PC Gamer: "I'm brave enough to say it: Linux is good now, and if you want to feel like you actually own your PC, make 2026 the year of Linux on (your) desktop"
9d 4h ago by lemmy.ml/u/mr_MADAFAKA in linux_gaming from www.pcgamer.com
I am brave enough to say it: The ocean has water in it.
Praise me for my braveness.
I get the sentiment but the article is more targeted at the PC gaming crowd that isn't exactly tech-illiterate but probably only knows Linux from memes about it requiring you to recompile a kernel to install Chrome or some other BS like that
I think a good portion of Lemmy and the fediverse already know it's been at this level for a long while now but I'm excited to see articles like this since it means the tide is turning against Windows for the average user
Yeah, though would be better if the well were not poisoned, misleading perceptions, with words like "brave" and "now".
but probably only knows Linux from memes about it requiring you to recompile a kernel to install Chrome or some other BS like that
Yeah just look at the article's comment section (not recommended). Still full of ignorant misinformation. Borderline disinformation IMO.
i think this bravery is worthy of a marble carving. 12 stories tall, of you pointing at the ocean
Pretty sure Trump's already building one, but I guess you could put this guy's next to it.
I heard somewhere that by the time the scientific community officially announces life on mars the rest of us will have already concluded that there is life on mars. I feel like this is the same thing.
Because science doesn't work on circumstantial evidence, but hard proof.
The problem is there's a large difference between the 50% the average person needs and the 99.9% the scientific community needs. It's just a different level of proof they're looking for.
I realize that scientific rigor demands more to assert a claim. I was more commenting on mainstream gamer media embracing Linux after it seems like a well proven option.
Big if true.
How do you live so dangerously, sir? Aren't you worried about retribution?
Valorant DaddleDew,
Doth proudly proclaim.
Sees that the sea is due
To torrential rain.
Dew truly polymath,
Paragon of deep.
Scrolls Lemmy in the bath
And nods right off to sleep.
Wtf. MODSSSSS
Next you'll say the ocean is a soup.
Salt, meat, vegetables--it is soup.
'zacly.
Best reply.
I was so reluctant to transition to Linux for gaming. I've been using Linux since 2007, so I'm not new to the OS.
I took the plunge a handful of months ago, and it is an amazing experience. The games I like to play actually saw performance gains when switching over.
I still dual boot a Win 10 partition for outliers, but so far the only game to get installed there has been BF6, due to the requirements of their anti-cheat.
I also have a spare windows drive for BF6, but it's so unbelievably mid that in practice I don't really even play it
I can't disagree. But a couple of friends and I like to play a few casual bot rounds on Friday nights.
How easy was it to do the signed boot?
Not OP. I'm dual booting Windows and Fedora. Fedora supports secure boot, so everything works out of the box. The only thing that annoys me are the Nvidia drivers. Those need a kernel module that you need to compile yourself. And all kernel modules need to be signed for secure boot.
In theory, it's still easy: At first, Fedora boots with a precompiled and signed nouveau driver, that supports secure boot - so you can use your PC after the install. When you install the NVidia Driver, akmods etc gets setup automatically. Also they automatically generate a key pair for you and mokutil allows you to send that key to your UEFI, so that you can install it on the next boot. So it's just reboot, load the key once in the UEFI and after the reboot the official driver is running. After every kernel upgrade akmods should automatically recompile the module, sign it with your key (now known by your UEFI) and it just works.
In practice... For me it's a 50:50 if the akmods auto build works. So, after a kernel upgrade, I usually reboot, wait for the build to fail to a Desktop in 1024×768 and then have to open a terminal and type akmods --rebuild --force. After the build and an additional reboot everything works again.
Lmfao it's a piece of shit, basically I have all three of my drives hanging out of the 5.25 bay on the front of my machine. That way I can easily unplug my 2 Linux drives when I enable secure boot. Otherwise my Linux won't boot, which fucking sucks to fix. So basically it's a pain in the ass and BF6 just isn't good enough for me to spend that effort.
Some distros like Mint support ‘secure boot’ out of the box, so dual booting works fine without any extra work. But I haven't used Nvidia drivers yet, so idk about that.
It's funny. I also was very hesitant to make the jump from Windows, but finally did in 2025. I was dual booting for a while until I realized I hadn't been into the Windows one in months because it was a pain in the ass for various reasons. So I just got rid of it.
I've made peace with the fact that I won't be able to play certain games. Their loss; there's plenty of other games to buy with my money.
I’ve made peace with the fact that I won’t be able to play certain games. Their loss; there’s plenty of other games to buy with my money.
Same.
I have a backlog of games years long, the fact that I can't put Battlefield or Valorant on that list doesn't diminish my ability to play amazing games 24/7 if I wanted.
Expedtion 33, Blue Prince, Hollow Knight, Silksong, Hades 2, ARC Raiders, Helldivers 2, Path of Exile 2, Deep Rock Galactic, etcetcetc.
I have over 200 games in my Steam library and every single one works on Linux. I'll worry about the 5 kernel anti-cheat games once I get to the end of my list...
I was dual booting for a while until I realized I hadn’t been into the Windows one in months because it was a pain in the ass for various reasons. So I just got rid of it.
A very old familiar story over the past couple decades or so.
I’ve made peace with the fact that I won’t be able to play certain games. Their loss
Yup.
It shall continue being good to see other people get this, taking their power back, ceasing being their games dealer's bitch.
Same experience here. I've used Linux for decades. Always on my servers. Occasionally on a desktop here or there. Tried to daily-drive it on a single computer or laptop many times. Got close a couple times, but ultimately always fell back to Windows when the going got tough, when hardware support wasn't available or the errors and misconfigurations became too convoluted or I simply fell back into the habit of regularly using programs that simply didn't work or weren't available in any form on Linux.
When I came back to it a year or two ago? That experience totally changed. The tables have flipped completely. Linux is now the compatible, straightforward, quickly-fixed, and often even user-friendly option while Windows has turned into a frustrating shitshow of blocking and opting-out of misfeatures and reconfiguring shit that breaks all the time with Microsoft's ideological "updates".
Switching to Linux on my grandma's computer was a breath of fresh air for both of us. Then I switched one of my laptops. I remained impressed. It took some self-convincing, but eventually I got brave enough to switch my main gaming PC/desktop workstation... and with a little bit of work, it was soon perfectly lovely (I'm typing this on it right now). I've been running PikaOS, a gaming-focused Debian variant for over a year now and it's been an utterly fantastic experience. I have zero complaints. Are there still some rough edges? Yes, absolutely, but I don't mind. I use them to file the callouses off my bash-scripting fingers while I figure out a way to smooth them down.
I'm pretty savvy and experienced with Linux, and I realize it's probably not ready for everyone yet, but it's ready for more people than you'd think. For grandma, who only uses web browser and word processor and email, Linux is a straight upgrade in user experience, stability, functionality, everything. For Gamers, everything you need is almost all out there already, thanks to Steam and Wine and Proton and the gaming-focused distros and all the ecosystem that's built up around that. Ironically it's the technically competent Windows "Power Users" who might still struggle the most, they won't have the survival skills they need to operate at the level they expect in a Linux ecosystem yet.
It would also be good enough for a Power User to work at grandma's level with zero effort, or a Gamer level if they were willing to just blindly follow copy-and-pasted instructions, but that justifiably won't be enough for them. To work at a Power User level in Linux, you need to learn some different skills. Maybe you can get those on the server side and through stubborn trial and error, like I did, or maybe Linux will eventually get good enough that it's intuitive to do everything even Windows Power Users want to do eventually. But I don't think it's quite there yet for that group. It takes some effort, for sure.
The games I like to play actually saw performance gains when switching over.
Yes. That's part what got me to let go of my dual-booting habit.
When booted to Windows, I would get tempted to play something (that I had installed on both sides) lazily without rebooting back to Linux, and it would suck.
TBH I don't understand what's there even to be reluctant about if you're already a Linux user. You've probably already been dualbooting, it's not exactly a lot of effort to install Steam or a gog Linux installer.
How shit gaming had been on it, for the majority of it's lifetime.
Yeah do people not remember the pre proton era? Or before the push in the 2010s that got indie games to support Linux?
Linux gaming has seen wild changes in just the last 5 years.
Yeah for tech savvy people it wasn't a big deal. Download Windows game on the interwebs, check winehq and then game.
But it wasn't always plug and play. Also I always was flexible on what games I wanted to play.
Even then, it often crashed or glitched. I mean it was amazing for me at the time anyway, running Windows games on Linux. But nowadays it's on a different level.
