(The “Windows” slices of the pies are entirely made up by Baldur’s Gate 3, which also runs well over Linux)
The issue has never been that games can’t run on Linux. It has always been a simple question of “will the games I want to play run?” More than ever, that answer is yes, but if your favorite game doesn’t, or if you never want to worry about “will this upcoming (online) game let me play on Linux?” then you use Windows by default.
Like, I love y’all, but the Linux gaming community on Lemmy is kinda insufferable with the straw-man “people think games can’t run on Linux” argument. That’s just not the issue
This has been my concern too. It’s great that we’re seeing some specific cases where Linux benchmarks faster than Windows, but that doesn’t mean a damn thing if the one thing I’m trying to play just full on won’t work.
Telling me that I can just also run Windows is counterproductive. If Windows will do everything I want, and Linux will do only some of what I want, now you’re trying to sell me on increased complexity and difficulties and learning a whole new system, without actually getting rid of the problems that come with running Windows in the first place.
deleted by creator
way back the issue most certainly was that though. There was a time when trying to run games with wine was a frustrating exercise that only resulted in a success in small minority of cases… which meant the answer was almost certainly negative when accounting for the additional restriction of trying to run the games you actually wished to be playing. Not everyone may remember this of course.
Exactly. If even one of my games doesn’t run, it’s already a pain in the ass. Might as well stay on windows so I don’t have to deal with the headache. They all run on windows. I’ll switch when they all run on Linux.
well, thanks to Gaben, new games working fine
That’s why they specified online, because the cancer that is Easy-Anti Cheat has a teeny tiny checkbox saying “allow linux users” that is rarely if ever checked.
dunno, if we’re talking about easy anti-cheat, i’ve played insurgency: sandstorm, war thunder and hunt: showdown. Not a lot of games, but none of them had any issues
Halo MCC was fixed too and now that works without issues online. It is good fun.
Plenty of games do check it! Which is why it’s excessively frustrating when other games consciously choose not to. There were a few hiccups initially but now as far as I’m aware it’s literally just the checkbox.
I really hate this "it’s just a checkbox* narrative. It’s bullshit. EAC functions very differently on Linux and it is ridiculous to assume that “it says EAC is on” = “game is secure”
[The documentation] says how developers need to “test and activate client module updates for Linux regularly in addition to Windows”.
But go off king
Yeah, that’s not the whole story
Enabling Linux support does inherently allow more attack vectors that need to be secured that don’t need to be if it’s windows only. Linux works against these kinds of anticheats, as they’re working to get the most information out of the system as possible to prevent 3rd party programs from being run. This is a major design consideration in Linux not present in windows, so there is considerable extra work that has to be done, on top of already being much less effective on Linux than they are on windows.
deleted by creator
Oh yeah? Name 5.
Name 6 more.
deleted by creator
“Linux is great for gaming. You only need to follow these 25 kernel configuration steps to combine three 3rd party applications and it runs just fine!”
Yeah it’s not like that anymore.
Step 1: Install Steam Step 2: Download games Step 3: Play games
If you have an AMD GPU and use Steam it’s mostly plug&play these days.
I have an Nvidia GPU and I don’t want to waste my already limited gaming time trying to make the games run smoothly.
I also have an Nvidia. It’s still plug-n-play. Everything runs fine.
Everything for you.
Get super fighters deluxe working and we’re talking.
Did you try this? https://www.protondb.com/app/855860
Gotta love ProtonDB. What an incredibly progressive project.
I did, didn’t work.
Jam Mint or Pop OS on there and you will never in your life have to worry about a kernel to game. Not even once.
The issue is they want to run rootkits and malware instead of games.
Not sorry. Siege, Fortnite, Valorant, all of these games require kernel level access to Windows to run, and the publishers refuse to support Windows.
The only reason I’d ever play games like this in the past is due to peer pressure from friends to play these shitty games together with a bunch of sweats, cheaters and an overall generally toxic community. Especially Siege.
