(The “Windows” slices of the pies are entirely made up by Baldur’s Gate 3, which also runs well over Linux)

263 points
*

The issue has never been that games can’t run on Linux. It has always been a simple question of “will the games I want to play run?” More than ever, that answer is yes, but if your favorite game doesn’t, or if you never want to worry about “will this upcoming (online) game let me play on Linux?” then you use Windows by default.

Like, I love y’all, but the Linux gaming community on Lemmy is kinda insufferable with the straw-man “people think games can’t run on Linux” argument. That’s just not the issue

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62 points

This has been my concern too. It’s great that we’re seeing some specific cases where Linux benchmarks faster than Windows, but that doesn’t mean a damn thing if the one thing I’m trying to play just full on won’t work.

Telling me that I can just also run Windows is counterproductive. If Windows will do everything I want, and Linux will do only some of what I want, now you’re trying to sell me on increased complexity and difficulties and learning a whole new system, without actually getting rid of the problems that come with running Windows in the first place.

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2 points

I agree with you, which is why I impatiently await a wide release of SteamOS, which delivers a console-like experience for whatever hardware you want, and also the return of Steam Machines for dedicated hardware. I have ChimeraOS installed but it’s far from perfect.

Also I ran a small poll a while back and the vast majority use their PCs for more than just gaming (which makes sense) so we would need to see more Windows-exclusive software ported over to Linux before you could switch over entirely.

But obviously there is an entire market for consoles that Linux hasn’t really penetrated.

Personally I run a dual-boot system so I can have the best of both but I’m not sure Microsoft would approve of that being sold “out of the box”.

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23 points

way back the issue most certainly was that though. There was a time when trying to run games with wine was a frustrating exercise that only resulted in a success in small minority of cases… which meant the answer was almost certainly negative when accounting for the additional restriction of trying to run the games you actually wished to be playing. Not everyone may remember this of course.

@neatchee @linux_gaming

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21 points

Exactly. If even one of my games doesn’t run, it’s already a pain in the ass. Might as well stay on windows so I don’t have to deal with the headache. They all run on windows. I’ll switch when they all run on Linux.

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9 points

well, thanks to Gaben, new games working fine

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28 points

That’s why they specified online, because the cancer that is Easy-Anti Cheat has a teeny tiny checkbox saying “allow linux users” that is rarely if ever checked.

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8 points

dunno, if we’re talking about easy anti-cheat, i’ve played insurgency: sandstorm, war thunder and hunt: showdown. Not a lot of games, but none of them had any issues

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-23 points

Oh yeah? Name 5.

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1 point

“Linux is great for gaming. You only need to follow these 25 kernel configuration steps to combine three 3rd party applications and it runs just fine!”

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7 points

Yeah it’s not like that anymore.

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6 points

Step 1: Install Steam Step 2: Download games Step 3: Play games

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5 points

If you have an AMD GPU and use Steam it’s mostly plug&play these days.

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2 points

I have an Nvidia GPU and I don’t want to waste my already limited gaming time trying to make the games run smoothly.

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3 points

Jam Mint or Pop OS on there and you will never in your life have to worry about a kernel to game. Not even once.

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-13 points
*

The issue is they want to run rootkits and malware instead of games.

Not sorry. Siege, Fortnite, Valorant, all of these games require kernel level access to Windows to run, and the publishers refuse to support Windows.

The only reason I’d ever play games like this in the past is due to peer pressure from friends to play these shitty games together with a bunch of sweats, cheaters and an overall generally toxic community. Especially Siege.

Social peer pressure goes both ways. And I’ve basically peaced out on any of these games in my friends group. That was enough to end that game for game nights, and as those games fade from our memory. I make sure what little memory of it remains is the true tainted and awful form from which they originated.

If you need a kernel level anti-cheat for your game, and nothing else will protect it. Your game is shit, your development cycle is shit, your company is shit, your community is shit, and why would I ever want to play a shit game with shit people from a shit company that forces devs to work under a shit development cycle?

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15 points

That is not, in fact, the issue. I don’t play any of those games and still can’t play all my games on Linux. I don’t allow kernel level anticheats on my system.

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6 points

Fortnite uses EAC that already run on Linux.

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0 points

You’re actually the worst. I’m glad you don’t play my games.

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-20 points

If only one could have two OS on one machine and somehow boot into the one you want to play a game on.

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28 points

Sure, but at the point you’re doing that the allure is lost on a lot of folks.