I absolute do remember the pre proton era, but for Linux users it should have been common knowledge that Proton exists and worked pretty well for years. And it's certainly less effort to try at least a little to get a game working you already own (by looking it up on protondb if it doesn't work right away) than to boot into Windows specifically for gaming.
I AM VERY BADASS
Yes, so badass, clicking "install" on a Steam game.
If the game is not on Steam or doesn't have a native Linux port (which is actually worse more often than not) then manually setting up to run through wine/proton is pain the ass.
How many people only play games that this applies to?
There are a lot of people play such such games at least occasionally. And on Windows they just work. The moment gamer try to do this on Linux and realize that it doesn't, they will go back to Windows.
The paradise of easy gaming on Linux ends the moment you try to leave Valve's walled garden.
Sure, I understand not wanting to fuck around with WINE manually. But the commenter who said they're reluctant never even said that they don't use Steam - why wouldn't they at least try?
For me, it's Final Fantasy XI - it's a million years old and it actually does run fine on Linux, but some of the third party QOL tools I use to make it less painful to play don't work (or at least I can't figure out how to get them to work) through Lutris.
Seriously, all the lutris & co mess is obsolete now.
Open Steam > add non-steam game > properties > compatibility > force proton 10 > profit
Worked for all the cough responsibly ripped .exe's I've thrown at it so far
I still use bottles to have a persistent virtual drive for things like modding tools.
Most things work perfectly in Steam though.
Yeah. I also use Bottles for GOG / itch games that don't have a native linux version. And I'm pretty happy with how it works. Things install smoothly and easily, and it has a very nice menu for the games I've installed. Here's what it looks like:
However, there have been some hiccups along the way that might have caused less patient people to give up. In particular, it took me awhile to work out that although I could tell bottle to launch a windows .exe from anywhere on my computer, it would only actually work properly if I first move the exe into the virtual drive - which deep inside a confusing directory structure. (The "troubleshooting" menu option goes directly into talking about this issue; but even finding that menu option isn't totally straight forward, especially if you're just launching the exe from a file browser or something.)
Anyway, the upshot is that I like bottles; because it is easy to use but also very transparent about how it works and what it is doing, which I like. But I wouldn't say it's the best option for everyone.
Lutris has allowed me to use battle.net though which I don't think steam can do, afaik. I'm happy to be proven wrong, though
I run battle.net through Steam. Works just fine.
Personally I prefer having Battle.net in Lutris (or something else like Bottles) even if you can run it through Steam. I just dislike using a launcher to open another launcher and Lutris avoids that.
I can understand that the Steam method would be a little easier for some people, but using Lutris for something as popular as Battle.net is really easy too. You just click "Add" and search for "Battle.net" and it does the rest automatically, even downloading the installer. The only thing to be aware of is that you should close the launcher when it gets to the point you are asked to log in which completes the installation, but Lutris tells you that as well.
how did you do it? mine does not start after installing.
I added Battle.net-Setup.exe as a non-steam game and set the compatibility tool to Proton Experimental. This seems to have worked for me. Running on Garuda.
‘Works fine’ is not true yet, currently.
Especially annoying on steam deck. Is this a Linux issue? No. It absolutely is not.
I also had no(*) trouble installing Battle.net in Heroic Launcher, FWIW. Steam probably shouldn't be much different.
(*) ok, well, not any more trouble than Battle.net usually is on Linux. The point is after prodding at it for awhile it eventually finished installing and updating and started up properly and has worked fine ever since.
Thanks, I need to give that a try. Most of my non-Steam games ("Deus Ex", "Giants: Citizen Kabuto") run just fine under Wine, using the default settings. The only one that doesn't work is NOLF 1. (Everything works except music).
If I have an .exe from the high seas that still needs to be unpacked/installed how do I deal with it?
Just started using Linux for playing, currently playing Dispatch (highly recommend it), used Lutris to first install the compacted .exe and then run the launcher .exe. Is there a better way to go about it?
Hell, I've got a game I legally purchased on CD back in the Win XP days I'd like to play, and the farthest I got is installed but fails to run.
This may or may not help. But I'll give you the basic steps using wine only and no Proton magic to run a game from disk:
- Create an empty folder to be your wineprefix (emulated system folder) or use the default.
- run
WINEPREFIX=[full path to new folder] winecfgcommand in terminal (justwinecfgif you will use the default prefix). - mount your CD so that you can see it in your file browser. (Might be simply clicking that device in the file browser when a CD is in the drive bay)
- In the winecfg set drive D: to point to the folder where you mounted the CD.
- run the CD installer with wine... e.g
WINEPREFIX=/some/path wine /media/something/cdrom1/setup.exe, install the game to C: - run the game with WINE on the same prefix and with the CD inserted and mounted (if there are resources on the CD or basic DRM) e.g.
WINEPREFIX=/some/path wine '/some/path/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Cool Game/coolgame.exe - if that works, you might be able to create an image of the disc and mount that instead of the physical CD, you'd then rerun winecfg and set D: to the correct folder where the disk image is mounted.
So, I'm actually very drunk right now and my eyes just slid right off all that, but I want to set my default misanthropy aside for a second and genuinely thank you for taking the time to write up some genuine helpful tech advice. That's really cool of you to have done. I might try that day after tomorrow.
Definitely do not recommend trying to set up a winecfg environment while drunk. The two kinds of wine do NOT mix.
You know what they say about wine and beer...
In heroic, you can add the game and while adding it, click "run installer first" and then install the EXE and copy whatever cracks needed. I needed to do that with a few games that are literally not available anymore on stores.
Lutris had been so janky for me the past 10 years and many of the installer scripts literally don't install any dependencies anyways that I switched to heroic last year and I no longer have games that work completely fine and then next launch they don't work.
do steam games run on linux already or something? Like do you only have to do that for non steam games?
do steam games run on linux already or something?
Oversimplification coming, but...
Most (modern) games can actually just run on Linux already, because Linux is where the best cross platform developer tools are.
Today, if a developer wants to publish their game to Windows, Mac, Android, Playstation, Nintendo Switch and XBox - the odds are strong that the developer is actually (possibly unwittingly) writing a Linux native game and then using an engine to port the Linux version to the other platforms.
The reasons for this are complicated, but mainly boil down to Linux being the simplest target to reliably build developer tools for - because every part of Linux is open and public.
Like do you only have to do that for non steam games?
If a game is purchased through Steam, Steam launcher knows enough to choose the best available version of the game for the operating system - whether the best version is the Windows executable running under wine/proton, or a native Linux executable.
Some have native Linux versions, while the rest can be "translated" (not strictly emulation, but the concept is close enough) via Proton, a translation layer that Valve introduced with the Steam Deck, which is itself running (arch btw) Linux. I'm not sure what the split is in the catalog, but the steam deck verified list serves as an indication for Linux (for Arch, at least) compatibility in general.
This is true for both Steam and non-Steam games - the developer or publisher might offer a native Linux version, but packaging is always a mixed bag. This proton trick allows you to run the Windows version with the same compatibility it would have on the steam deck, no matter where it came from.
THIS is the year.
Posts 30 year old photo of Linus
Posts 30 year old photo of Linus sourced from Getty Images. They paid for the image to discuss FOSS.
While talking about the PC desktop in a gaming magazine.
Some of y'all are showing your bubble side; outside of our communities here, Linux very much is obscure. That said, there really does seem to be a leak in the mainstream and it's nice to see it mentioned in a publication. Even if just a little gain, thanks in large part to Steam raising awareness for gamers, US decline in Europe and Canada, and Windows 11 blunders with security.
I've gone from people being completely oblivious when I mention Linux, to going "oh, like steam deck?" but there's still plenty of others who still are oblivious. Then again, mentioning file extensions goes over the heads of 95% of who I talk to, so I wouldn't have too high hopes.
Linux very much is obscure
To paraphrase Bill Hicks about drugs...
See, I think
drugsLinuxes have done some good things for us! I really do. And if you don't believedrugsLinuxes have done good things for us, do me a favor. Go home tonight, take all youralbumsbookmarks, all yourtapeslinks and all yourCDswebsites and burn 'em. 'Cause you know what? Themusiciansservers whomadehost all that greatmusicweb content that's enhanced your lives throughout the years?Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreal fuckin'
highhosted ondrugsLinux.
:3 Well, that nearly worked. n_n
(I had intended to add a "they[servers]'re all running linux" meme... but failed to find... instead, this'll do nicely too...)
https://images3.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED455/6859360c6abcc.jpeg
I'd say it worked. Bravo. Haha
Wish I didn't cave in and bought an NVidia card back in 2022. But well now we're served with severe shortage of PC hardware all thanks to fucking AI and I'm stuck with a 500GB main SSD and an almost full 2TB spinning disk with a 3050 and I'm sick of MS getting slower by the day it's ridiculous; I'm still on 10 and not actually paid MS for it ;), but still.