Social peer pressure goes both ways. And I’ve basically peaced out on any of these games in my friends group. That was enough to end that game for game nights, and as those games fade from our memory. I make sure what little memory of it remains is the true tainted and awful form from which they originated.
If you need a kernel level anti-cheat for your game, and nothing else will protect it. Your game is shit, your development cycle is shit, your company is shit, your community is shit, and why would I ever want to play a shit game with shit people from a shit company that forces devs to work under a shit development cycle?
That is not, in fact, the issue. I don’t play any of those games and still can’t play all my games on Linux. I don’t allow kernel level anticheats on my system.
Fortnite uses EAC that already run on Linux.
You’re actually the worst. I’m glad you don’t play my games.
If only one could have two OS on one machine and somehow boot into the one you want to play a game on.
Sure, but at the point you’re doing that the allure is lost on a lot of folks.
Why boot to two when they only want to play a game and one does it without needing the other.
This is an answer to a question that wasn’t posed.
All the inconvenience of Linux with all the inconvenience of Windows. You might as well throw MacOS on there, too.
It’s so weird, usually it’s Mac users saying that to me.
It’s a hassle, most people are one size fits all
That’s great until you decide you want to play more than one game and have to restart your computer 5+ times per day. Then you’ve somehow made the experience exponentially worse than staying on either one
Do something more with one’s life than play that many games.
I do
It also requires windows only applications. So the problem still stands. Switching between the two OS’s is a terrible experience.
Mine is not an argument asserting that people think games can’t run on Linux, mine is a mockery of the people who do so (I know several).
I find you insufferable too, don’t worry
You are mocking a straw-man. These people you refer to number in the dozens
I must’ve gotten lucky with my quarter of a dozen friends who do that…
Or they were making excuses
Oh, it’s the Linux-preaching guy again. He always tries to get us to switch to Linux. We just say “sorry mate, we can’t game on Linux” when we see him, he usually leaves us alone after that.
OP’s friends until now
look dude, you were friends with Steve and he died in 91, and he taught us to be more patient with you than you deserve. We don’t care that you’re on the spectrum, this is not okay. Every single time we go out you’re on that Linux shit. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. We’re tired of your shit, we don’t want to hear from you again, you can keep your Linux and shove it up your ass. Just stop bothering us about it.
OP’s friends after OP’s newly found pie charts
🫡
I’ve been 100% Linux for over a year now. If it doesn’t run, I don’t buy it.
That’s the attitude that we all need to have. Same here, if anything doesn’t work on Linux, I ain’t buying it.
I even got a refund from steam when rocket league lost Linux support when that one company bought it
deleted by creator
Nice. You can run rocket league on heroic launcher btw. I have it through the epic store. Works flawlessly
Yes, it was more the principle than anything. I was terrible at that game and barely played it
Right there with ya. My 10 year old smokes me all the time in that game 😂
Same, I play it that way on the steamdeck
I didn’t bother because I got plenty of playtime from it and got it through the Steam Controller/Link bundle as well. But I did consider it since I was ticked about losing Linux support.
Same been Linux only for several years now. If it won’t run I won’t buy it.
Same, since 2013.
I’ve found that often the game is listed as not linux, but runs fine with proton anyway. So I often buy, and refund if needed.
That’s what I do too.
Huh, same here, give or take a year (I was 100% Linux before Steam came, which was sometime around 2013).
I have never refunded a game though, ProtonDB is usually accurate so I just check there before buying.
That’s how I’ve been for a few years now. Windows has serious bugs that I encounter all the time that I never encounter with Linux.
Just this week alone… screenshots stopped working, usb microphones were stuck on mute, and the taskbar crashed preventing me from using any touchpad gestures or even accessing the start menu to restart.
The task bar was fixed with a restart but the other two issues required a reinstall of the os. I troubleshot those for like an hour without any solution.
Windows is not ready for the desktop.