Why boot to two when they only want to play a game and one does it without needing the other.

This is an answer to a question that wasn’t posed.

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19 points

All the inconvenience of Linux with all the inconvenience of Windows. You might as well throw MacOS on there, too.

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12 points

It’s so weird, usually it’s Mac users saying that to me.

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7 points

It’s a hassle, most people are one size fits all

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6 points

That’s great until you decide you want to play more than one game and have to restart your computer 5+ times per day. Then you’ve somehow made the experience exponentially worse than staying on either one

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-3 points

Do something more with one’s life than play that many games.

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-28 points

Mine is not an argument asserting that people think games can’t run on Linux, mine is a mockery of the people who do so (I know several).

I find you insufferable too, don’t worry

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8 points

You are mocking a straw-man. These people you refer to number in the dozens

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-6 points

I must’ve gotten lucky with my quarter of a dozen friends who do that…

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63 points

I’ve been 100% Linux for over a year now. If it doesn’t run, I don’t buy it.

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29 points

That’s the attitude that we all need to have. Same here, if anything doesn’t work on Linux, I ain’t buying it.

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17 points

I even got a refund from steam when rocket league lost Linux support when that one company bought it

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7 points

Rocket League runs fine on Linux, they just lost native support.

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3 points

Nice. You can run rocket league on heroic launcher btw. I have it through the epic store. Works flawlessly

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1 point

I didn’t bother because I got plenty of playtime from it and got it through the Steam Controller/Link bundle as well. But I did consider it since I was ticked about losing Linux support.

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6 points

Same been Linux only for several years now. If it won’t run I won’t buy it.

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5 points

Same, since 2013.

I’ve found that often the game is listed as not linux, but runs fine with proton anyway. So I often buy, and refund if needed.

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2 points

Huh, same here, give or take a year (I was 100% Linux before Steam came, which was sometime around 2013).

I have never refunded a game though, ProtonDB is usually accurate so I just check there before buying.

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2 points

That’s what I do too.

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-1 points

That’s how I’ve been for a few years now. Windows has serious bugs that I encounter all the time that I never encounter with Linux.

Just this week alone… screenshots stopped working, usb microphones were stuck on mute, and the taskbar crashed preventing me from using any touchpad gestures or even accessing the start menu to restart.

The task bar was fixed with a restart but the other two issues required a reinstall of the os. I troubleshot those for like an hour without any solution.

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6 points
*

Windows is not ready for the desktop.

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1 point

Haha that’s pretty funny. And I whole heartedly agree.

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3 points

I know! I have to use windows at work (IT Admin) and using powershell always makes me wish the software we need ran on Linux. Just today I needed to extract a partition image with dism and it just did nothing for half an hour before the progress bar even came up. People say that Linux is buggy but gnome gives me way less headaches than windows 11.

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3 points

Windows unfairly gets the reputation of being more reliable than linux. I’m just waiting for my work to make one app available on Linux and then I’m switching.

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36 points

Is this Lemmy’s version of Reddit’s “pc vs console” I’ve been seeing this a lot lately. Why are you all so obsessed with who plays on what and what their opinions are?

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57 points

Because more people playing on Linux means more games get published for Linux, which is an outcome we want.

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-14 points

Gonna have to get in line behind consoles first. PC gamers have been around for years, still at the bottom of the list when games get published. So…what’s the point in saying “play on Linux because games also work here” when publishers don’t care?

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21 points

PC gamers have been around for years, still at the bottom of the list when games get published.

That’s because console manufacturers and game publishers team up to fuck consumers.

More gamers on Linux would force their hands.

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14 points

I decline the premise of the question. No one in the thread leading to your comment said anything remotely similar to “play on Linux because games also work here”.

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10 points

More like play on Linux because windows gets more bugs,bloat, and built in spying every version and if I had the kind of money to afford the whole collection of apple products you inevitably end up with when chosing that path, I would have had kids instead and not been dumped by my ex for being born into a poor family and failing to gain anything from working other than worse health and not even breaking even financially. Linux is free too. Free is my favourite price.

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29 points

Because we want things to be better for everyone.

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13 points

I just want more games to work on Linux, and more marketshare gets devs interested. I don’t care what specific people use, just that enough use Linux to grow marketshare.

Use what you want, but I’ll encourage anyone who is interested to give it a try.

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5 points

Huh. Yes, that’s exactly what it is.
Good shout.