The plan was to get a new 2TB SSD and install a distro, but see above fuckery because of AI.
I'm going to check if I moved all my installed Steam games to the spinning disk will Steam on Linux be able to read it. Because I'm sure as hell am not downloading the game files again if I can help it. If the answer is yes, I'll just nuke the current SSD to install a distro. I'll figure how to move installs again later in 2029 or something when SSD prices have gone down again and I can get 2 or 4TB SSD for less than 2 kidneys.
Fuck Microsoft. Fuck NVidia.
I’m going to check if I moved all my installed Steam games to the spinning disk will Steam on Linux be able to read it.
I advise against trying to use the same library for windows and linux, but if you just want to migrate, it should be possible to use Steam's backup feature.
Thanks. I have a feeling that might be the case. I'll have to research properly.
Just to add, since I recently started to switch. Steam will find the game if I mount the "old" NTFS drive and point my steam library to it. It will be able to download missing files and appears to launch the game. The game doesn't start though. After adding a EXT4 partition, I was able to add a library there and use the "move installation folder" in game settings. Then it works.
thanks for the tip.
so I can't use the files if my 2TB HDD is NTFS as is. the main drive currently with windows and a few games that I'll move to the HDD, I'll be converting to a distro I haven't yet decide.
so I'm guessing after I get Steam running on the linux drive, install any game then move the games installed from the old windows install…?
I'm not sure I follow the question. I'll try to list the steps.
- Install distro
- Install steam
- Mount NTFS drive
- Add steam library in NTFS drive (point to existing Window library)
- Let steam recognize the game and install potentially missing files
- Create EXT4 partition disk (preferably done already when installing distro)
- If EXT4 game partition is not main drive, mount it and create steam library on it
- Move game files.
Hopefully that makes sense. Somewhere along the way steam will probably install Proton as well. It might work straight from NTFS too, maybe? But I didn't get it to on Linux Mint
My question is a bit confusing yes, sorry 😅
But yes thank you for getting it. This helps a lot clearing up my uncertainties on moving to Linux
It works straight from NTFS if you install the ntfs driver, but you're better off moving them to a BTRFS or EXT4 formatted drive so as to not fuck around with NTFS too much since NTFS can cause issues.
Highly recommend CachyOS for gaming too, has one click GUI installer for all gaming components out of the box.
CachyOS is on my short list to try first. But I'm gping to try installing a light distro on a pendrive first like someone suggested to me to check if my gaming wheel would work with it.
If I were in that situation, one thing I'd consider trying.... get 2 USB pendrives, one to put a Live/Installer distro on (Devuan, or AntiX being the two friendliest of my likely candidate distros (or VoidLinux, Artix or Gentoo if feeling a little more bold)), and a bigger one to install the distro to, just like it's a HD or SSD, to see if "everything works". Then can decide from there if wanting to just carry on from there living like that, or, move to the main SSD.
M$ Windoze gets slower by the day, by design. Just one of many anti-features abusing the user used. Planned obsolescence, actively engaged, to encourage you that you need to buy the new version, and new hardware. Stick a GNU+Linux or a BSD on it, and then surprisingly the hardware's nippy again, for over a decade more, sparing your kindeys.
Ooh, I've never seen installing on a pendrive being suggested before, I think. I certainly do have a couple pendrives. I'll give that a shot, since I also have a gaming wheel I'd like to test.
When I first set up my current gaming PC, I had Kubuntu running from a 1Gb external SSD, just to check all the hardware was good before wiping the main internal SSD.
Used it that way for weeks before figuring that I needed to get around to setting it up on the internal drive. At no point did it feel like a problem. Games were running from a 2Tb HDD, and were playing just fine.
Also had it installed on a 64Gb thumb drive, so I could boot some of the Windows machines at work into Kubuntu for hardware testing.
It really is extraordinary how flexible Linux can be.
I think it's also down to windows 11 being increasingly enshitified, and unwanted AI stuff being forced on users. A lot of people are frustrated and are more open to alternatives.
Everyone acts like it's all about gaming, but people want to use Lightroom, Photoshop, Excel, their banking and tax software etc. They don't want the alternatives because they're not integrated well, they can't access their Dropbox/Apple Cloud/whatever and they gave Linux their Google password already, why does it need it again for that mail software that has some stupid bird name instead of "mail".
Yup. Although I've become a fan of things like GIMP, you do need to learn a new software and depending on who you are, it might take a while. Lucky (?) for me, I was too poor to afford it for school and since it was for official assignments, I didn't want to pirate.
That said, Microsoft integration is more a curse than a blessing at this point. Privacy and junk aside, it's dumped hundreds of GB of files onto my tiny SSD C: since it kept changing settings and ignoring my preferences. That's why Microsoft messing things up is converting people who even prefer integration, when there's an option to anyway!
A bunch of the issues you mention aren't issues anymore, thanks to fully featured web applications.
Sure. There's always an exception like graphics editing.
We talk about exceptions a lot. But being in a niche professional can lead to either early or late adoption. A job is a job, and we just use the tools we need.
But for stuff like email, banking, and various document services, the average user's experience is identical:
- Type the product name into Google.
- Register or Sign in.
- Use product.
I do think a good file backup service is one of the big remaining challenges.
Ironically you mentioned two that are I believe are still fully Linux native (Dropbox and Google).
But to your point, people need file backups that just work, and plenty of popular cloud sync services choose not to provide Linux support.
If you're setting up an email client you're almost certainly doing work on the computer and anyone who has setup outlook can setup any other email client so that's maybe not the example to use. But you're right in the sense gaming, office environments and schools are the major groups that train window users.
Competitive gamers want edges - a better mouse, a better keyboard, a better internet connection. The latest performance metrics show linux running many games better than windows so this means a major inflow to windows is losing out to linux.
The weird part about all of this is that macbook sales are also up like 4%, suggesting overall a move away from windows. And for most of those apps you listed they also work on mac.
If linux is eating the gaming environment and the mac office experience is better than windows (due to MS enshittification)... the thing keeping windows in place is legacy software, corporate products, oem deals and like historical precedence.
Better to escape the user lock-in (and other) malicious anti-features of proprietary software, going for more of a fully Free Software system.
Idk one of my siblings who I never chalked up as a non-windows user and not particularly tech savvy sent me a screenshot of their linux install. If like the tech barriers to linux are falling then the only thing left to fall is software developers for commercial software.
Idk one of my siblings who I never chalked up as a non-windows user and not particularly tech savvy sent me a screenshot of their linux install.
Yes. 2026 was an interesting year for Linux desktop.
More of my friends installed Linux in response to Windows 11 than I imagined possible.
I think I noticed a correlation with their having a kid in the house who owned a SteamDeck. There's a generation who are learning Linux in order to mod their games.
We have a time traveller over here.
Nah. Just an ordinary typo that anyone could make on their period authentic LTE smart phone or Casio smart watch.
"Like an Android, but without Google's control."
Since Android was built off Linux, just way locked down. Might appeal to a wider range of folk since it isn't strictly to do with gaming and more people are likely to be familiar with Android than a Steam Deck.
I built a high end Steam machine in October. I haven’t played many Windows games since. There are games I can’t play, like Space Marine 2, but I have so much that I can play I’m kind of fine with it. Being able to PC game in the living room with an OS that is well formatted for TV play is wonderful.
Space Marine 2 no Linux?
It runs like butt. It’s optimized for Windows, apparently.
That's a shame. But hopefully by the time I'll buy it in 2 years or something on deep discount, it has better support or optimization.
That’s the thing about PC gaming, right? There’s always hope someone will figure it out.
As a 20+ year Linux user, no shit. It's been great every year.
I have been a user since around 2000, I work in Linux every day, and I get where you're coming from - but in the context of gaming Linux has really only recently come into its own.
Like, could you imagine, circa 2010, telling a naive user that practically their whole Steam library would work with one click? Wine has always been a minor miracle, but at some point there was an inversion between being surprised when it worked, and being surprised that it didn't work...
I used to be shocked when a game ran in wine without any manual intervention. Now I'm shocked when it doesn't!
Only game I played on Linux before Proton was Minecraft Java (cracked) for Ubuntu in like 2014.
In fairness, it can be easy to go an entire decade playing almost nothing but Minecraft...
At the time, I was running on an very old 2004 Dell Win XP laptop and it still had alright performance.