Haha that’s pretty funny. And I whole heartedly agree.
I know! I have to use windows at work (IT Admin) and using powershell always makes me wish the software we need ran on Linux. Just today I needed to extract a partition image with dism and it just did nothing for half an hour before the progress bar even came up. People say that Linux is buggy but gnome gives me way less headaches than windows 11.
Windows unfairly gets the reputation of being more reliable than linux. I’m just waiting for my work to make one app available on Linux and then I’m switching.
Is this Lemmy’s version of Reddit’s “pc vs console” I’ve been seeing this a lot lately. Why are you all so obsessed with who plays on what and what their opinions are?
Because more people playing on Linux means more games get published for Linux, which is an outcome we want.
Gonna have to get in line behind consoles first. PC gamers have been around for years, still at the bottom of the list when games get published. So…what’s the point in saying “play on Linux because games also work here” when publishers don’t care?
deleted by creator
Well, at least get partity with Windows. It’s unlikely to get Rockstar to launch on PC first, but it might mean more MP games work well on Linux.
All I want is for enough people to use Linux so devs care enough to remove roadblocks for Linux, such as anti-cheat. I don’t expect Linux to overtake Windows or anything, I just want my selection to not be limited just because I’m running Linux.
I decline the premise of the question. No one in the thread leading to your comment said anything remotely similar to “play on Linux because games also work here”.
More like play on Linux because windows gets more bugs,bloat, and built in spying every version and if I had the kind of money to afford the whole collection of apple products you inevitably end up with when chosing that path, I would have had kids instead and not been dumped by my ex for being born into a poor family and failing to gain anything from working other than worse health and not even breaking even financially. Linux is free too. Free is my favourite price.
deleted by creator
I just want more games to work on Linux, and more marketshare gets devs interested. I don’t care what specific people use, just that enough use Linux to grow marketshare.
Use what you want, but I’ll encourage anyone who is interested to give it a try.
Huh. Yes, that’s exactly what it is.
Good shout.It’s like when you discuss music with a metalhead, it’s not that you just don’t feel anything when you listen to metal, and you don’t consider complex polyrhythms to just be objectively “better” because they’re harder to play. It’s that your music sucks ass and if it’s not the right kind of metal it also sucks ass.
Linux can play most games, but if you like playing games that Linux doesn’t play then those games suck and you shouldn’t want to play them. That’s their perspective.
Why do you want to play Fortnite or CoD warzone? Don’t you know kernel level anticheat is a rOoTkiT?!? (As if they could even define such a thing without resorting to just pointing at shit they don’t like and twisting the definition like a Baptist preacher trying to create theology.)
You can’t win with these types of people, Linux can play games! And if it can’t it’s YOUR FAULT FOR NOT EXCLUSIVELY PLAYING GAMES THAT LINUX CAN PLAY.
Nah, you’re getting too deep into your own feelings. Most threads I’ve seen where people start talking about Linux as a viable gaming option, it’s because some commenter or the OP mentions a problem they’re facing in Windows, which is directly solved or mitigated in Linux. Also, most of the time when people recommend Linux, it comes with warnings like “it has a learning curve” and “not everything works”. The hard line Linux-or-bust types are definitely not the majority.
Also, the very nature of Lemmy means the userbase probably skews towards more techy types who have been using Linux in their professional lives for years and have naturally come to harbor positive feelings for it. That drives the recommendation as well as anything else.
Whatever you say, I’ve literally had people ask me “why do you play insert game here?” When I tell them why I haven’t completely gotten off windows. It’s happened multiple times. I’m not getting in my feelings, some of you guys are just insufferable.
I love Fedora on my old gaming laptop and arch/SteamOS kicks ass on deck, but I’m not giving up my main game that I play for socializing with my friends just because the FOSS community assigns themselves moral superiority for not being on Windows.
I love Linux but it really does need more VR support.
And racing sims. I was talking to someone on Bluesky and they said the lack of racing sim gear support is holding them back.
