Even gamers nexus’ Steve today said that they’re about to start doing Linux games performance testing soon. It’s happening, y’all, the year of the Linux desktop is upon us. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
Edit: just wanted to clarify that Steve from GN didn’t precisely say they’re starting to test soon, he said they will start WHEN the steam OS releases and is adopted. Sorry about that.
To anyone reading this thinking “once SteamOS comes out, I’ll switch”, you should know:
Gaming on Linux is already here. Pick a distro and game. You can take advantage of Proton right now. You don’t need to wait for one specific distro.
I’ve personally been gaming on Linux exclusively for about 3 years. Windows games, not Linux games.
“Pick a distro” is why they’re waiting for steamos, presumably.
This is fair. I should have given my own suggestions.
Mint is probably the choice at the moment for new folks. Also, this will be controversial, but feel free with Ubuntu. It will get you started, and that’s great.
Edit: I added some (open-ended) suggestions to my original comment.
I actually think mint is a terrible choice for beginners because it’s not kde, which is by far the best for windows people, and it isn’t immutable, which is a gamechanger for not having to maintain your system
I see the point about KDE, though I don’t think the learning curve on Cinnamon is hefty. I also think that KDE being so configurable can seem overwhelming to new folks.
As someone who gives kde to new folks all the time, most of them never configure anything and this isn’t a real problem any of them face. I mostly give this to the elderly and tech illiterate.
I think that is perfectly valid and I’ll happily recommend steamos to newcomers. I’m only a little worried about it being locked to flatpaks by default though. Hopefully that will change, but for most users it will be a good start.
locked to flatpaks by default makes sense long-term, I think.
Might be a little difficult in the beginning though.
Locked to flatpaks? aren’t they worried about the disk space?
The marginal extra disk spaces used by flatpak really isn’t a concern for most users, much less valve. If you do everything in flatpak and your apps only use current runtime versions, the additional space used by flatpak is in the megabytes, since libraries like libc are going to be on your host no matter what.
One flatpak uses a lot of extra disk space, but for each additional flatpak you add to a system the disk space difference is much smaller because they share dependencies. When it’s system-wide for all user-installed packages, the difference is quite small.
I was under the impression the didn’t shared dependencies thus eating space.
They don’t share dependencies with the base system, but they do share dependencies with each other, so long as those dependencies are at the same version, which most of them are because flatpaks generally stay quite up to date.
I wouldn’t say SteamOS for new folks, tbh. Flatpaks are very different from the typical Linux flow.
The typical linux flow is not important to learn for most and flatpak is easier for the vast majority of people to understand and deal with
furthermore flatpak is rapidly becoming the typical linux flow
It’s actually surprising how easy it is to use.
My wife was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on her windows laptop (GOT version, DRM free) and I just wanted to see if I can run it on my Linux laptop.
Just copied the game folder from her laptop to my external SSD, plugged it into my laptop, ran through proton. Everything works without any issues. Simple as that.
I was pleasantly surprised. We could even join via LAN and had some co-op fun. After trying it out I think I’m buying the game.
I haven’t used Windows for more than a decade, and I am genuinely surprised reading your post that the game works in this manner even if with proton/wine layer.
I can’t help but think that this is an exception, and would attribute this behaviour to how the game is made. I wonder what other software function this way.
I don’t even check ProtonDB anymore before buying a game. It just works the vast majority of the time, even without additional configuration.
In my experience pretty much everything works this easily. Steam games are a click away, Linux support or not. For things outside of steam you can either copy the install folder from a Windows install or just run the installer through Proton.
ran through proton
See, this is after where most gaming folks hop off.
In all fairness, if you just run Lutris (pre-installed on Bazzite), log into GOG from there and install and run the game through their wizard, it also “just works”.
That might be easier for most.Probably true, it depends. There are Steam folks and then there are GOG folks.
I prefer GOG tbh because it’s DRM free, but for some games I still need Steam, unfortunately.
What you just said is so much more difficult than running games through proton isn’t it??