These days on my full gaming PC, I get amazing MC performance, like 300+ fps vs my friend on W10 gets like 130+ fps.
Linux stays winning!
As someone who gamed on Linux in 2005, I can tell you that the experience was generally garbage back then.
I still remember making a bug report about the then ATI driver - performance tanked in certain situations in ut2k4, a game with a native Linux build. After months, they released a "fixed" driver which disabled some feature - so the game looked worse but didn't lag.
Then I was trying to get Enemy Territory (and its total conversion TC:E) - another native Linux game - to play nice. I ended up running a second X server so that I could alt tab, but that made sound even more interesting than it already was back then; a friend actually shipped me a PCI sound card to be able to use teamspeak in Linux.
Then came source games, which worked but were choppy and missing some graphical niceties. Then I gave up, bought a laptop so I didn't have to dual boot my pc, and never looked back.
Maybe, but this isn’t just any year, this is THE year of the linux desktop.
Yup.
Ditto.
our university put linux mint on all the desktop computers this year.
Cool. Which university is that? How did it go?
they put linux mint (cinnamon edition) on computers. people more or less used it normally, i'd say most people barely bothered that it's not windows. essential software that we needed to use was pre-installed (with neatly visible icons on the desktop to click on), and web browser was installed too. that covers basically all use-cases.
one colleague asked how to do screenshots. i showed her.
That's the main reason, Linux is still not as widespread as Windows - marketing. If you'd ship all of the sold PCs with a pre-installed Linux, nobody would give a shit.
And why would they? The vast majority of ALL computer users just use functions (email, office, browsing) instead of programs. Oh, I know, I know. If you ask, you always hear Word, Excel, Outlook. But to me that are just synonyms for the tedious everyday tasks most users perform. And if you'd stop training people to repeat tasks and klick buttons and instead train them to understand what they're actually doing ... sigh
To take it a bit further, I found at least cinnamon and KDE to be familiar enough that you can use your "discover how to do things on windows" skills for figuring out many things.
And once you get a handle on the repository software, it can also be easier to find and install new software when instructions direct you to a terminal command that doesn't exist. KDE even does a search and says what needs to be installed when the command isn't found. On windows, you need to download shit from some random website (which always sketched me out that someone could take advantage of that trust by making their malware behave as expected) and their search can fail to find something already installed on your machine, let alone figure out what you want to do if the name is a common word.
For everyday computer use, the experience is pretty similar. Unsurprisingly so because that's how they designed Cinnamon. Funny though, your colleague didn't think of typing "screenshot" into the search bar of the start menu.
your colleague didn’t think of typing “screenshot” into the search bar of the start menu.
i didn't think of that either. thanks for pointing it out. i have always used a weird key combination for that till today.
Let us know, I'm very curious. At our school (cal poly pomona), our comp sci professors were upset Ubuntu got put on their lab computers and they were upset because IT didn't give warning and some didn't know how to use it.
That sounds like the dumbest possible way to go about this.
Yep
If you're curious about migrations, there will be several talks at this years FOSSDEM from people sharing their experiences migrating whole organizations /municipalities to FOSS.
Compsci labs or everywhere?
the department where i am. don't wanna say which one because privacy concerns.
Wir petzen schon nicht.
Given I'm actively avoiding modern multiplayer games for more reasons than just the fact that they pretty much all have rootkit DRM (I know kernel-level anticheats have a different target than traditional DRM, but they're functionally DRM so they count as DRM to me), and one of the few games I have left which were unplayably broken on Proton work now (Civ3, still has audio issues that to my knowledge can't be corrected for non-destructively, but the black-map issue is now fixed, at least on my end using proton-cachyos), I have no plans on running Windows again any time soon, not even in a VM.
Bottles.
There's a flatpak called Bottles that does a pretty decent job of setting up a containerized Windows /WINE environment, if you have some program or game you can't get to work quite right by chucking it into Lutris or Steam.
But I can't be bothered to play windows games
I mostly use it for dev tools that only barely technically support linux, or just don't at all.
That and uh... lets call them homebrew game decompression executables.
... yeah... yep.
Copilot BS made me agree with you. I’m gonna stop dual booting and just game on Linux
I switched my gaming pc to Linux and all the games I tried so far worked good.
Switching the household's PCs to avoid the Windows 11 BS here. All my stuff is good so far, but the kids have a few games that don't work - Minecraft Bedrock, Fortnite, and Roblox.
time to switch them to java edition, bedrock sucks anyway
Probably for the best, lol. At the very least, Roblox isn't particularly good for kids.
Also, modded Minecraft through Prism beats bedrock any day of the week. I'm hoping when my kids are of age, they'll be down for an expert pack. My daughter sure as hell will be, she's as weird as I am. I'm sure more normal kids have packs they'd enjoy, though.
Have you seen the Schlep controversy? Personally, I would be glad if my family PC suddenly couldn’t run Roblox and “sorry kiddo it just doesn’t work anymore”
Use PrismLauncher for Minecraft! :)
Isn't that just for Java Edition though? Bedrock has a different launcher, with more modes and mtx to "enjoy"
honestly it's a good excuse to switch them to java edition, bedrock kinda sucks
Mine are playing Minecraft and Roblox under Linux without problems. I don't remember what I did for Minecraft, but for Roblox you need something called 'Sober'.
Minecraft runs natively. One version is Java, so thats easy enough. I think the C++ version has an installer.
If your kids really need Roblox to work, they could try Sober. I personally don't play Roblox, so I've never tried it, but I've heard good things about it.
That makes Linux even more attractive!
I've been gaming on Linux mostly if not entirely full time since 2014. Back when you had to look to see if there was a Steam icon alongside the Windows and sometimes Apple logo because Proton wasn't the "everything works" magic it is now.
Anyone complaining about the state of Linux today look like diaper shitting babies. "WAAAH! My privacy invading rootkit requiring multiplayer CoD Fortnite meme slop sippy cup game is specifically designed to not run on Linux. WAAAAH!" Yeah, I remember when hair didn't grow near my genitals too, but then I stopped acknowledging any of my feelings in public except anger and pretended to like beer out of sheer force of peer pressure, and thus became a fully grown man by the standards of my culture. Get on my level.
What were we talking about?
You're definitely living up to your username 👌
I always have since before joining this experiment in mediocrity we call the Fediverse.
In an age of enshitification, pretty ok most of the time is to be celebrated
Entering my 12th year as a Linux user, I can't disagree with that.
You keep up the good fight.
I'll take whatever positive press Linux can get at this point. More people switching over is a good thing.
I'd like to give Battlefield 6 a try, but it's not important enough for me to dual boot Windows or anything silly like that.
I do dual boot windows and play bf6. Windows has its own 500GB hard drive for things like that and Linux has 4TB for everything else. I do wish I could just run Linux only though. Some day…
I have an empty 1TB ssd in my gaming rig, still not installing Windows.
I hate PCGamer's website. Everytime I get partway through an article, a pop-up shows asking me to sign up to their newsletter. Now the pop-up alone would turn me off of their website, but what happens is the pop-up scrolls the article all the way back to the top of the page. So I completely lose my reading position.
PCGamer isn't the only site to do this, but I think it's one of the more popular ones that do.
The other thing that sites do now that earns an instant DNS block on my pihole, is capturing the back action that prevents leaving the site to show a pop-up that says "wait, before you go, check out these other articles" or something along those lines. HELL.... NO!
Wow. So brave.
If your job is paid by advertising, yes.
Why, this will only want Microsoft to pay more for advertising, as clearly it's becoming more necessary to do so.
How are trade publications getting more from Microsoft if their readers move to Linux?
Because losing customers would force Microsoft to advertise more in these trade publications, to swing momentum back to Windows.
Don't preach to the choir, convince the wayward sheep to return, so to speak.
I doubt loosing your sponsor their clients would allow you to charge them more money, but you may be a better salesperson than I.
IMO, the hardest part of moving over is relearning a bunch of things you've taken for granted. However, Windows has been changing and breaking things at such a rapid pace, that not even my friends who still use it can keep track.
I'm brave enough to say it
Made the switch during Christmas to Cachyos. I am extremely glad I did, and so relieved to finally be free of Microsofts clammy grasp.
I already stopped playing online competitive games long ago, so the anti-cheat thing isn't really a problem for me. All the games I want to play works fine, even better in fact than they did on Windows.
The competitive game anti-cheat issue is kinda overblown nowadays. A lot of popular competitive FPS games run perfectly fine, anti-cheat and all, on Linux with wine/proton. And the ones that don't either have incredibly invasive anti-cheat that you wouldn't want running on your computer anyways, or have server-side "protections" that properly boot Linux players out of the game for some arbitrary reason.