That’s the case for me, too.
Yup. I guess the gist of it is, Linux is great for just general gaming, but if you’ve got something specific, it’s just not there yet. (I see a bit about VR too)
I just make do with running both. Of course would prefer to have everything on Linux, though.
+1 on sims, with so many different peripherals as well as third party software like simhub, even if a base game works on Linux, it effectively doesn’t since there is so much integration needed
Yeah, I’d love to get a VR headset, but there just aren’t even games to play on Linux, and the headsets with good Linux support are either expensive or hard to find.
Hopefully that improves, I imagine it’s stopping people from switching to Linux.
Even the Index, Valve’s own headset has had broken functionality for years with no fixes in sight. Valve refuses to fix big stuff like the cameras, base stations not turning on, or even automatic audio switching.
Not to mention steamvr reprojection is completely broken.
Huh, that’s too bad. I guess I’ll keep waiting then…
deleted by creator
Yeah, I just keep a windows partition for VR. In all of my experience with VR on Linux, it has been terrible and buggy which is just intolerable. I gotta be honest, its not smooth sailing on windows either, steam vr has some bugs they haven’t fixed for years, so combining that with Linux just is not good.
For me, I have been dual booting, but I have also had my linux set up for a few months now and was using it exclusively until i got my quest 3.
I can definitely see the allure of just sticking to windows if one plays pcvr exclusively or if one just hasn’t taken the plunge into linux yet.
I really do hope that support comes. Either officially or unofficially by a linux savant who knows this stuff.
Yup. One by one the papercuts are getting resolved, so hopefully it’s just a matter of time before VR support gets better. Ideally Valve gets interested again and makes another push for Linux VR (maybe some tie-in with the Deck?), otherwise we may be waiting a while.
Hum 🤔
Mine’s similar (macOS is my work computer):
And last year Linux and Steam Deck were flipped:
It’s also heavily skewed in my case due to online hours being the only hours counted, while I use my steamdeck away from internet most of the time.
There are still a lot of proton games where I encounter the weirdest bugs and when I report those the game devs don’t do anything about it and say it’s a proton/linux issue what they don’t support. For some games, especially VR, windows is mandatory.
You should report the bugs to the proton devs, not the game dev.
I have a WMR headset, am still on a dual-boot of Pop!_OS and Windows 10 with my gaming pc. I have an Nvidia RTX 3080 and don’t want to worry about compatibility with kernel so Pop!_OS fixes that for me. I also love window tiling, which it does pretty well (not as good as Sway and Hyprland but close enough).
At this point, I can do everything on Linux except for 1 thing: Use my HP Reverb VR headset. It’s a Windows (WMR) headset and doesn’t work on Linux. But it is essential for my gaming, as about 80% of my gaming time is spent flying aircraft and helicopters in DCS: World in VR. I got a whole simpit setup with crazy good stick, pedals and throttle and everything.
I am really hoping to switch the headset out for a SteamVR-native headset and ditch Windows before Windows 10 support ends in 2025. First step is to install DCS on Linux and start flying it outside VR to help find bugs and assess when it is good enough to switch VR headsets.
And yes, I did consider upgrading to an AMD card for the improved Linux performance but the RX 7900 XT didn’t do DCS in VR (on Windows) well, even after the big driver update this Summer that was supposed to fix the stutters.
if you are having weird bugs when playing via Proton, report the issue on the Proton GitHub page. If it’s a graphical glitch you can also report it to proton-vkd3d or DXVK depending on which one is being used by the game. If unsure just report it only to Proton.
The Proton developers and the developers of associated projects (DXVK, vkd3d, etc) will often add workarounds into the various parts of the Proton platform to get a game to work correctly, even if the problem you are seeing is a game bug or driver bug.
I’m at 50 / 50. Went 100% Linux 6 months ago and never looked back. Didn’t even bother with dual booting, it’s all in or nothing.