For me, yes. But this is all using hands-holding Windows-like UIs, please realise that the recent-ish influx of Linux gamers understand this much, much better than terminals.
Although, I’m not sure how to install Proton as a CLI package on Mint, for instance.
aptdoesn’t list it, but Steam and Lutris do install it internally…You just go to steam settings > compat > enable for all games and then it just works for all games on steam
I’m not sure if you’re reading my messages but I’m saying I’m not sure how to do Proton outside of Lutris and Steam. And that CLI outside of a launcher sounds more convenient, but gave Lutris instructions for someone running a game not from Steam.
okay, that is different, sorry.
for that
step 1. install wine-tkg
step 2. right click a .exe > properties, set wine-tkg as the default
left click on .exe’s to open
done
Exactly this. Many people have a lot of apprehension until they actually try it.
Make sure your hardware is compatible. Otherwise you have to deal with kernel upgrades to get latest drivers, which is advanced linux stuff. My gpu (B580) is compatible with 6.12 and newer kernel. And I wasn’t able to install newer kernel on linux Mint 22. Ended up installing Windows. And… It’s not that bad. I haven’t seen it for a while. Everything works better in my case. And you can uninstall all you don’t need including edge. But I will go back when kernel I need will be shipped with distro.
This is generally true, but I’d also caution that the B580 is a brand new card with (somewhat lacking) Linux support.
In general, if you aren’t using bleeding edge hardware, you won’t have such issues. This is especially true of AMD hardware, which tends to be extremely Linux friendly.
Tbh the vast majority of people who say “ill switch to (insert Linux distro here) when (insert accomplishment here)” will most likley never switch
Fair enough. I tend to agree, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, because, you know, FOSS and freedom.
Some game developers (AGS) won’t turn on EAC for their games (Lost Ark).
For all the not super technically inclined people out there, I would recommend Linux mint with cinnamon, you’ll feel right at home and won’t face any real issues so long as you don’t want to play LoL, a few other big multiplayer games have anti cheat systems that don’t like Linux.
I’ll switch when 10 finally dies, they state Oct 2025 but if even less people go to 11 they won’t really have a choice but to keep 10 up and running. Make 10 the last Windows OS ever. Never go to 11.
But… Why not now? I can’t think of a single reason.
Personally, my last holdout on my desktop is VR, and I’d rather not dual boot.
My laptop has been running Linux for years now, although I’ve been having some issues with it lately, possibly due to repeated in-place upgrades, so I’ve been thinking of switching away from mint to a rolling release distro. Although, I have to say, NixOS’s philosophy is really compelling.
I have a friend that regularly games in VR in Linux. Admittedly, he’s always faffing around with it to make it work. But he’s also a bit of a chaotic person that runs Arch, so that could just be him and not a failing of the current level of support.
Out of sheer curiosity is he using a fancy Steam VR kit like an HTC Vive or something?
I’ve fully switched over to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed at this point but I’m so bummed out my Samsung Odyssey is relying on heroic support from Monaco dev(s?) to even have a hope of it running.
But Windows is killing WMR too and they don’t care, so OS really isn’t an issue here. I’m keeping my Win10 partition there getting dusty though, because it still has WMR on it. =\
Samsung Odyssey w/ GTX 2060.
He’s using Monando built with Envision without the steamvr-monado Plugin because “it slows everything down”.
Whaaat that’s crazy interesting! Thanks for replying!
I know there’s been a lot of progress made with Monado on these units but the controllers are still no-go from my understanding. Is he using the controllers or just the HMD? :O
I might just have to spend a weekend figuring out how to build Monado hahaha.
Sons is mostly playing Valorant right now on Windows 11. I’m an old dude familiar with FreeBSD, and Debian. No clue about running games and stuff though. Would he be able to switch?
Some Linux Competitive Multiplayer games that generally “just work” and perform well under Linux: Insurgency Sandstorm, Hunt Showdown, Hell Let Loose, Dead by Daylight, Battlebit
To be 100% honest, probably not, and you may need to confirm with someone who knows Valorant. The big issue is anti-cheat, the detectors in use for major multiplayer games tend to lose their minds when they see Linux as they’re typically only built for Windows. Other than anti-cheat, it wouldn’t surprise me if it played better on Linux. Some of the low level magic has improved a lot in recent years, but official support is mandatory for multiplayer.