I only have one problem with my linux mint distro: Sometimes cheats for video games don't work.
Like I like to use savegame editors for Cyberpunk 2077, but they don't work on linux despite all my attempts, and PINCE (Pince Is Not Cheat Engine) works for almost all games but just not for some.
And that, ladies and gentlemen (and all those in between or neither) is when I finally found a reason to actually code after tinkering on-off for decades: I want to make those save game editors for linux! That is something that legit doesn't exist but needs to.
This person's writing style is, frankly, well, pretty obnoxious.
PC Gamer saying this is a good sign though, still one of the most popular special interest magazines that's not porn
I too, am super brave for switching to Linux from Windows 11.
Joking aside, I love it. My relatively new laptop runs so much smoother on it. W11 always was doing something in the background and making my fan blast even when I wasn't using it. That's all gone and it's a much happier device.
My printer works, my wacom intous tablet works, all my steam games so far work (I haven't played every single one, but the ones I have played are fine).
Honestly, there was some things I had to troubleshoot at the beginning. I just asked AI and it gave me the terminal commands that I needed to get it done.
10/10 would recommend... if you're brave.
I made the switch this year
The only good Windows is a dead windows. Welcome 🙂
I'll go ahead and share my experience with Mint so far. Gaming worked mostly fine which is pleasing.
I couldn't get many basic features working correctly for my dual monitor set up. Even after putting in the time to research.
I couldn't get multiple proprietary programs to work for my job.
The customization in settings is extremely limited.
I have to mess around with complex terminal commands I do not fully understand every time I need to do something more than use my browser.
I will try another distro this year, but it is definitely not a foolproof experience.
A lot of things Windows does easily, I took for granted.
The customization in settings is extremely limited.
Give KDE Plasma a try. Sometimes they're criticised for having too many settings.
There's a learning curve to it. I have yet to find anything I could do on windows that I can't do on Linux. Lots of stuff took me a while to understand, but daily driving arch for 2 years and I actually cant believe how limited windows is and how I put up with it for so long.
Only real exceptions thus far are that you can't play league of legends or fortnite. And thats because the developers have their servers set to kick any Linux users basically. Not a limitation of the operating system.
Can you give some examples of basic features that weren't working with your dual monitor setup?
KDE might also help with this btw, as while I didn't have any glaring issues with dual monitors in cinnamon (on Fedora), it improved overall when I switched to KDE. Used to have to change the audio output to my TV whenever I enabled it, now it happens automatically (plus the option to disable my HDMI audio if I preferred the "keep the same audio when switching to a different video output" behavior).
Only issue was that it didn't work correctly the very first time, followed by it suddenly working the next time when I was intending to troubleshoot it.
Imo, KDE handles dual monitors better than windows even, especially if your secondary monitor is a TV you enable and disable depending on what you're doing. Two clicks to toggle it, it handles different scaling seemlessly across the monitors (iirc, windows would "pop" to the scaling setting of whatever monitor they were mostly showing on as you moved them). Mouse cursor visibility improves when shaking the mouse, so it's easy to find it on a giant screen.
Still anxious that there's no clear roadmap for linux gaming after gaben passes (Hopefully decades until then).
That’s the beauty of it - Valve has done generous and miraculous things for Linux, using their money to fund work towards a common goal of both the users and their corporation.
But it doesn’t go away if they do. Valve cannot close Pandora’s box. The compatibility layers are open and accessible to the community and cannot be taken away.
IFF it becomes the standard before he dies, it might become as sticky as Windows was — but without enshittification.
Everything I've played this year has been as easy—if not easier—to run on a free OS put together by a gaggle of passionate nerds as it is on Windows, the OS made by one of the most valuable corporations on planet Earth.
I know the histories of both Linux and Windows are complicated, and oversimplification is going to be more wrong than right, but this seems almost malicious. Yes many, if not most, people who work on Linux can probably be characterized as nerds, but that's equally as true of Windows developers. Programming itself is classified as nerdy, so it would be impossible for it not to be true. And dozens, if not hundreds, of companies contribute to Linux, both the kernel and software running in user space, so it's not like it's only unwashed 20-somethings living in their parents' basement that built Linux.
The statement could be completely flipped and be equally as true (if not moreso, since multiple of the most valuable companies on earth contribute to Linux), so why even make it?
If people don’t need any specific software and can adapt to the Linux alternatives, like LibreOffice… people will see some distros are now easier than Windows to use… and… you don’t have bad surprises on updates
The biggest problem with Linux has always been windows software imo.
I don't know guys, I miss AI.
Stockholm syndrome?
Never been there. Is it nice?
Once you've been, you'll never want to leave.
Made the switch to Ubuntu in 2019. The only time I use windows is at work, sadly, but in my main computer, that malware hasn't been installed for years
So I'm on Bazzite right now, and while everything works there's still some stuff that leaves room to be desired.
For one, I don't know what I should be expecting with various games and HDR. It works in some, doesn't work in others. I don't know if I need to tweak any GPU settings (AMD 7900 XTX) but even if I do, I have no idea how to do it.
Steam Remote play is ???? But that was also a problem with Windows.
Multiple monitors and games don't seem to jive nicely either. And I don't know if the Free sync 2 is working or how to even test it.
It took forever to figure out how to wire up my Yeti microphone, but I finally did.
Otherwise every game does work.
hdr works fairly easy now. Not sure about default proton but ge and probably some of the other variants like cachy have it mostly built in. I just use ge-latest for everything via proton plus until a game doesn't work with it before tryig others.
game settings go to launch options and put in:
PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 %command%
monitor settings make sure hdr is enabled.
I only do dual monitor now but whenever a game can't be on the right screen or does weird sizing shit:
alt+enter/f11 and drag to correct monitor, or
windowed, move to other screen, borderless/fullscreen, or
borderless, taskbar right click and select move then drag to other screen, or
select other monitor from ingame settings
If none of those work it could also be a native linux build which while nice to have tends not to be consistent across games, and forcing proton will redownload as the windows version which I've found will have different screen behaviours compared to native in a lot of games.
Freesync should be in monitor settings if its detected by the system. I've only confirmed it a few times working with ge proton as I don't have many games that both have it and that I remembered to check for it. Usually I do the deck thing even on my desktop and find a config that can hold 90/60/45/30 and set the refresh equal or double manually.
Thank you! That covers some stuff I was wondering about. And I was at a loss for how to change the monitor the game was on.
The HDR is fairly recent too. Before you had to jump through like 8x the hoops and also had to use gamescope which is another thing that could both improve and worsen the window situation. If you ever encounter a game where none of the other stuff works gamescope can force a monitor and separately force render and display resolutions for up or downscaling, but tabbing out or using other software like browsing to guides or modloaders have been kinda janky in some games.
The multiple monitor thing has been an issue for years. Ive had to disable multi display at times to get games to run. Its just one of those things that will be flakey for another 10 years.
That's good to know.
Is HDR even worth any effort? I never tried it.
I'm using a QD-OLED monitor and love HDR for movies or tv shows but with gaming I have several gripes that don't make me enjoy HDR as much, funnily none of them caused by Linux.
A lot of games suffer from pretty terrible HDR implementations so it might just end up looking worse than SDR. Additionally, at least on this display tech, HDR is a trade-off between stable brightness (TrueBlack mode) or peak brightness (Peak mode). I find TB mode to not really pop enough to justify HDR, but peak mode to be too distracting for gaming since turning your camera can quickly change the overall brightness and make the image flicker.
I would say in theory HDR could be a huge increase in immersion for gaming but the tech and execution isn't really there for me yet.
HDR support on Linux though I find is in a pretty good spot if you're not opposed to setting a few env variables.
Not really. It can make the image pop a bit more, but that’s about it.
Absolutely. As long as your display is capable HDR and can output 600+ nits of brightness (1000+ preferred) and has high contrast (like an OLED display).
It doesn't require any effort, it's a checkbox in the display settings and a command line option in Steam. Assuming you're using GE-Proton10, you just put this in the command line parameters of the game that you want to play as HDR.
PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 %command%
You should pretty much always use the PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND flag*, the default is for wine to use xwindows and unless you're on a non-mainstream distro then you're using Wayland and so the display out put has to go through a compatibility layer (xwayland). This can introduce weird frame time jitter and hitching in some games that won't occur when using Wayland directly.
The game has to support HDR and there are some edge cases where the game won't detect that your machine is HDR capable so you can't enable the HDR option.