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-10 points

It’s like when you discuss music with a metalhead, it’s not that you just don’t feel anything when you listen to metal, and you don’t consider complex polyrhythms to just be objectively “better” because they’re harder to play. It’s that your music sucks ass and if it’s not the right kind of metal it also sucks ass.

Linux can play most games, but if you like playing games that Linux doesn’t play then those games suck and you shouldn’t want to play them. That’s their perspective.

Why do you want to play Fortnite or CoD warzone? Don’t you know kernel level anticheat is a rOoTkiT?!? (As if they could even define such a thing without resorting to just pointing at shit they don’t like and twisting the definition like a Baptist preacher trying to create theology.)

You can’t win with these types of people, Linux can play games! And if it can’t it’s YOUR FAULT FOR NOT EXCLUSIVELY PLAYING GAMES THAT LINUX CAN PLAY.

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14 points

Nah, you’re getting too deep into your own feelings. Most threads I’ve seen where people start talking about Linux as a viable gaming option, it’s because some commenter or the OP mentions a problem they’re facing in Windows, which is directly solved or mitigated in Linux. Also, most of the time when people recommend Linux, it comes with warnings like “it has a learning curve” and “not everything works”. The hard line Linux-or-bust types are definitely not the majority.

Also, the very nature of Lemmy means the userbase probably skews towards more techy types who have been using Linux in their professional lives for years and have naturally come to harbor positive feelings for it. That drives the recommendation as well as anything else.

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-1 points

Whatever you say, I’ve literally had people ask me “why do you play insert game here?” When I tell them why I haven’t completely gotten off windows. It’s happened multiple times. I’m not getting in my feelings, some of you guys are just insufferable.

I love Fedora on my old gaming laptop and arch/SteamOS kicks ass on deck, but I’m not giving up my main game that I play for socializing with my friends just because the FOSS community assigns themselves moral superiority for not being on Windows.

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26 points

I love Linux but it really does need more VR support.

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11 points

And racing sims. I was talking to someone on Bluesky and they said the lack of racing sim gear support is holding them back.

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4 points

That’s the case for me, too.

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5 points

Yup. I guess the gist of it is, Linux is great for just general gaming, but if you’ve got something specific, it’s just not there yet. (I see a bit about VR too)

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2 points

+1 on sims, with so many different peripherals as well as third party software like simhub, even if a base game works on Linux, it effectively doesn’t since there is so much integration needed

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6 points

Yeah, I’d love to get a VR headset, but there just aren’t even games to play on Linux, and the headsets with good Linux support are either expensive or hard to find.

Hopefully that improves, I imagine it’s stopping people from switching to Linux.

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7 points

Even the Index, Valve’s own headset has had broken functionality for years with no fixes in sight. Valve refuses to fix big stuff like the cameras, base stations not turning on, or even automatic audio switching.

Not to mention steamvr reprojection is completely broken.

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1 point

Huh, that’s too bad. I guess I’ll keep waiting then…

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4 points

I’d really love a wireless VR headset that is just a display with inside out tracking and streams from your PC.

There’s really no reason to have built-in computation unless it’s a standalone device and it just leads to a bulky and heavy device that still has a short battery life.

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2 points

Yeah, I just keep a windows partition for VR. In all of my experience with VR on Linux, it has been terrible and buggy which is just intolerable. I gotta be honest, its not smooth sailing on windows either, steam vr has some bugs they haven’t fixed for years, so combining that with Linux just is not good.

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1 point

For me, I have been dual booting, but I have also had my linux set up for a few months now and was using it exclusively until i got my quest 3.

I can definitely see the allure of just sticking to windows if one plays pcvr exclusively or if one just hasn’t taken the plunge into linux yet.

I really do hope that support comes. Either officially or unofficially by a linux savant who knows this stuff.

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2 points

Yup. One by one the papercuts are getting resolved, so hopefully it’s just a matter of time before VR support gets better. Ideally Valve gets interested again and makes another push for Linux VR (maybe some tie-in with the Deck?), otherwise we may be waiting a while.

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24 points

Hum 🤔

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3 points
*

Mine’s similar (macOS is my work computer):

And last year Linux and Steam Deck were flipped:

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2 points

It’s also heavily skewed in my case due to online hours being the only hours counted, while I use my steamdeck away from internet most of the time.

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Linux Gaming

!linux_gaming@lemmy.world

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