No riot game works on linux
Given their rivalry with Valve (I’m sure Riot see it as a rivalry at least, Valve probably don’t) I wouldn’t put it past Riot to want to avoid SteamOS and Linux by extension until significant market share is available.
It’s the only category of games that doesn’t work, they use kernel windows modules for anti-cheat and they don’t have any plans to support
Yes, anti-cheat specifically is a problem. That’s you fighting against the corpos, to be clear. Not really an issue with gaming on Linux itself.
I’ve been using Linux exclusively for ~14 years now. Heavily gaming on Linux only for the last ~8 years.
It was possible (though sometimes headache inducing) to play most games back then (Wine and soon Proton to thank) the biggest change IMHO came with SteamPlay since it turned the headache into one click on most games (thanks to the amazing work of wine/proton developers and the tinkering of the community).
When the SteamDeck released people seemed surprised at the breadth of games that were running on day one. To me it was not really a surprise since I had been Linux gaming with SteamPlay all the time and was almost expecting games to “just work” (though I still would and still am checking ProtonDB before purchase).
What the SteamDeck changed in my view was
- Showing “everyone” that Linux Gaming is a thing that’s happening and been happening for a while. So maybe check it out?
- That a Handheld that doesn’t have to work around Windows but uses a purpose built OS just makes a lot more sense
I feel that the SteamDeck with SteamOS has really put Linux, especially Linux gaming on the map. Even though I want to be like “Linux Gaming has been a thing forever, I was doing it before it was cool” ;) I have to recognize that fact. In the past years I’ve seen so many people setting up Linux especially by the way of SteamOS (using HoloISO, Chimera …) just to play/mess with it which is also why I think an Official SteamOS release will make a huge difference.
Tl;dr: Gaming on Linux was a thing before. But the SteamDeck/SteamOS 3 made a huge impact nonetheless.
I haven’t run across a game that hasn’t run on The Deck yet. I know it’s capable of running quite a lot, but I got it to play indie games. It’s been great and does what I want it to do phenomenally. Additionallh if I ever wanted to do something more demanding on it, I could.
Most demanding thing I’ve tried on it was beam ng drive, it ran but struggled a bit. I’ve never yet been unable to play something I wanted to on it.
It still feels like magic at times. The SteamDeck is my backlog steamrolling machine (pun intended). Almost every game in my library that I either forgot about or feels wasteful to play on my high-end desktop, runs amazing. I’m replaying Brutal Legend just because it runs so smoothly on my deck.
When they came out with SteamOS the first time, it felt so good to have a games run on Linux without fiddling with Wine. Those were dark times. The few people making an effort to run their games with the tools they had available where really putting in work to make it happen.
God, I remember searching the ends of the internet to get Starcraft running at some point. I managed to kinda get it going but it might have taken a few days of troubleshooting silly things.
If you’ve been at it for 8 years, I appreciate your efforts.
Only 1 downvote? woah.
Bill Gates? Where is he?
the biggest wall imo is still getting companies with anticheat games on board.
IMO, no one should be playing games with kernel level anticheat. There is no way I would let any big gaming company have that level of control over my PC. It’s a security nightmare.
I wonder if Valve will eventually offer their own system of checks similar to Google Play Integrity? I don’t think I’d care for it since it’s an invasion of personal choice on a device that you own, but for people who want to play competitive games with cheating problems, running a partition with integrity checking seems a fair trade.
If it’s an immutable system, it should be easier to ensure system integrity IMO.
Yeah you can do most of that server side but they don’t want to pay for it. Why pay when your players let you coop their machine for free or even better yet pay you for the privilege. Also player run dedicated servers would fix all of this. Don’t like the cheaters movement servers. Own the server ban them. We had this working just fine in the 90s.