You can go through gamescope to have it work, but that is a bit more effort (mostly just installing gamescope and using 'gamescope %command%' (with some switches for options, like resolution, refresh rate, etc). This is a bit more effort and can have some performance overhead, but is still worth it imo.
*Using Wayland breaks Steam Input. You can still use a controller on games that support a controller, but if you use Steam Input to remap buttons or to play non-controller games with a controller then you'll have to wait on Valve to write Wayland support into the Steam Overlay.
I was struggling to figure out why my PS5 controller just wouldn't work with MH Wilds with Wayland enabled
Yeah, it took me a while to figure out what the problem was. If you disable the steam overlay in the game's options, the controller should connect directly to the game (via SDL) instead failing to go through Steam Input.
I'll keep that in mind when I buy my next monitor ...
For remote play I don't use steam. I highly recommend. Sunshine / moonlight . Work great to play games from my PC on my phone or whatever else I want. If you want to stream outside of your network you will need to set up something like wireguard or tail scale but that's just something cool and useful to set up anyway and not to hard. Also Bazzite comes with sunshine already installed.
TBH that's what I use. I haven't played around with the settings enough to get a completely smooth experience but it works much better than Steam Remote play
Do you have an OSD for active refresh rate built into your displays? FreeSync / VRR can be managed directly by your DE settings
I might, I'll need to dig into it a little bit. It's a recent LG 2k with HDR and 165hz free sync.
I am on Linux and never looking back to Windows (except if I have to use Microsoft Teams for interviews).
https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux
I have to use Teams for work and it works fine in a (Chrome-based) browser. I have a Chromium install that I only use for work stuff.
I had several issues using teams on browsers before so I felt compelled to use Windows for the app. But I admit that I never tried using it on Chromium so I will try next time.
If you can handle the browser version, works fine on Linux with Firefox.
Doesn’t Teams work in browsers, though (as a guest at least)?
Not allowed to change all the computers as some play games like GW2 and use Steam. Thought about dual booting, but the computers are using the accursed Windows 11, and there’s fears they’ll (being Microsoft) will screw with that. Anyone who’s in a dual boot situation comment on their experiences?
Guild wars 2 runs great. Was my fear when switching aswell. Even got BlishHud to run. Gotta start it through steam and it should be fine.
Really? I have to say that news is great to hear, how’s the frame rate and support for cards? Steam setup was easy enough? What Linux OS do you recommend?
It is my first time dabbling with linux at all so i might just have luck and i had some small problems, that thankfully resolved themselves pretty easy.
I am using CachyOs since my brother in law recommended it and i could ask him when there where any problems. Have an old Nvidia GTX 1080 and have no problems with it yet.
Steam will be installed alongside Discord and Firefox with Cachy so no problem there. I could even test and transfer games through steam, from my older windows drives once they were mounted.
Getting BlishHuD to run was not hard. There is a good guide Here. Only framerate issues i have is with Pathing but i had that with windows aswell.
Installing some modules make it crash but i rarely use any except pathing and EmoteTome so you gotta experiment i guess.
ArcDps works right out of the box and any other game works through steam without a problem. I do not play mayor multiplayer games so i dont miss out on that stuff.
My wife likes to play sims 4 tho so i will have to make EA launcher work later this year when i switch her desktop to linux.
My tip is makin backups and have someone experienced to help if you need it. Also take your time. I did it on my vacation and it was quite fun to dabble tbh.
Vouching for the Raidcore Nexus addon system since it's just tossing a .dll into the root GW2 folder. Granted the addon library isn't huge, but my needs are simple. =D
Any chance of a how to for dummies? Lol
Yep, this was my must have game for switching over. Blish was a bit of a pain, but I haven't loaded up windows on my laptop in months now.
Still using windows on my desktop, because I play racing sims, and I gather the hardware is not well supported on Linux yet.
Now if you don't mind I'm going to delete the root folder and see what happens.
Free more ram with the ram command! Sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root
Why would you remove the french root, it is the source of all power in the GNU+Linux
Or do "sudo chown -R 1000:1000 /" because this one thing has permission issues
It's been good for the average PC user for like 5 years. Pretty much when Google Docs became pretty ubiquitous from elementary school through university. Then also stuff like turbotax becoming something people use through a website rather than a application they buy a disc for from the store. Steam Deck was when Proton maturity reached a point where it became suitable for most gamers. Steam games on Android is the next mainstream frontier to pull users away from Windows. Now the main barrier to me is improving prosumer software/making open source alternatives competitive like how Blender became. Pretty much need people to get away from Adobe and FL Studio/etc
It’s been good for the average PC user for like 25 years.
IFTFY
I would argue Linux has been "good enough" for 25 years, but only upgraded to "fine" and then "good" and then "great" more recently.
Edit: But to your point, anyone brave enough to drop an Ubuntu Live CD into their system 25 21 years ago often had a surprisingly smooth path and could already do critical stuff like email or writing a document. (But there were many more exceptions, edge cases, and work arounds, back then.)
Edit: But to your point, anyone brave enough to drop an Ubuntu Live CD into their system 25 years ago often had a surprisingly smooth path and could already do critical stuff like email or writing a document. (But there were many more exceptions, edge cases, and work arounds, back then.)
Anyone dropping an Ubungu Live CD into their system 25 years ago in January 2001 must have been a time traveller, since the first release of Ubuntu was only out in October 2004, only available as an install CD, and there wasn't an Ubuntu Live CD until the first test release of an Ubuntu Live CD in June 2006.
I remember when Live CDs first became a thing. I thought, for sure, now, everybody will be able to switch to Linux, without fear, able to try it first, before installing to their hard drive.
Hah!
Here we are 20 calendar years later, ~ and sure, it's probably around 10x the size of userbase of desktop GNU+Linux, rising past 5% market share, but it's hardly "The Year Of The Linux Desktop" Like I thought was coming in 2007, especially when the next increment of bloat and abuse that is Win7 came along. ... Maybe for sure now that Win11's taking screenshots every 10 seconds and calling home, and all the adverts in your operating system interface and further nerfed capabilities and annoying babying and and and.... Just how many abuses can Microsoft keep getting away with and people will still keep using it!? Now you need to buy hyper inflated new hardware too?? It's almost like they're trying their hardest to sluff off their userbase, but people keep staying for the punishment of the intentional enshitifications.
My first Live CD was actually Puppy Linux and it was surprisingly nice, for the time.
I did have one of the mail order only Ubuntu Live CDs. I wish I had kept it. I bet they are kind of rare, because I recall prominent instructions on it for how to make a copy for a friend.
I showed my uncle a bunch of different distros... I thought for sure he'd go for Scientific Linux. But nope. He took to puppy. And has been daily driving it for well over a decade.
MS may have finally pushed me to home linux. I'm used working with RHEL servers at work.
Ditched Windows 11 for Bazzite on my RoG Ally. It is much smoother, more stable and zero problems running games on Steam.
"Linux is good now"
Is this a quote from like 2007?
All the supercomputers and webservers are running Linux just because they don't want to pay for a windows license of course
I am waiting for SteamOS Desktop to be a thing. It is my preference for my PC to be boring in all ways unrelated to entertainment. Yes, I already know about Cachy and Bazzite, but I would like an 800lb gaming company to be supporting my power-casual OS. Stuff like documentation, working Nvidia drivers, minimizing the need for the terminal, and so forth is important for me.
documentation
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page
working Nvidia drivers
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/
minimizing the need for the terminal
https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.kolunmi.Bazaar
o7
(tears streaming down my face, Born in the USA on soundtrack)
how does steam operate on Linux? anything I need to do to port over stuff?
I installed Steam on Debian 13 and it wouldn’t run from the desktop shortcut. I had to edit the config for it to start. I installed and tried two games at random and neither worked. So I uninstalled it. Even completely removing Steam needed several shell commands. I’ve been using Linux on and off since its early days so this was very disappointing.
Debian is stable meaning it has ancient packages. I'd try on a distro that tracks more recent packages
deb 13 was bleeding edge in June
Debian 13 was a new Debian release in June. Meaning the devs and sid/unstable users had done enough to determine that the sometimes 5 year old "new features" in the packages were stable.
I love Debian for it's stability. Makes it great in the homelab. The devs will back port security patches from upstream, but features (especially potentially breaking features) get years of testing before being implemented in the stable release. Even sid (their testing branch) is more stable than most other distros main branch.
But all of that means that the actual features in the packages released for Debian are ancient, especially by gaming standards.