One of us! One of us!
Windows is an abomination.
I won’t claim that it’s all flawless, because it really isn’t sometimes, but a lot of things just work. Both new games, and old ones, that don’t even work on windows to begin with.
My biggest two showstoppers are games like Destiny, and VR titles, that unfortunately are completely unplayable because I own a Rift S.
I still play practically everything else on Linux, and don’t see any reason to not to. I already do everything else on this os, so why would I switch
There’s a bunch of other things, like HDR; I don’t have a HDR monitor so I can’t say what people are missing, but I tried to mess with it in my pet-project game engine and
vkSetHdrMetadataEXTjust does not exist at all, and I don’t know what library or Vulkan layer could provide it.It matches with what I’ve heard around, although apparently KDE supports it now?
KDE support requires plasma 6 which is in alpha.
I’m playing Cyberpunk2077 with HDR on my Steamdeck so support is there.
Linux Gamers - “Sure am stoked that gaming on Linux has gotten so good, finally don’t feel like I need to keep Windows”
Randos - “Wow, such copium! It didnt work for my specific use case! Linux users are so obnoxious!”
If your quote was the title of this post then the “randos” wouldn’t show up. But it’s not. 🤷
Idk man, I get how you could read the title as confrontational, but every pro Linux post has these “randos”. Haters gonna hate. 🤷♂️
100% penguin
I kind of dig Linux Os, I find Linux users insufferable.
As a fellow Linux user I entirely agree. I stay off the forums as much as possible. My latest crime was uploading a tutorial on how to update the bios on certain laptop models. Got fucking roasted, even on lemmy.
For some reason Linux forums are like stack exchange; an extremely toxic neckbeard pissing match.
Oh shit, that sounds extremely helpful, why did they roast you?
I’ve been using Linux since Ubuntu 8.10 iirc, and I’m still a fucking moron at dealing with Linux so I’m always thankful for people like you.
I might have been very lucky. I’ve barely seen anything negative than when people post factually incorrect or potentially dangerous/bricking stuff.
Though, I do keep a healthy distance from the Ubuntu and Arch forums.
Eh, you’ll get the worse of any userbase if you go to a community specifically for that OS. Go to PC Master race or whatever to see the opposite problem.
I’ve been on Linux exclusively for something like 15 years, but I almost never bring it up. In fact, I don’t even mention my distro of choice unless it’s directly relevant, and if asked I recommend something different (I recommend Mint Debian edition because I’ve heard it’s very user friendly).
I also find many people in communities like this insufferable as well, so I spend my time trying to tone them down a bit with comments like “Linux isn’t for everyone, but it’ll always be there if you decide to give it another try.” I use Linux because it works better for me than Windows, yet many here make it a religion or something. It’s kinda weird.
I didn’t get the “You played on more than 1 device”. Guess it has been 100% Linux
Note did I, so I assumed that was the case as well. I only have my Linux desktop with Steam.
Just Linux for me…I haven’t used windows since windows 7. I’m probably going to sell my steam deck though because it mostly just sits in the case on top of my computer (where I usually play since my computer is plugged into my 50 inch bedroom TV. But the stream deck is nice and fun to play with.
I’m the opposite, my computer is in the basement and my Steam Deck is next to my bed, so ~75% of my playtime is on the Deck.
It’s a cool device, but it’s not for everyone.
Funny, I’ve actually never played BG3 on Windows. It’s always been Proton. It works flawlessly.
Mine has some windows time from testing someone’s computer after reinstalling.
I think it’s interesting most of your play time is on the Steam Deck, but you play a bunch of games on Linux. Are you just testing settings then?
I think it’s a lot of the same game on both, but some I only played on the deck. Some I switched back to desktop for sections where inconsistent frame rate was wrecking me like GoW Valkyries. Dave the diver was entirely deck. Also have a laptop but vulkan support is incomplete on haswell so some games were launched and crashed if they didn’t have opengl.