I would imagine it wasn’t that large scale back then. I wasn’t in the 90s so I wouldn’t know. But some games with player servers are filled with extremely triggering names and env, if you know what I mean. I’d rather prefer the current matchmaking.
The tick was to find your sever. With Quake 2 and Team Fortress Classic. You would find a server that meshed with the community that fit you and you would go to that server. You got to know the players that would come back over and over. It was a micro community in the larger community of the game. You became a regular sometimes were even giving mod rights very much like a lemmy community. Yeah there were asshats just like there is on here but you just don’t engage with them.
Hell back when quake 2 was in heat.net we would just hang out and chat in the lobby. When playing mechwarrior 2 they had clan websites and we would battle other clans in brackets. I started in that clan by just random showing up in that lobby and someone was nice and taught me how to account for lag when targeting other mechs.
It takes a little more work to find or create your community but once you do it’s so much better than the company directed dull experience. Stuff like surf servers in counterstrike or bombing run basketball servers in unreal tournament would not exist without player controlled dedicated servers.
Also scale didn’t mater since it was decentralized like lemmy is. The company didn’t have that much control of what players did with their severs. That’s what this is what this is all about control. They want to make sure you see what they want you to see to buy that cosmetic to feel fomo. To play how they want you to play. So emergent gameplay almost never happens anymore.
If gamers were buying in their best interest nintendo would be bankrupt, there is what gamers should do and there is the real world. The sad reality is that only the low end gamers care about vanguard and they aren’t paying the bills in riot
I wouldn’t say it has anything to do with the financial affluence of the gamer, but I agree with you that the vast vast majority of gamers simply do not care. Like with a lot of things, that same majority would be better off if they did.
sadly theres a line between shouldn’t and how the market responds to it. Regardless of the fact, it is a hurdle, and the reason why not all of the top games on the concurrent player list on steam is playable on SteamOS, whether one likes it or not.
After that huge “Salt Typhoon” hack against major telecoms, you’d think people would take “security nightmare” a little more seriously!
Truth is though, your average Valorant/League/Whatever player probably isn’t even aware of it running when they smash through ok -> ok -> agree -> yep -> accept -> accept -> ok -> play.
Any kernel-level anything connected to major corporate servers should be scary and taboo, but except for the alarm-raisers who know what they’re talking about, most people don’t even understand the implications.
I’m glad Steam is at least marking a big “This game requires kernel level anti cheat” on store pages now. It looks ugly, possibly scary, so maybe that’ll raise some awareness and make developers not want to go with it.
That will be more likely as more people start using SteamOS.
If SteamOS can get enough users, then not supporting it will start to hurt the game developers profits.It’s true that a big slice of gamers play games with anti-cheat solutions that don’t work on linux. That said most of those aren’t even on steam, which is the biggest pc game marketplace, so I’m not sure it’s that big of a dealbreaker for that many people.
you don’t have to onsider off platform titles on its own. just take proton DBs list and sort by playercount and youll have your handful of misses on some of the top currently played titles. that already filters the non steam games already, and it still has its small handful of titles not on board yet.
It will be the opposite. Even Microsoft hates kernel-level anti-cheat.
Let’s be honest here, they only care because when someone inevitably fucks up, people will think the fault is with windows.
I wonder why they dont like people fucking around with the kernel
I’m sure it starts with C and ends with “Strike”.
Oohh, counter strike.
I’d rather kick them off the boat.
The reason why I can’t try Marvel Rivals with friends.
Fuck kernel-level software from commercial companies, though!
? rivals works fine on my machine on Nobara. it has a Linux compatible anti-cheat.
Hm? It wasn’t very click-and-play on Bazzite before, and areweanticheatyet.com listed it as broken.
I see it’s updated to Running (though not Supported)
I’ll have to try this weekend, it seemed fun!