Which is to say, Debian 13, at the time of release, had about as much bleeding edge as a stone sphere.
it had the very latest gnome and kde releases at the time it finished. I'm sure there are dozens of other packages for which this is true. by Debian standards it was anomalously current. I find it hard to believe there are serious gaps that make even 2025 games unplayable.
edit: speaking, of course, in comparison to other 2025 distros
Debian 13, at the time of release, had about as much bleeding edge as a stone sphere.
As a diehard Debian fan - how dare you call out my favorite distro so accurately!
Haha!
TBH that sounds more like a Debian issue than a Steam issue ... though I guess the difference doesn't matter for an end user. Did you install Steam through the .deb or the flathub flatpak? Might want to try the other one.
Also, what DE, because Gnome doesn't like Desktop icons.
Debian has ancient packages. Frankly, it's not the best suited for gaming, given how late performance optimisations come. Personally I'd like to have driver updates quite promptly.
If you're going to use Debian for gaming, you should probably use the Steam Flatpak.
As a nearly 100% Debian user, I'd recommend trying a distro with more up to date packages/kernel like Fedora or even Bazzite before giving up.
May I suggest Bazzite?
Absolutely. I may give it a go because it looks interesting. I need to learn more about it before I install it.
Back in the yonder days of lore, I too ended up on Debian, or at least Debian based distros...
I was actually able to get RDR2 running on Debian via Steam/Proton in like... 2020/21?
That required a good deal of bullshit though, felt like I practically had my own lite custom distro at that point.
Worked online too! Untill Rockstar decided linux users are all dirty hackers/no longer supported.
... they still owe me money as far as I'm concerned.
But good lord, getting a Steam Deck has made me lazy.
Bazzite is just so much easier for 99% of the shit I actually do.
You can use the prepackaged DistroShelf to fairly quickly just set up a Debian or w/e environment, to do things like compiling and such, as Bazzite is Atomic, which means it tends to get mad or break if you directly futz with its core packages.
Gaming on it? Literally works out of the box.
I see you tried particularly hard: did you actually select the proton runtime for the "random" game you selected? I've quite literally have ZERO games in my library that have not played on linux. It's not a fully complete or random sampling, but I've gotten everything to work, but you do have to do the bare f-ing minimum step of turning it on.
I tried three. My point is that people are talking more about Linux as a viable desktop. I despise windows as much as the next person and I really want people to move to Linux.
Many people stick with windows because of gaming but gaming on Linux has to be consistently at least as good and easy as windows. It’s all well and good saying “edit this file, select the right runtime”, but that’s not good enough IMHO.
Installing steam was either download the DEB file (and then run a shell command) or run a bunch of shell commands to add a key and a repo and to install the program. That’s not an attractive picture for non technical users.
But downloading deb files is how you install things on Ubuntu. Just like app files on Mac and exe on Windows. Like, any user needs to do the absolute bare minimum and understand the os they're using.
If the requirement is that Linux needs to run exe fines just like windows, then that's not reasonable and the user should totally just continue to use windows. They deserve the ads.
But if you read the 1/4 page install instructions for steam and Linux, follow the directions, then your things will run just fine. THAT is what people mean when they say Linux works great for users.
No, the Steam deb is special because it's not in the normal apt repos, which is true for both Ubuntu and Debian. And I can believe that Debian has issues with an installer file that was probably made for Ubuntu in the first place. But downloading random installer files is indeed the standard way to install applications on Windows.
That’s not an attractive picture for non technical users.
Agreed. Let's not send non-technical gamers to Debian.
Gaming and stability are still often at odds.
No average user is going to do that. If it doesn’t just work it doesn’t work to them.
fwiw I'm running Debian 12 and had no issues getting steam to run, and all games I've tried run great (with a few exceptions but not many).
I really really wouldn't recommend Debian as an OS for games. It's a server/workstation OS. I use it because I like Debian, not because it's a good idea.
I remember changing my grub config to pass arguments to the kernel for gaming performance. I bet you wouldn't need to do this on a distro designed for gaming like Bazzite.
How much of the tweaking is actually noticeable? Not trying to be a dick here. I'm so old that we didn't use to have GPUs, we had graphics cards and nobody had a "rig". Overclocking or hardware mods was the only way if you weren't willing to spend money on new hardware. Not saying Bazzite is that kind of distro but I'm so old I don't trust some spazzed out maintainer with cat ears and a discord channel. Let me break my own shit, you don't have to do it for me.
I have the exact same experience as you with Debian 11-13 and gaming. Both with Nvidia and AMD cards, various chipsets etc. Everything works. Sometimes after reading a few lines of official documentation and installing a package or two but that's about it.
The only thing that ever required some head scratching was the infamous EA and Rockstar launcher but that's not a Debian or even a Linux problem.... Everything else is identical to windows. Click install. Wait. Click play. Everything works in-game. What am I missing?
You know, honestly? I didn't do any like, testing to see how much impact each had. I just used some recommended settings like setting the kernel to PREEMPT and setting mitigations=no (this is a minor security risk, I am spectre vulnerable but this is a performance increase)
My CPU is very old and I have a newer graphics card, so I figured this would help but I didn't do any concrete testing. Seems fine.
Edit: also I had to set my CPU governor to performance. Debian had it on some low-power default setting (forgot now) and this DID matter, a lot, way more than any kernel argument. I control it some other way than a kernel arg, tho
Ah I see. I guess it makes sense to squeeze out every single % in such cases.
also I had to set my CPU governor to performance
I believe most DE has an addon or equivalent for setting that.
My experience with running Steam on Debian 13 was different from yours. I don't recall having any issues starting Steam. Unfortunately, I don't recall if I had to do anything unusual other than installing it (from the Debian repos?), but it certainly didn't involve editing any configs. This was a clean Debian 13 install, not an upgrade from 12, and it had almost no other software installed, so I wonder if one of those is a factor.
Regarding the games not working though, I think I may be able to provide some help. I found out from someone I know that just installing Steam and trying to start Windows games is not sufficient. Apparently, for whatever reason the Steam client seems to come with some ancient version of Proton that is not compatible with many (most?) games. You need to also install Proton-GE, which I guess has all the latest compatibility updates. The easiest way to do this is to install ProtonUp-QT, which is a GUI to install and manage Proton-GE, and then from there install the latest Proton-GE. After that, there is one more step that's required, unfortunately. For each game you want to play in Steam using the latest Proton, you need to go into that game's settings in Steam and change the compatibility layer to use the latest Proton and not the built-in one. This is my understanding and this may not be the most efficient way to do all this. After I did all this, the games that weren't starting or were freezing shortly after starting began to work flawlessly. I have no idea why it requires jumping through so many hoops.
A pattern that I believe I noticed but haven't completely confirmed yet is that it seems that the whole Proton-GE rigamarole may only be required for games that don't say that they're "verified" under the steam deck compatibility section on their store page. The games that say they have "verified" compatibility with Steam deck may not require any additional steps. I could be wrong about this too.
I recently began casually installing games on my Ubuntu system which I use for work. Apart from sound issues that I have because the drivers currently have issues with my specific hardware, I am surprised how ridiculously easy it was to run games. Steam's Proton compatibility layer sure does the crucial work. But it's usually just as simple as install and play.
Worst I had so far was a graphics glitch which was solved by using Proton GE for that title instead. Okay, and Wayland seems to make it hard for games to set the screen resolution and possibly fullscreen mode. But switching to X11 helps to get around such quirks.
I tried. I really tried. I think i sent through 3 different distros. But my gpu doesn't like any of them also playnite isn't on linux yet
Which GPU
Nvidia obviously
Nvidia
Try CachyOS or Bazzite and do not stray from defaults. If it suggests you use the legacy Nvidia driver, you say "yes sir" and do as it says.
A huge fraction of linux trouble comes from picking a distro with bad defaults, or messing with good defaults.
playnite
It seems they are planning to move: https://github.com/JosefNemec/Playnite/issues/59#issuecomment-3542246599
I'm planning to move to Linux in 2026 after P11 is done, and since Playnite is my personal blocker for the move, I will try to make some Linux version in 2026. Definitely not fully featured version on parity with Windows version of P11, and probably desktop mode only, but something daily drivable with Linux specific features (Wine/Proton integration for example).
If that goes well, I'll start looking into P11 Avalonia porting proper say I mentioned in previous update.
It’s more interesting to ask which 3 distros was tried 😁
It happens. Particularly shitty proprietary hardware has held me back from upgrading in the past, as well. It is what it is.
I hope we see more mainstream support for Linux by hardware vendors in the next few years.
It's really mostly a labeling problem. Even vendors who have great processes to publish drivers can't seem to be bothered to slap a Linux Mint sticker on the box.
