Linux surpassed MacOS in marketshare for the first ever time this month. Let’s go! :)
How is Linux game compatibility doing in current year?
How about user experience? Should one still expect to have to troubleshoot things on a consistent basis?
Considering doing a rebuild of my win 10 system in the near future and am getting tired of all these obnoxious pop-ups that I can’t disable asking me to “finish setting up my PC” by connecting to /signing up for various services.
I use Linux Mint at home and Windows 10 and 11 at work. The UI is basically interchangeable, I use both in the same manner.
I’ve had zero reliability issues and Mint was easier to install than Windows when I did it 4 years ago (not had to reinstall it yet, just kept on updating).
Games wise, I just play stuff through steam or classic emulators and it works well enough that typing this is the most I’ve thought about how it works for a long time.
I’m guessing the people who complain are running some gnarly full-custom linux on new hardware and trying to get the latest games to run … that was once me, I now use a PlayStation for newer games because PC gaming was just a bottomless money and time pit.
The user experience, and required troubleshooting, is still obnoxious. Even on the steam deck it’s obnoxious. It’s just not reliable, much as people hype it up. You’ll have to do a lot of troubleshooting at unexpected times when you really don’t want to be troubleshooting or might be pressed for time.
If you have an nvidia graphics card you can expect trouble with drivers, too.
If you have Windows 10 pro (or I think there’s a workaround to enable it if you just have the Home version), you can go into the group policy editor and disable those annoying pop-ups. You can even disable auto-updates, if you want to, or control how they work. And you can disable most of their telemetry. Windows 10 has a lot of flexibility if you know where to look/figure it out. They make it annoying to deal with, yes, but it has never been has horrible as Linux is for me whenever I’ve tried it, and it’s actually reliable.
Edit: also worth mentioning, depending on the games you play, a lot of multiplayer games’ anti-cheat systems do not work on Linux at all, so you can’t play those games on it.
Pretty good. I haven’t had to play around with proton launch options in a good while, Valve and the Heroic team have done a good job making it all plug and play. I don’t generally play the latest releases and am not really interested in multiplayer though, so YMMV.
Not to be a downer but Valve doesn’t give and insight into their methodology of collecting data and it’s been wrong a few times before. With Linux, VR, and languages. Why should the statistics be trusted now?
isn’t the hardware survey just a voluntary survey available to any steam user? like we know how they collect the data
It’s randomly picked users which has been shown that it’s not so random and that at one point Linux users weren’t being asked as often as Windows users. So without methodology and insight, it’s hard to have trust in the survey system.
Of course they weren’t asked as often, there’s significantly less number of users on Linux. 96.21% of the users asked was on Windows.
Isn’t this just the Steam Deck?
Probably, though does that actually matter?
The SteamDeck is showing people that Linux can in fact game. And while we’re always saying “ThE yEaR oF lInUx!” This is actually a huge step in the right direction.
Agreed. I have a deck and I’m now definitely gonna switch my main pc from Win10 to Linux. Steam deck desktop mode helped show me I could be comfortable using it, and the deck in general showed the gaming support is there nowadays.
I now see no reason to not put Linux on my desktop. Just deciding on which distros to check out. Probably mint. Maybe garuda…
I use Garuda and love it, but I also don’t think it’s the best for a first Linux distro, unless you’re good with needing to consistently use the command line for things, and you are interested in learning more about Linux and want a distro that requires you to occasionally get your hands dirty.
From what I’ve seen, Linux Mint is a great first distro. If you want something that’s more purposed to gaming, then Nobara is great. It’s made by GloriousEggroll, who makes Proton-GE. It’s not going to be as new-user friendly as Mint, but more so than Garuda.
I’m thinking about doing this as well. My Steam Deck runs fine like 99% of the time, so I don’t see why a gaming desktop with Linux wouldn’t work.
Plus, I’ve always been looking for a reason to use Linux daily. I’ve messed around with SUSE and Ubuntu here and there and use it for some homelab stuff, but Linux has never been my daily driver. Which means I’ve never really learned it the same way I’ve learned how to use and navigate Windows, or even Mac (I forced myself to learn OSX/MacOS several years ago when I bought a Macbook as my daily driver for productivity). This could be it.
It’s showing people Linux is acceptable as a handheld os. Which the world already knew with Android. Linux as a desktop is another story. Steam deck has desktop mode but I highly doubt the percentage of those who use it as a desktop is high. I wonder how many bought the dock.
I think you’re wrong. It’s showing that Linux has the capability to actually run these games. Some/most people won’t be able to equate the Linux on their handheld with Linux on a desktop, but those who do are welcome to the fold.
The Deck is basically a laptop in a handheld form factor, so no, it’s not just showing that Linux can game as a handheld.
False alarm everyone. I run Garuda but have been playing around with Nobara and I filled it out on both distros on the same machine. Sorry to get everyone’s hopes up.
Hope this trend continues to strengthen over the next few years!
I do wonder how Microsoft buying up basically the entirety of the western game dev world will influence this in the future though
If Proton keeps getting better, it won’t matter. I mean it matters, because this is clearly where governments should step in and bust up the monopolies, but they obviously aren’t going to.
Might become a problem if Microsoft starts making all their games windows store exclusives. Doesn’t seem to be their strategy right now, but it’s always a danger.