Or getting players & friends to stop playing those types of games when there are so many compatible games to choose from.
i have faith this will be resolved eventually/they will have to admit kernel anticheat isn’t even meaningfully more effective and give up on it. anyway loads of people don’t play multiplayer AAA so it’s a no brainer already for them. as the mass of people migrating continues to grow devs/publishers hopefully will have to catch up. 2% of the steam hardware survey is linux now, it could be 5% within the decade. that’s my optimistic outlook, i know i shouldn’t underestimate how out of touch the epic games suits etc. are though
It does often feel like as soon as a significant hurdle is overcome, the industry just makes another one.
Hopefully SteamOS/Steam on Linux gets enough traction to force publishers to reconsider.
And with every step it’s getting better. 10 years ago almost no games were natively supported and you needed to fuck around a lot to start anything with wine and most didn’t work anyway. Nowadays everything just works, and the only category of games that doesn’t is that slop with kernel level anticheat.
The improvement was monumental.
Let me preface by saying I love everything Valve has done for Linux gaming and I’m fully aware that Linux wouldn’t be where it is now without Steam. With that said… I really don’t get the hype for SteamOS on other devices. I mean, it’s serviceable if all you do is gaming but it’s honestly one of the worst desktop experiences I’ve ever had (and I’ve
used gnomehad many): You need to go into desktop mode to do pretty much anything a regular computer should be able to do and, when you get back into Steam, it closes everything you opened while in desktop mode. This means you have to rely on hacky software to do things you would just be able to do if Steam was better integrated with the desktop. For example, why do I need to install a plug-in to import all of my games from different stores into Steam when I should just be able to alt-tab into whatever launcher I want? No, I will not import other launchers into Steam’s launcher and then launch the launcher from the Steam launcher to launch the game — I’m not a crazy person. It feels as if Steam is doing everything in its power to keep me from leaving it and punishes me for daring to try, which honestly reminds me of a certain fruit company. Now, Valve obviously designed SteamOS to be used with a controller and only for games bought from Steam (which is delusional but I digress), so let’s assume you are that person: you have your entire game library on Steam and you use a controller as your main input device so you don’t see the need to ever leave Valve’s walled garden. Then you’d still be better off with any one of the other 37 thousand distros that come with Steam preinstalled because then you at least have access to the desktop Steam UI.tl; dr: SteamOS kinda sucks, just use a normal distro. Yes, even if you exclusively buy games from Steam.
I mean, it’s serviceable if all you do is gaming
You answered your own question. For some devices, gaming is all they need to do.
It feels as if Steam is doing everything in its power to keep me from leaving it and punishes me for daring to try
Does it? EmuDeck, Heroic and Lutris integrate directly into Steam. With a single click you can add a shortcut in your Steam library. Same goes for adding any desktop shortcut with a right click.
I’m not sure how they can make it any easier unless somebody like GOG bothers to do some work themselves.
For some devices, gaming is all they need to do.
Serviceable isn’t good, even if gaming is all you do, you’re better off with a regular distro — this was brought up already in the comment you’re replying to.
EmuDeck, Heroic and Lutris integrate directly into Steam. With a single click you can add a shortcut in your Steam library
Adding a secondary launcher to a launcher is bad design. Again, this is something that I brought up in the comment you’re replying to, along with having to use hacky software that only exists to remedy SteamOS usability problems, of which emudeck is one.
I’m not sure how they can make it any easier
They don’t have to. The problems I mentioned only exist because of SteamOS dumb decision to completely segregate the “desktop” and “gaming” experiences. They’re fixed by just letting me use my computer. Imagine if Steam logged you out every time you exited Big Picture mode, because this is pretty much how SteamOS currently works. I think you guys are cutting a LOT of slack to SteamOS because of what Valve did for Linux gaming but there’s really not a single reason to use it over something like Bazzite (not the Steam Deck version, obviously).
This could lead to some sort of controlling mechanism that will check if your OS is actually SteamOS, otherwise some kind of DRM would prevent you from playing online for example. I’m weary.
Also people are forgetting that gaming isn’t the only thing people use their computers for. They are convenience devices. They want to game on the PC they also use for other things. They will not switch for gaming only. Companies who sell software will see this and start piling on their controlling mechanisms, tracking, … More proprietary things will come, I mean games already are, and they are not in the spirit of Linux.