Hurr durr something something drivers, something something recompile the kernel, something something only if your time is worthless.
League of Legends still doesn't support it. Most of my friends play it however shitty and toxic it may be. As long as that remains a fact, I can't move to Linux unless I want to "sit outside and look at my friends playing together".
I'd love to give it another chance, but the kernel doesn't have support for my network card, so I just have to wait...
brave enough
It was good enough for me at least as early as 2003.
It took no bravery to say.
I wonder why it takes Joshua Wolens any bravery to say "linux is good now, and if you want to feel like you actually own your PC, make 2026 the year of Linux on (your) desktop". I'll skip writing a list of possibilities (~ most which would not be kind to the content of his character).
I'm all-in, baby. I'm committed.
This is the way. :)
PS, it's the "Free Software" (Free As In Freedom ~ Free to use, study, share, change, as you wish), not the "Linux" that really matters, in the long run.
Couldn't get Europa Universalis III to work on Steam, though.
I could not figure out how to play Europa Universalis III.
So, so brave......
Are there issues? Sure. HDR's still a crapshoot...
Untrue.
Edit: I effortlessly use it on Bazzite. What's the issue you guys are having?
Actually very true.
Kde has good hdr with Wayland but a lot DEs still are very much a crapshoot, yes
Getting it to actually work with games is still a crapshoot, though.
Plasma 6.5 has broken tonemapping both with gamescope and proton wayland (which breaks a bunch of other things to boot). The fix was merged just a couple of weeks ago.
To be fair, HDR gaming is pretty bad on Windows, too. (Unless - so I heard - you use RTX HDR, which is still a workaround AND you need a new-dish NVIDIA card, which I don't have.)
Niri has HDR too
You want to explain? Because the last time I checked getting HDR to work with games is a huge hassle.
with KDE and Wayland i have no issues, using Steam launch parameters:
PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1
Linux 6.18
AMD Radeon 9070XT
Mesa 25
Doesn’t this require you to also be on plasma 6.4?
Using proton wayland also breaks steam input, which can be deal breaker.
maybe. i'm on plasma 6.5 and usually on latest.
i can't speak to steam input, but i've not had any controller issues with my 8bitdo and Gulikit.
It isn't a controller issue. That still works through SDL.
Steam Input uses the Steam overlay, it takes your controller input and allows for more custom remapping options, macros, etcetc. I primarily see it being used to let people use a controller to play games that were not designed to play with a controller (by remapping the controller to move the mouse cursor and send keyboard inputs with the controller buttons)
I use Wayland and my xbox controllers work fine. I'd use Steam Input if I could, but most games are already designed to accept controller input directly so the damage is limited.
This is exactly what I do on Garuda Arch with KDE and Wayland.
I usually use the latest GE Proton 10-x for games with HDR.
I cannot for the life of me get HDR working consistently across games on my CachyOS rig. So I would say true. I also find Bluetooth is my biggest pain point for now. I seem to only be able to connect to stuff from the command line. Some Linux hardcores here might roll their eyes at that complaint, but I'm not afraid to admit that I prefer a GUI.
Some Linux hardcores here might roll their eyes at that complaint, but I’m not afraid to admit that I prefer a GUI.
Even most of the Linux hardcores use a GUI. Living 24/7 in a terminal environment is mostly a sysadmin/programmer flex.
The important thing here is that you were able to figure out how to do what you wanted via the terminal, that's a huge first step since most people just give up as soon as they can't use a GUI (props to you). Now that you know the commands to do what you want, you can now do the most common useful Linux thing: make a script
It sounds like Bluetooth works, but requires a configuration/setting that the GUI developer didn't forsee.
What you need to do is to break down the individual tasks that you have to do in the command line (like, enable/disable bluetooth, connect to a device, etc) and type them into a text file instead (one command per line), add #!/bin/bash at the top. Save the file and make it executable (chmod +x filename). Then you can execute the script by typing (from the directory where the script is located) ./enablebluetooth.sh or ./connecttoheadphones.sh
Once you know the scripts work, you can bind them to a hotkey in Plasma Settings under Keyboard Shortcuts -> Add New -> Command or Script -> select your script, and bind it to a hotkey combo. If you wanted to get a bit more advanced, you could probably create some UI buttons that would launch the script when clicked but I don't know how to do that off of the top of my head.
Once you're comfortable with the workflow of 1. Figure out how to do it in the terminal, 2. Write a script, 3. Make the script convenient to use/automatic then you'll come to appreciate the flexibility of the terminal (because you can put it in a script and never have to use the terminal!)
If you try and run into any issues just let me know and I'll try to get to you pointed in the right direction.
I appreciate the thorough response and the attempt to help, truly I do. But I feel like it's kind of missed the point a bit.
I actually run a home server, have written some scripts here and there for the server (particularly backup scripts), use VMs and have figured out pass through; my point is that I'm not completely clueless here, while still not exactly being a power user. Even though I've done that stuff, and have that knowledge, it's not a fun user experience for me. When I open my Bluetooth settings, I want it to just work. I don't want to have to dig into the terminal and troubleshoot stuff.
Windows sucks for a lot of reasons, but I at least, personally, never had issues with Bluetooth or HDR.
I would like it to just work too. That would be amazing. Spending time fixing bluetooth or HDR issues is annoying, 100%. I understand your point.
Like everything, it's about choosing the trade-off that's best for you.
The reason that you don't have to fix these problems yourself in Apple/Microsoft products is that they invest millions of dollars in software engineering labor in order to cover every possible contingency and hardware configuration available and they expect a return on that investment. Instead of spending your time fixing bluetooth issues you can pay money to subsidize Microsoft/Apple fixing it. That has been, for quite a while, the best deal available in personal computing.
Except now they don't just want to sell you a box with software in it that operates your computer. They also want to spy on you, lock down your device, prevent you from repairing your own system and trap you in a walled garden of subscription services and use their monopoly power to prevent any other alternatives from being able to offer better services.
I don't like this new bargain, I'd rather write a script or read a wiki. The FOSS world is full of people who understand this dilemma and we're all working together to make computers better for everyone. Part of that is helping our fellow users come onboard and deal with the issues that they're facing, that's what I was aiming for (and even if you don't need the information, it may help some reader).
I switched to Linux, so obviously I don't either.
Bluetooth is one of those things that’s a gamble on Linux. On my PC it works perfectly, but on my friends PC it’s barely working at all. Had to help troubleshoot for quite a while until I gave up.
I just had to sign my own drivers that I compiled locally for VMWare. Even though I use it, it’s not quite ‘everyday’ user friendly
Edit: It is user-friendly and what I am doing is a CSCI college grad level, nothing anyone using basic Linux would ever need to do
I’ve always considered Windows to be a toy OS, because the only use case that could legitimately justify its need is gaming. Removing that requirement leaves only the clownishly unserious and terminally incurious users, which is a large population in computing today, but I’m fine with leaving them to kick in their wading sewer.
What a hot take.
Literally trillions of dollars in business have taken place on applications that only work on Windows. They were developed for 95 or XP or whatever and are still in use today.
For me, music production is my reason for being on Windows. Gaming I could do on Linux, but there's nothing to drum up the interest in in fixing music prod on Linux that there was for gaming.
There was a spin of Ubuntu back in the day that focused on music production. I think I took it for a spin, but that's not really my world and running it as a daily driver wouldn't make sense for me. Having said that, you've probably already got a collection of licenses for a dozen windows-only audio programs . I did learn that sound in general is a bit complex on Linux with pulsaudio, alsa, and whatever else is going on.
Take my down vote Captain Obvious.
The steam hardware survey showed Linux has 3.8% while Mac has 2.2% and windows the remaining 94%
Desktop Linux is niche, it will always be niche if they continue to ignore the user experience. Linux is for nerds, Linux nerds love that.
Linux is niche, because every computer sold comes with Windows on it.
Linux nerds hate to hear Linux is for nerds. The OS is too difficult for the average person and instead of taking in that feedback and fixing the issues, the community just downvotes it and sticks their head in the sand.
Linux isn’t the problem the user is! Yeah, that attitude ain’t helping.
I would fuckin' love it if we had the same support Mac users get.
Desktop Linux is niche, it will always be niche if they continue to ignore the user experience.
Have you had a bake off between Linux and Windows/Mac in the last couple of years?
I got rid of my last Windows install because obvious usability features I take for granted on Debian or Mint still require installing additional software, in Windows.
I do think Gnome is a little too excited to try new things, vs polish. But I still like Gnome better than Windows or Mac.
I do wish Mint would switch the default DE to KDE. I do think KDE is more polished, and I encourage newbies to try it first.