the sound doesn't work right in HBS Battletech (which is odd cause I'm pretty sure that's a unity game). But the vast, vast majority of my library works without any tinkering.

2 of my kids play a total of 3 games: Fortnite, Rocket League, and Madden NFL. We're locked in for a while.

I have the separate PC just for Steam, at least that's how I look at it :]

There are far more penguins in my homelab

Same here. I would love to go Linux exclusive though, but need to keep a mac around for data/file management, since Linux STILL doesnt support creation/provenance/birth time on any FS. It really sucks that linux is still so far behind on that compared to the two mainstream OS options, hope the kernel devs will change that someday.

Same. ArchLinux and macOS for me.

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