I’m bad at expressing my thoughts, but I hope you understand what I’m trying to say.
You meant “wary”. Weary means tired. Wary means suspicious.
It didn’t feel right when I wrote it, but English isn’t my first language. Thanks!
No problem; it’s a common English mistake, even for native speakers.
Not really. The “control mechanism” is already in place for games that rely on Steam’s infrastructure for their online functionality.
I tried their iso on a mini PC yesterday and uhh… not so good.
Installed mint and had steam running in 15 minutes after the disappointment tho.
Where did you find a SteamOS 3.0 ISO?
There’s no ISO.
Wrong
https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown
Ok, it’s an img file, whatever. Same same.
Oh man that’s the old SteamOS 2.0 from 2015.
Valve completely rebased and revamped it in 2022 for the steamdeck. Steam OS 3.6 is the current version and only available for the steamdeck.
This is the version based on Debian, which is ~10 years old.
The new one is based on Arch.
How nice of them to just leave it up there.
I only know this because I was able to download a distrobox image of SteamOS on my Bazzite installation (it was in the drop-down menu), and it’s actually Arch instead of Debian. Not sure if it’s legit or what…
That is SteamOS 2.0 which is nearly a decade old.
I just did that. I have a dual boot laptop where Windows was used exclusively for games, and instead of upgrading that I built myself a PC with an AMD GPU (Nvidia, fuck you!).
So far I haven’t run into any problem that I couldn’t easily solve, and the only games that won’t run are those demanding I install an anti cheat system, but I’m fine not playing those.
Very nice! I wish I could use an AMD GPU, but sadly machine learning keeps me on the CUDA platform. Gotta make a living. That said, recent NVIDIA drivers got better on Linux. I can finally use Wayland problem free now. Games on proton also work just fine.
However, this only works well on Arch, BTW. Really wish I could just use Debian. I’m a computer scientist, but I also get tired of an avalanche of software updates every couple of days; I don’t need all the latest and greatest software. My German internet commection also means I wait up to half an hour sometimes.
Funny enough, I’m on Arch by choice. I was using it before but it makes sense as having the latest packages is good for gaming on it. Luckily I’ve just been upgraded to a FTTH connection so I’m good on that front.
I had to go back to Xorg though because Wayland was doing some weird shit.
When SteamOS releases on all devices people will say “I’ll switch when every peice of Windows software is compatible” or some other unreasonable and impossible accomplishment. Even if every peice of Windows software was compatible people would say “ill switch to Linux when it looks and functions identically to Windows”.
It helps to think about this as a spectrum, as more features become available more people will make the switch to Linux. Not everyone will be able to swich to Linux at the same time, and some people will never switch.
Gaming was major bottleneck, even I, a person using Linux full time for the past 20 years, I used to maintain a Windows disk to play games. Only in the past couple of years I was able to sunset my windows setup, hopefully to never touch windows ever again. I had to drop a couple of games but it got to the point where rebooting to a OS wasn’t worth it, as most of my games worked flawlessly without any tweaking.
There are many major pros to the Linux desktop environment, but we still need major software applications to become portable. The workflow of an average office worker is still not Linux compatible. Of course there are office alternatives, but they are not as easy to use. Though, IMO the oss world is hurting by trying to copy ms when their products are so horrible… Hopefully, the EU will drop some major cash at the issue with all these talks about digital sovereignty.
These guys should not wait for Linux but support reactOS, lol
Absolutely this, Linux is not a Windows replacement but ReactOS is (granted its not ready yet)
Yep. I recently started using bluesky and it’s filled with linux hate posts farming likes. People just complaining about random things that don’t even make sense.
I believe fomo is a real thing. Even if one doesnt play fortnite or valorant or kernel level shit, they still are afraid of missing out. So unless and until Microsoft goes bankrupt, I doubt Linux will replace it.
Man that’s sad, because I was considering it just because it had a stronger “Network Effect” than Mastodon.
