Valve's latest Steam survey highlights Arch's popularity among Linux gamers, with EndeavourOS joining the list.
  • Waffle@infosec.pubEnglish
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    11 days ago

    Exciting to see endeavoros making the list. I’m one of the 0.06%! There’s dozens of us!!

    • Bjornir@programming.devEnglish
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      8 days ago

      It is really great, even with a NVIDIA. Never understood the complaints about arch, but maybe I have Endeavour to thank for that

      • pathief@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        6 days ago

        Boot up a VM and install vanilla Arch Linux using the wiki instead of archinstall. Notice that Arch Linux isn’t very pretty out of the box and take the time to set some “sane defaults”. Imagine having a person who is new to Linux to jump through all those hoops when they’re not even sure if Linux is for them. Imagine all the little things that could have gone wrong in this process and how a clueless person would react to them.

        EndeavourOS is extremely easy to install. Next next next and it’s done. It looks pretty out of the box and has sane defaults. The only reason I don’t recommend Endeavour to newbies is because it lacks a software manager/store, which REALLY help newbies out. The very frequent updates are also not for everyone.

        I love EndeavourOS but it’s certainly not for everyone.

      • Waffle@infosec.pubEnglish
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        9 days ago

        Definitely about ease of use. After borking my system a few times it was just easier to go with endeavor.

    • gusgalarnyk@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      9 days ago

      Can anyone comment on how difficult it is to get gaming working on vanilla arch vs endeavor or… Bazzite I think the other one is.

      I’m about to transition my main PC to Linux and I haven’t decided. I transitioned my laptop to vanilla arch and got everything working but it’s not a gaming laptop so that was the one thing I didn’t do. Worried it’ll be hard or impossible to get Nvidia card going and I’ll have to redo everything for one of the more prepared options.

      • pathief@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        6 days ago

        If you’ve already installed vanilla arch on your laptop then you’re good to go, that’s the hard part. EndeavourOS has a very user friendly installer but still uses Arch’s official repos. I like to think of it as a quickstart installation, but still feels pretty much like arch. I wouldn’t recommend Bazzite to a main computer, especially since I believe their gaming stack is optimized for AMD.

        Gaming on arch/endeavour is pretty straight forward

        • Install your nvidia drivers
        • Install steam
        • Go to Steam > Settings > Compatibility and enable “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”
        • Play your games
        • gusgalarnyk@lemmy.worldEnglish
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          6 days ago

          Thanks! That’s what I wanted to hear. When researching distros they always talk about them being optimized for gaming or what have you and I was worried some of that wasn’t as simple as installing the drivers and fixing steam.

          I look forward to converting this weekend or next!

          • pathief@lemmy.worldEnglish
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            6 days ago

            Optimized gaming distros often have stuff pre-installed, such as nvidia drivers, steam, heroic launcher… But you can pretty much install whatever you want and replicate that behavior.

            Bazzite in particular provides a fantastic gaming experience but, in my personal opinion, a bad desktop experience. It’s great for devices used almost exclusively to gaming, not so great if you have to work every day.

      • TheBeesKnees@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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        9 days ago

        I’m on EndeavorOS, but I basically use Arch’s wiki for any troubleshooting/guidance. I wanted Arch with an easy installation and I got just that.

        No huge issues gaming-wise, but you do need to be comfortable referencing Arch wiki as needed regardless of your installation. My installation defaulted to the on-biard graphics processor instead of the gpu, so I had to install the proper stuff manually.

        If you need help in the future, feel free to reach out.

    • gingernate@sopuli.xyzEnglish
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      10 days ago

      I did not know nix users had time to game due to the hours messing around with their dot files hahaah

    • WillBalls@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      9 days ago

      There’s dozens of us!

      I’ve had to do very little tweaking overall to get most games working, with the one notable exception being dragons dogma 2. The solution was proton GE and a new .nix file with GPU tweaks and now I’m getting slightly better performance than the average windows experience.

      • shadowbroker@lemm.eeEnglish
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        9 days ago

        I have to admit, that I have some experience with nix on 2 servers and 1 desktop, but installing steam was just 1 line in the config and everything worked. My biggest concern were the nvidia drivers, but that worked as well. Currently playing RE4 Remake.

  • Naz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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    10 days ago

    Holy shit there’s so many sub-distros in this thread:

    Arch

    • EndeavorOS
    • Cachy
    • Void
    • Nix
    • Manjaro

    Which one do we install for gaming, or do we wait for SteamOS on Desktop?

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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      9 days ago

      Void and Nix aren’t Arch-based.

      Which one do we install for gaming

      If you have to ask, I recommend Linux Mint. It’s not Arch based, which is a good thing because it’s going to be really stable and easy for people new to Linux.

      Steam is the same regardless of distro because it ships all of its own dependencies, even for Linux games. So if a game works on Arch or SteamOS, it should work on Mint, Fedora, etc.

      If you want something that feels like SteamOS, I’ve heard good things about Bazzite, but my recommendation is still to use Linux Mint and install Steam and Heroic, and then you’ll be good to go. I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed, but again, I recommend Linux Mint for someone new to Linux, because gaming should be nearly identical between distros and Linux Mint has a large community of people to help when you run into issues.

  • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
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    9 days ago

    Still plenty of Debian/Ubuntu out there. And with bazzite even Fedora’s getting in on gaming.

    Arch distros have made some truly impressive gains in userbases recently, though. Especially for being based on a distro that explicitly eschews user-friendliness

    • yonder@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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      9 days ago

      Once you’re a bit familiar with linux, arch becomes much more user friendly due to the Arch wiki and it’s wide coverage of topics. Knowing exactly what packages I need to use my Intel card to render with Blender is very handy. If you use a distro like EndeavorOS, you don’t even have to do any special setup: it installs like any other distro.

      • pyrflie@lemm.eeEnglish
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        9 days ago

        I feel like people discount just how useful a good wiki is. Especially on “how to” topics. It makes it better for the specifics of gaming just due to people testing and documenting it.

  • Allero@lemmy.todayEnglish
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    10 days ago

    Previously was a Manjaro gamer, and had a perfectly seamless experience.

    Migrated to Fedora, got some weird new issues, but running games through Steam solves everything.

  • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    11 days ago

    It’s because SteamOS identifies itself as Arch. Omitting this information is either dishonest or uninformed.

    • Voyajer@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      11 days ago

      Steamos identifies itself as “SteamOS Holo x86_64”. Either way it is Arch-based and is appropriate to group with the other Arch-based distros.

    • patatahooligan@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      10 days ago

      This is very obviously false. With the default filters with all OSs shown, Arch has 0.20% marketshare and Linux has a total of 2.29%. That means Arch is about 8.73% of all Linux systems in the survey. If you select the Linux only results, then SteamOS appears as its own entry, alongside a few others like Flatpak. We can see two things here:

      • SteamOS Holo is 36.47%. This was very clearly not counted as a part of Arch Linux in the all OSs tab.
      • Under these filters, Arch is even higher at 9.7%.

      What’s impressive here is not just the confidence with which you called the article dishonest and uninformed while not spending half a minute to check your false assumption, but also how many people upvoted you. This was trivial to prove wrong and in fact people have already done that below. Why are people so eager to believe the article is wrong that they will jump to agree with a blatantly wrong comment while having no knowledge of the situation themselves?

      • rooster_butt@lemm.eeEnglish
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        10 days ago

        Am I missing something or is 36.47% not greater than 9.7%? Why is SteamOS not shown as the most popular Linux distro without the Linux only filters?

        This contradicts the article claiming Arch dominates the Linux gaming scene and not StesmOS.

        • patatahooligan@lemmy.worldEnglish
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          10 days ago

          SteamOS seems to not be counted at all in the first page. Apparently, it’s not just “All OSs combined” vs “Linux only” but there are additional filters applied. Perhaps the first page is desktop-only. The article either also cares about desktop gaming specifically or is uncritically parroting the survey page. I think both Valve and the article writer should be clearer about what they’re talking about.

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        10 days ago

        I’ll take the L on this one. It’s a combination of the article only using the screenshot of the first view as evidence and me late night posting on Lemmy while falling asleep via NyQuil.

      • Elgenzay@lemmy.mlEnglish
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        11 days ago

        Because you hear “Arch” and it gives the impression that they’re being played on a Linux desktop, not a Steam Deck

        • hellofriend@lemmy.worldEnglish
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          10 days ago

          While that may be true, I still use my Steam Deck in desktop mode for a bunch of stuff besides gaming. Writing, job applications and interviews, using reddit because it’s the only device I have that isn’t detected for ban evasion, watching shows/Youtube. Maybe I’m atypical, but I don’t see why the Deck would offer a desktop mode if it wasn’t meant to be used.

    • Virkkunen@fedia.io
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      11 days ago

      The only uninformed here is you, since SteamOS does not identify itself as Arch, but rather as SteamOS Holo and it does show separately from Arch on the stats.

  • soul@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    10 days ago

    Literally spent the second half of my holiday vacation moving from dual boot Mint+Win11 to EndeavourOS. The last few days has been fun getting the latest Plasma to be themed out how I want it.

    To ease my move, I repartitioned my secondary NTFS days drive to free up space for an EXT4 partition and moved my /home to it. Once that was done, bye bye to the other 2 OS installs and hello to a nice clean install of eos.

    It’s worked very well so far. As a long ago Arch user who battled the AUR back in the day, I was hoping for the experience to be better now. And to my joy, it is. (It’s been probably at least a decade since I last used Arch.)

    Since almost all of my Windows needs are now covered natively and the few that aren’t are something I’ve gotten working via WinApps for a (mostly) seamless experience, in pretty comfortable with where I’m at now.

    I’ve even got my 2024 Kraken Elite working via NZXT CAM so I have full control over the cooler until that is eventually supported elsewhere. (Including control of the screen.)

    • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      10 days ago

      I must have joined the Arch community at the perfect time. I have been using it for probably over a decade and have had close to zero issues. AUR is amazing, and helpers make it even simpler. Only after using Arch for years did I understand that people have had serious issues with it in the past.