That FOMO is pretty real though. These multiplayer service games are a flash in the pan sometimes, where once their heyday is over, they become “Hey remember that old game?” and there might be some reverse-engineered private servers running from like, Lithuania, with 4 people online after that lol.
I feel this pretty hard with Helldivers 2. I had a BLAST with the first game! Loved it! And apparently this one is good too!
But Sony is determined to be Sony, and it’s got kernel-level requirements, so nope, I’m missing out. It does suck, because before all the drama I really looked forward to it. It genuinely looks fun. I see my friends playing it. Oh well.
Watching Arcane made me almost wanna fire up League of Legends again, but once they announced their anti-cheat, I quit forever. (Probably for the best, let’s be honest lol.)
So yeah with an OS, I think people feel like some killer app will come out and if they’re not running a system it was tailor-made for, they’ll miss out on it entirely.
Yep. I thought it was filled with left but it’s mostly liberals. They get very easily offended when any of their capitalist hobbies or tools are endangered in a conversation.
About the arcane part agree. For me its esports. Watching it makes me want to play but I know none of the things I enjoy watching will be in ranked lol(teamwork). Linux not supporting kernel level anti shit is a feature for me lol. I would jump right back to my valo addiction otherwise.
With bottles, boxes, and all the other small environment virtualization solutions available right now, switching to Linux with a few ‘almost native’ Windows application is easier than ever. The mileage will vary from distro to distro. I’ve managed to get bottles to run some annoyingly old statistics software I need for work. It works great. Sometimes it can be a bit of a headache to figure out where the software saves files but playing detective for a file somewhere in the system is better than enduring all that Windows imposes on the user.
Didn’t know about Bottles, Cool find, may have to test it out.
For all my disc games or other just standalone .EXE stuff, Bottles has been nothing short of mind-blowing.
I’d say the Flatpak might be your best bet if you’re on a rolling distro.
My only other tip is to make sure you set your Bottles directory to wherever your storage partition is, as it’d probably fill up your /home by default pretty quick!
Just in time for Windows 10 to lose support in October 2025 and for me to never switch to Windows 11 because it sucks and I hate it
Every so often they’ll release an update that breaks everything, or they’ll patch something and the processor improvements will be bigger than intel or amd get out of a generation, showing how gimped it was to begin with.
Thanks Steve
I’ve been saying for years: we need a dedicated gaming operating system.
No we don’t. Who needs that? That’s what consoles are for. Every time I want to play on my computer I would need to dual boot and change to the OS? That’s nonsense
Game Devs and device driver Devs need to get their shit together and fix things.
Personally I’d love a dedicated console experience that’s Linux.
Do you mean a dedicated gaming flavor of Linux? Because otherwise, isnt that just a console?
Or even better, a dedicated gaming runtime environment. And that env can then be made multiplatform.
Hello, flatpak exists you know
Well here you go: https://bazzite.gg/
cloud native
Already rings an alarm bell, but thank you for sharing regardless.
Also, their website runs like shit. I don’t have much hope for them making a gaming OS that doesn’t, but time will tell.
That is astoundingly judgmental. Good lord.
Cloud native is a weird term I’ll agree, but it just means container based.
Bazzite is amazing and worth a try. I’ve been using it as a daily driver for nearly a year now.
Perhaps you’d prefer the Github over their “shit” website: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite
Or perhaps you’d like to positively contribute to the state of Linux gaming, and make some suggestions for the website in their post just for that: Requesting input: Bazzite’s website
At this point when people tell me the website runs like shit I just laugh and tell them they’ve been filtered. That does 120 FPS on a phone, if you’re lagging on that site just go ahead and give up on gaming.
The animations are stuttery for me on … Fedora Linux.
I bet they’d be smooth as butter on Windows. x)
PC gamers moving to console? What’s next the existing consoles adopting keyboard+mouse?..
There is no downside to this
Consoles have accepted keyboard+mouse for years now! Microsoft started with the Xbox one and Sony started with the PS3; Though there were select games for generations prior that supported k+m through their own implentations
The only bastion left is anticheat. Everything else are just (bad) old habits fueled by marketing.
…and VR. VR is already finicky on its own, gaming on Linux can be finicky in different ways, and the issues multiply if you have two things like that.
Tends to depend on the headset you own, some work perfectly. Also, Valve is very likely releasing a headset based on SteamOS, which should help.
Sure, the Index should work fine, but I’m not so sure about accessories, my Slimes, etc. Also on an nvidia GPU…
Really hope Valve does indeed release the new headset, because my Index is getting very dated.
Completely depends on the accessories, and an nvidia GPU is unlikely to have a major impact, I’ve used one for VR before. What are slimes?
Slimes as in SlimeVR, open source trackers.
I think it all should work, but I’m afraid of just having to solve issues in general with stuff I don’t have to solve any issues with now.
I assumed it was that. I saw explicit Linux support on their site, so wanted to confirm.
Nothing wrong with having that fear, just not super fair to assume it won’t work in that case. Both the devices you’ve mentioned have good Linux support, and would likely work pretty well out of the box.
Yeah, it’s also that “it just works” now, and one undisputable (though unfortunately self-fulfilling) advantage of Windows is that chances are if you do encounter an issue you’re not the first one and someone has already solved it.
Being an early(ish) adopter of anything like that is always a bit of a risk and pain.
I work in VR, I play in VR, including Windows games, all on Linux. No specific problem for me on that front.
Can you provide some context… VR has many devices? Can you make meta shit work?
Yes, Meta shit actually works quite well using Wivrn apart from it being, well, from Meta. lvra.gitlab.io is a treasure trove of Linux VR info. SteamVR is kinda shit on linux, so using the open source openXR runtime Monado is ideal. I personally use a pimax 5k I got cheap used to play Beat saber and it works quite well. While not complete, there is very promising progress on getting WMR headsets working. The Index, Vive and Vive pro all work with no fiddling though if that’s what you’re after.
I’m basically just using Steam with SteamVR on the Index, no tinkering in there.
I also tried other things, e.g. Monado, streaming to headset, etc but in practice I prefer to “just” play when I’m playing and for that the Index works great.
How do you work ‘in’ vr?
Apologies I wasn’t clear. I actually I work “on” VR, namely I’m a software developer who write VR/AR code.
Still though… I also do work “in” VR as I have numerous demo where I’m coding in the headset. Most recently you can check this 1min video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGvc4kNXiUY that I did for https://futuretextlab.info/ and it’s all open source, cf https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/text-code-xr-engine/src/branch/fot-sloan-companion . To clarify a bit I drag&drop file on my (Linux) filesystem and they are reflected in AR in that example. I can open them, manipulate them, if it’s code (here JavaScript and AFrame) it can live reload part of the scene, etc.
I’m also working “in” VR for the NLNet sponsored project xrsh aka XRshell https://nlnet.nl/project/xrsh/ where thanks to WASM we basically put a (small) Linux system with its terminal on a Web page and thus can code and work in the headset.
Maybe they mean that they use flatscreen applications in VR, or maybe they take all their meetings in VRChat.
Anti-cheat systems already have to make changes, since Microsoft have plans to significantly restrict kernel mode access after the major Crowdstrike issues earlier in the year. Kernel mode code is very invasive, difficult to get correct, and can result in major security holes or stability issues if not written correctly.
A bug in userland code may crash that one app. A bug in kernel mode code can (and often does) cause bluescreens, that people blame Microsoft for. I’m sure they’re tired of being blamed for buggy code written by other companies.
Running the anti cheat code in userland will (in theory) make it easier to run on other OSes too.
Well put.
Yes indeed, I’ve followed that from afar (as I generally mostly play offline, definitely not competitively) so I hope this will be the final missing piece.
Windows is actually fedware these days.
(Fedware that also scams and aggrevates the feds themselves) if you post here you owe it to yourself to dump that hot garbage as soon as you can.The issue for me that had me buy a Windows 11 laptop was it was the cheapest I could find. Though I have since then given it away and replaced it with a Steam Deck as my only computer.
